This Week, Industry Snapshot Looks at
Athletic Footwear

A sample of the full length subscription product is available for download, as well as details surounding its genesis. To the right subscribers and non-subscribers alike are invited to peruse the companies that are featured in this week's Industry Snapshot. In addition, we urge existing subscribers to take advantage of "Subscribers Online," it's chock full of helpful research and follow-up information on the industries and companies featured in previous Snapshots.  

Every week we will offer up a taste of what is available to Industry Snapshot subscribers by providing a short summation of the industry and the companies that appear in the most curent issue.

Fila Holding S.p.A.

K-Swiss, Inc.

NIKE, Inc.

Reebok International Ltd.

Vans, Inc.

Subscribers Online

This Week's Industry Snapshot

The multi-billion dollar business of athletic footwear has become a grueling marketing battleground, with Madison Avenue taking center stage over the usual spotlight hog, Wall Street. Everyone is familiar with the pseudo art-house images and the emotive quality of the commercial spots, but perhaps very few know the business models that make these companies grow.

What could be better than athletic shoes for building a brand name presence? The business has barriers to entry that can be characterized as a virtual "moat," rather than the medieval moat of Warren Buffet fame. In theory, anyone could start making shoes, but the brand awareness generated by star power and the distribution arrangements needed to become successful make start-ups a virtual impossibility. Hence, the athletic shoe arena is populated by only a few players, and even the most beaten down participants have substantial brand awareness that can be used to foster shareholder value. As far as demographics, kids around the world wear athletic shoes and constantly outgrow them, teens make them a fashion statement, and older consumers develop brand loyalties that are not easily changed. For the front runners, it is truly a magical business.

Certainly the bellwether of the industry is Nike. From rather inauspicious beginnings selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car, Phil Knight fashioned Nike into an international titan (to mix mythology rather than metaphors). Indeed, the story of Nike over the last twenty years is as much about building its brand name as it is the exigencies surrounding the building of a business, such as the actual product characteristics, manufacturing, and distribution. Ironically, though, the company whose brand name Nike did the most damage to in the 1970s and '80s might now be its most threatening global competitor.

On the Playing Field

Where Fila has been tripped up in the key basketball shoe market in the U.S. by misfires with its Grant Hill IV shoe, Adidas North American sales rose 51% to about $390 million in its most recent quarter. Nike's footwear sales growth in the U.S. for fiscal 1997 lagged both of these companies, but was still strong at 36%, off a much larger sales base. Adding to growth for Nike, 1997 athletic apparel revenues grew 70%, which points to a key difference between Nike and the rest of the industry at the moment.

One key element of the equation came about as a result of Phil Knight's epiphany a number of years ago that Nike was in reality an "athletic brand," not merely a shoe company. This realization led to a build out in Nike's ancillary offerings that has solidified today, and placed it in a more mature stage of the apparel business (in comparison to its peers). None of Nike's competitors is taking market share in apparel. In that category alone, Nike is almost a $2.5 billion company. Fila's second quarter worldwide apparel revenues were up 11% in the first half but down in the U.S. Reebok's apparel revenues were up strongly in its first quarter, running at $88 million, or at about the same level of Fila's apparel revenues. Although it's already obviously the leader, Nike appears to be extending the distance between itself and its pursuers.

(c) Copyright 1997, The Motley Fool. All rights reserved. This material is for personal use only. Republication and redissemination, including posting to news groups, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of The Motley Fool.