阿迪达斯CEO访谈 买卖与赞助

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The latest acquisitions by Real Madrid. How is that gonna impact on your bottom line? You're obviously quite positive about them.

Yeah, of course. Because this gives us opportunity to sell more shirts if great players are coming to Real and I still think back five years ago when David Beckham joined Real, this was the most successful commercial year for us, with Real. And I'm sure that Ronaldo and Kaka will sell a lot of shirts.

And that's what you do.

Exactly.

To sell shirts.

Yeah, exactly.

Where does your business make its money, obviously you have tangible aspects such as selling T-shirts, but the intangible such as the brand association with, say, the World Cup. Uh, how lucrative is that for you? Where do you make your money?

When with the sponsorship like that, you have two different aspects, you have the tangible and the intangible aspect as you have mentioned already. Of course we can already count how many shirts we have sold during the World Cup 2006 in Germany.

How many was it?

It was over three million replica shirts from all the teams which were competing. And our brand name, it was 1.5 million just alone from the German Team. We sold over or nearly 15 million balls with Teamgeist design which was a special design for the World Cup 2006. But this is a tangible asset. But on the other hand, you have so many millions and millions of spectators, TV viewers who are seeing your brand permanently, and then going afterwards into stores and buying your brand. Of course this we can not measure and count. But overall, I think that these investments and as I've said before when you see the performance of our company, then this is really worthwhile, and we do not calculate it and name it as a cost, it is an investment into the future of our company.

How does global financial crisis affect your business?

We can not escape the financial crisis as well, but I'm absolutely convinced that our industry is by far not as affected as some other industry like the car industry, etc.

Why?

I do believe that there is a big desire in the community for people that they wanna be fit, they wanna stay in shape and they wanna do sport. This is point No. 1. Point No.2, our products are not that expensive, so we are talking about 50 to 100 Euro, and these products are affordable to a wide variety of people.

In terms of sponsorship, are you getting the returns now that you expected when you signed up for these deals years ago?

Definitely. Because when you look to the last 10 years and the development and the performance of our company, then you'll have seen that we have permanently grown our business. And we went from one record year to the other, and this is because we are investing in the future of our business. And an investment into a World Cup is not just for one year whether there is a financial crisis or not. This is a long-term investment in the brand building, and into the performance of our future. And therefore, I'm absolutely convinced I would write this cheque again.

Could you write that cheque in the current economic climate?

Definitely. I mean we are a very healthy company as you well know. We have a very healthy balance sheet, we are producing a lot of cash, we are very profitable. So, yeah, we are definitely in the position to write this cheque again.