Adidas teams up with GMAP for Chinese expansion

Sportswear giant Adidas is making a play for top sports retailer in China after teaming up with international retail planning experts GMAP Marketing Consulting, part of the Callcredit Information Group, to support their expansion strategy in China.

Adidas already boasts 7,600 outlets across 1,000 Chinese cities and it plans to utilise its partnership with GMAP to consolidate their location coverage in the major cities as well as increase their footprint in China by expanding to another 400 cities by the end of 2015.

The sportswear retailer enlisted GMAP’s research intelligence to map the market in the country, providing them with insight into current and future retail locations to help them priorities where expansion potential exists, especially focusing on opportunities in China’s middle sized cities.

GMAP, known for helping retailers identify and target customers and locations for expansion in the Asia Pacific region, worked with Adidas to provide a market analysis study across 45 cities in mainline China, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. The results of which have been used to provide the sportswear firm with a picture of demand and supply, as well as identifying the direction of consumer spending flows.

Adidas planning to expand into another 400 cities in China

In addition, the research has also calculated the size of the market opportunity for sports and casual fashion in nearly 5,000 unique retail sub-centres, identifying which locations and malls within specific cities would offer the highest revenue prospects for expansion.

Tom Brown, Adidas China’s retail expansion director said that working with GMAP in China was “like a breath of fresh air”, and that the research carried out has resulted in a “detailed roadmap identifying the most viable locations to target for store expansion”.

The research features a unique database of more than 800 potential future developments for the sportswear brand, which means the aim of adding another 400 locations by the end of 2015 could be a realistic aim.

More locations could also help increase its sales growth in the region, for the first half of 2014 the sportswear giant reported an 8 percent sales increase in Greater China on a currency-neutral basis, as well as an increase in South Korea.

Image: Adidas