27 Oct Amer Sports Reports Earlier Shipments Fuel Q3 Gains
Amer Sports Corp. reported net sales reached €713.7 million in the third quarter, up 5 percent in currency-neutral terms compared with €645.8 in the year earlier quarter. Excluding acquisitions, net sales increased by 4 percent.
Gross margin rose 230 basis points to 47.0 percent. EBIT reached €103.5 million, which was up 18.2 percent from €87.6 million excluding non-recurring items, (NRI) reported for the third quarter of 2014.
Earnings per share climbed to €0.59 from €0.49 excluding NRI and free cash flow €-92.2 million compared with €-84.8 million.
The Finnish company said its outlook for 2015 was unchanged. Net sales in local currencies is expected to increase and EBIT margin excluding non-recurring items to improve from 2014, despite challenging market conditions. The company will continue to focus on apparel and footwear growth, consumer-driven product and marketing innovation, commercial expansion and operational excellence.
“We continued to grow profitably in the third quarter, driven again by Footwear, Apparel, Business to Consumer and China,” said Amer Sports President and CEO Heikki Takala. “Also Ball Sports delivered strong profitable growth behind healthier fundamentals following Ball Sports’ (Wilson) new strategy. Importantly, our quarterly cadence in 2015 is quite different compared to 2014, with Footwear and Apparel deliveries peaking in Q3 in 2015, and Winter Sports Equipment (Salomon, Atomic) and Sports Instruments (Suunto) peaking in Q4. In Fitness (Precor) we continued to focus on profitability whilst preparing for acceleration in 2016 with important new building blocks, for example Queenax functional training acquisition, and our Spinning licensing deal.
“In August,” Takala continued, “we announced a new five-year strategic glidepath toward 2020 with focus on accelerating profitable growth especially in the five prioritized areas: Apparel and Footwear, US, China, Business-to-Consumer, and digitally connected devices and services. We are already increasing our investment and capability injection to enable the acceleration. As examples we have strengthened our Retail opening pipeline, fueled investment into digital products and services, and recruited critical talent, latest the Group Chief Digital Officer. We see attractive upside potential for the company, and we now put all our effort into realizing the potential, guided by our new strategic glidepath.”
Amer Sports is a sporting goods company with internationally recognized brands including Salomon, Wilson, Atomic, Arc’teryx, Mavic, Suunto, and Precor.
NET SALES AND EBIT JULY–SEPTEMBER 2015
Amer Sports’ net sales in July-September 2015 were EUR 713.7 million (July-September 2014: 645.8). Net sales increased by 5% in local currencies. Excluding acquisitions, net sales increased by 4%. The growth was driven by Footwear (+19%), Ball Sports (+16%) and Apparel (+14).