Of course, it all depends on the definition of the market. Adding Crocs and Skechers to its chart, mainly because they are also sold by sporting goods stores, the American edition of Sporting Goods Intelligence instead sees the 2006 branded sports shoe market rise by 10.0 percent to $26.1 billion. We prefer to continue to include these two brands into the lifestyle casual sub-category of the so-called brown shoe market, which targets mainly the non-athletic shoe shops. The corresponding charts will be published shortly.
The growth of the athletic footwear market continued to be driven mainly by emerging markets in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America. It also got a slight boost from last year’s World Cup of football. The slightly weaker dollar had a very minor effect on the calculations, which are expressed in U.S. dollars and based on the average exchange rates published by the OECD for each year.
Together, Nike and Adidas and the brands that they control represented a strong 60.8 percent of the total branded market, although the two groups grew by only 8.1 percent and 5.3 percent in footwear, respectively. Reebok’s acquisition gave Adidas a market share of 22.9 percent, behind the 37.9 percent share of the Nike group of companies, but it undermined its growth. Puma came out as the third-largest player worldwide with a market share of 7.7 percent, followed by New Balance at 6.3 percent and by ASICS with 4.7 percent. In terms of individual brands, Converse came right after ASICS, with direct and licensed sales estimated at $1,150 million. Outside the USA, ASICS was bigger than New Balance, however, and Puma had a higher market share of 10.1 percent.
In addition to the fashion elements that led brands like Converse and Puma to grow faster than the market, the skate shoe category overall was on fire. Like Sole Technology, which is behind the Etnies brand, Vans and DC Shoes had solid double-digit growth in 2006, helping the VF and Quiksilver groups to grow strongly in footwear generally. In this category, Heelys was the star. It was also the fastest growing brand on the chart, with a sales increase of 327 percent. If included into the chart, Crocs would have come next with growth of 226 percent.
The Crocs and Heelys phenomena are indicative of a thirst for new product ideas and concepts in a market that tends to stagnate, particularly in the economically more mature countries. However, especially for the more established brands, there is still a huge reservoir for further growth in the emerging markets. We also estimate that there are opportunities for further market penetration by the smaller brands in some of the smaller developed countries that they have more or less neglected until now.
Sales of sports shoes were in fact practically flat in the five major markets of Western Europe during the past year, according to the quarterly retail audit of NPD Sports Tracking Europe, with an increase in volume of only 0.7 percent to 197.9 million pairs and a 0.2 percent drop in value to €7.99 billion. Germany and Spain fared the best in value, with increases of 3.6 and 3.7 percent, and the UK fared the worst with a drop of 5.5 percent.
The figures on our annual brands athletic footwear chart include the companies’ invoiced sales of footwear and wholesale sales of footwear under license, to the exclusion of other products, and they are partly based on estimates. The global market would be bigger than $24.6 million at the wholesale level if distributors’ discounts were added to the count, but they are partly offset by the retail margins taken by brands such as Adidas and Puma, as the sales of their company-owned retail stores are included in our figures.
