About the sporting goods and clothing manufacturer Adidas darker and darker clouds are brewing. Due to partly home-made problems in China, sluggish demand in many countries and rising costs, Adidas lowered its business forecast for 2022 for the third time. The head of the group, Kasper Rorsted, who will leave office at the latest in the coming year, will leave his unknown successor with a house with many construction sites. According to experts, the forecast, which has been lowered again, puts pressure on the supervisory board to soon present a new boss.
The share, which was already weak recently, slipped to less than 105 euros and thus its lowest level since spring 2016. The Adidas share is now a long way from the record high of more than 336 euros in August 2021. Around noon the minus was 10 percent to 103 euros.
Adidas continues to worry about the China business, in which the group is very heavily involved. There, the German manufacturer is struggling like its competitors Nike and Puma with the government’s strict corona policy, which weighs on consumption. However, Adidas had also made its own mistakes in the country and thus opened up the field for domestic companies, as Rorsted had admitted in the “Handelsblatt” in the summer.
Added to this are the sharply increased numbers in many western countries energy prices, because of which consumers buy fewer consumer goods that they do not urgently need. This all led to a weak third quarter for Adidas.
The Adidas management now only expects a profit of around 500 million euros in the continued operations for 2022, as was surprisingly announced on Thursday after the stock market closed. The forecast had previously been around 1.3 billion euros. In terms of sales, the group expects a currency-adjusted increase in the mid-single-digit percentage range for 2022. Last year there was an increase of 16 percent to 21 billion euros.
Operating profit should only reach four percent of sales – instead of seven percent, as previously thought. At the beginning of the year, Adidas had aimed for significantly higher increases in margin and sales.
Rorsted’s departure was announced in August. There is no successor yet. The search had “begun”, it was said about two months ago. The Dane will continue to hold office for as long.
The manager has been running Adidas since 2016. He came from the Düsseldorf consumer goods group Henkel. There he was known for his restructuring successes and his focus on returns. At Adidas, he heralded a change in strategy, selling the brands Taylormade, CCM Hockey and Reebok and concentrated the group entirely on the Adidas brand. Critics repeatedly accused him of choking off creativity in the group. Adidas has recently missed some trends and made competitors strong.
At the end of a good week so far, the German stock market barometer dax feathers again. At noon the index was down 1.5 percent to 12,572 points. The plus built up over the course of the week is increasingly melting away. The only ray of hope in the Dax were the SAP shares, which claimed a slight plus of 0.4 percent after the software manufacturer’s papers were released by the US bank JPMorgan were upgraded to overweight. Overall, the stock exchanges also suffered from growing interest rate concerns on Friday.
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