Recovering from a decline of 1.5 percent endured in 2009, the world's largest sporting goods retail chains enjoyed a 6.4 percent increase in their sales in terms of local currencies in 2010, according to an annual survey by Sporting Goods Intelligence, outperforming the 4 percent growth of the global market calculated by NPD and reported in the previous issue. Their growth was a combination of higher comparable store sales, store expansion and a few acquisitions.
Translated into U.S. dollars at the average exchange rates for the year, the 79 major retailers that we have been able to track down reached total sales of $68.4 billion before VAT and other sales taxes, representing nearly one-third of the total world market of $226 billion.
U.S.-based retailers recorded a 6.4 percent growth, led by the likes of Lids and Lululemon. European-based retailers grew by 6.3 percent, better than the 4.3 percent increase that we calculated for the total European market in our Aug. 24 issue. Asian retailers saw their sales rise by only 3.5 percent, mainly due to the persistent decline of the Japanese market.
Décathlon reinforced its Number One position and grew a little faster than the global market. Foot Locker remained the second-largest integrated sporting goods retailer in the world ahead of Dick's. Other retailers such as Sports Direct or JD Sports Fashion have followed the internationalization trend pioneered by Foot Locker, Décathlon, Intersport and Sport 2000, and they have benefitted from that.
The figures reported in the table on page 3 are a little different from those reported in the American edition of SGI last week, and in some cases more accurate. They are based on different criteria than those used in our global retail chart one year ago insofar as we have eliminated the effect of VAT and other sales taxes from the revenues of all the companies on the list.
We have added for the first time the biggest Brazilian sporting goods retailer, Grupo SBF, which owns Centauro and other national chains. We were tempted to include Sportmaster of Russia, whose sales are estimated to have grown by 15 percent to nearly $1.1 billion, but we are not quite sure about these figures. Both companies are expected to go public soon.
As usual, the data on our chart come from published financial reports, where they are available, but in many other cases they are based on input from management and other trade sources. Often, we get updates that lead us to change the estimates that we had published for the prior year. We calculate the total change in local currencies by weighting each company in relation to its share of the total market.
We have again posted separately at the top the indicative figures for the retailers belonging to Intersport International Corporation and to Sport 2000 International, but they have been reported with the inclusion of VAT and other sales taxes. On the other hand, we have eliminated all the national buying groups from the chart that are affiliated with Intersport or Sport 2000.
The only buying group that has remained on the chart is STAG of Britain, which doesn't belong to either one of these international retail organizations and has an important position also in Ireland. To give it a correct ranking on the chart, we have estimated its members' sales before VAT. For the national buying groups in Europe, you can check our European retail chart from last Aug. 24.
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