A new buying group is about to combine the bargaining power of major retail players in the sports markets of Austria and Italy. The new entity is called Sport Alliance International (SAI) and can be defined as an extension of Sport Alliance, the Italian buying group based in the South Tyrolian city of Bolzano, Italy. Its establishment follows the exit of Sport Alliance, formerly known as Selezione Sport, from the equity of Sport 2000 International, which we reported about in the previous issue of SGI Europe. Sport Alliance had already stopped purchasing special make-ups and private label items through Sport 2000 International already last July.
The strong players behind the new supra-national group are Sportler, the northern Italian heavyweight in sporting goods retailing that owns 60 percent of Sport Alliance, and Kastner & Öhler, the big Austrian department store company that has a strong presence in the market through its Gigasport stores. However, Kastner & Öhler will have no shares in the group.
As already reported in The Outdoor Industry Compass, Gigasport joined already a few weeks ago Euro Family, an informal coalition of leading European specialty outdoor retailers of which Sportler is a leading founding member. Other members are Bever Zwerfsport in the Netherlands, Transa in Switzerland and Globetrotter, Förg, Engelhorn and Breuninger in Germany.
SIA sees its mission mainly as getting attractive price points rather than putting together a “full service” scheme, which other cooperatives like Intersport and Sport 2000 are well-known for. The plan is that Kastner & Öhler and any other affiliated Austrian retailers will be bound to SAI by a contract that can be terminated within a period of six months. In contrast with the strict conditions imposed by other buying groups, they will not be pinned down to a certain volume of purchases, no matter whether they are private labels or “real” brands. The membership fee is based on the turnover of the affiliated member.
SIA has already started making contact with about ten to 15 important vendors to pool purchasing operations for both the Italian and Austrian markets in behalf of the affiliated retailers, in time for the autumn/winter 2011/12 season. The negotiations are conducted by Francesco Schneider, a former manager of Vist who joined Sport Alliance two years ago to take care of new affiliations and sales of winter sports products. Amer Sports, Head and Tecnica Group have already agreed in principle to play the game.
In Italy, where it currently has about 250 retail members, Sport Alliance already works directly with about 60 vendors. It is going to try to do the same for the Austrian market, bypassing local agents and distributors and trying to obtain similar conditions for its Austrian members.
SIA plans to develop common programs with major brands for special make-ups. Sport Alliance already has exclusive contract for the Italian market with brands such as BH, but it has managed so far to extend its Italian contracts to Austria only for two of its exclusive outdoor brands, Sherpa and Singing Rock. A core of that cooperation is the Euro Family’s range of exclusive brands of outdoor gear, which the potential members of SAI may now be able to access. Currently, Euro Family has two private labels, Meru’ and Kaikkialla.
SIA still has to discuss the territorial rights for purchases in behalf of the numerous Gigasport stores located outside Austria. Gigasport has 34 doors, 19 at home and the other 15 in Slovenia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Sportler runs 20 stores, 17 of which are in Italy and the rest in Austria.
According to Sport-Fachhandel, the German trade publication, the idea behind the new buying group came up after a couple of Austrian retailers called on Sportler, which already has experience in the Austrian market, to join forces in purchasing. Georg Oberrauch, the mastermind behind Sportler, who has always been active creating new alliances of retailers to get the best out of negotiations with vendors, apparently jumped on the opportunity.
Oberrauch, whose brother Heiner is the chairman of the Salewa group, quit Intersport in 1997 to set up Selezione Sport as an alternative buying group together with Sergio Longoni, who then owned the Longoni Sport stores subsequently bought by Cisalfa Sport. Affiliated with Sport 2000 International, Selezione Sport went bankrupt in the wake buying group of the demise of an important member, Giacomelli Sport. Oberrauch then resurrected the group by setting up Sport Alliance in combination with Italmark, an important retail group based in Brescia that operates in the sporting goods market through its Sportland stores.
