The German sporting goods provider Adidas AG was able to exceed market expectations and its own forecasts thanks to a surprisingly strong final quarter in the 2024 financial year. This emerges from preliminary results that the company published on Tuesday evening.
Accordingly, sales in the fourth quarter reached around 5.96 billion euros, which corresponded to an increase of 24 percent compared to the same period last year. Adjusted for exchange rate changes, revenue grew by 19 percent. Excluding the share of sales of remaining items from the Yeezy line, there was a currency-adjusted increase of 18 percent.
The gross margin, which was 44.6 percent in the same quarter of the previous year, rose to 49.8 percent. The operating result amounted to 57 million euros, after an operating loss of 377 million euros had to be recorded in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Annual sales increase by eleven percent
According to the available figures, group sales for the entire financial year were almost 23.7 billion euros, exceeding the 2023 level by eleven percent (+12 percent adjusted for currency effects). The most recent forecast only predicted currency-adjusted growth of around ten percent.
The gross margin rose from 47.5 to 50.8 percent, and the operating profit jumped from 268 million to almost 1.34 billion euros. Management had recently expected around 1.2 billion euros.
CEO Gulden looks “optimistically into the future”
The group plans to announce the final results for 2024 and concrete forecasts for the current year on March 5th. CEO Bjørn Gulden was already pleased with the available figures. “Although we are not yet where we want to be in the long term, I am very happy with this development, which was much better than expected,” he said in a statement.
The outlook of the company bosses was correspondingly positive. “We are also optimistic about the future and see potential to increase our market share in all markets. There is great macroeconomic uncertainty at the moment, but we clearly have the goal of achieving double-digit growth again with the Adidas brand,” emphasized Gulden. “We want to use this growth to further improve our operating result and get even closer to our margin target of 10 percent.”