The bankrupt retail chains Perry Sport and Aktiesport are once again in the hands of a British owner. The curator of parent company Sports Unlimited Retail (SUR) has reached an agreement with retail company Frasers Group, he said when asked. NRC know. It is doubtful whether the names Perry and Aktiesport will therefore remain present in the Dutch shopping street.
Sports store chains Perry and Aktiesport, through parent company SUR, have been part of the British sports store giant JD Sports since 2016. After it withdrew financial support for the Dutch subsidiary in early December, Sports Unlimited was declared bankrupt in early December. At the time, the company had about 56 stores and 1,100 employees.
Frasers only wants to take over some of those branches, curator Kees van de Meent said. The company is interested in “up to twenty stores” that are now part of SUR. The British group now has five stores in the Netherlands under the Sports World and Sports Direct brand names, including in Muiden, Leeuwarden and Rotterdam, and “wants to expand its presence,” according to Van de Meent.
According to the curator, it is not yet possible to say how many stores Frasers will ultimately continue with, and which ones they will be. The new owner must first negotiate new leases with the owners of the retail properties in question. “This also means that it cannot yet be said which SUR store employees are affected by this and which are not,” says Van de Meent.
According to the curator, the new owner wants to “start with his own new stocks”. The previous owner’s offer is therefore sold out, he says. The Sports Unlimited stores had already started doing this after the bankruptcy. That sale will run until at least March 1. The curator receives help from Hilco Capital, a British investor specialized in selling bankrupt stores.
Established names
It is not clear what the restart means for Perry and Aktiesport, two established names in the Dutch shopping street. According to the curator, the brand names have also been taken over by the new owner. “Whether these will also be used, or whether names that Frasers has used so far will be chosen, is up to Frasers,” says Van de Meent. The British company itself could not be reached for questions on Monday.
The name Perry in particular has a long history. The company was founded in 1866, when The English American Warehouse Perry & Co opened a branch in Amsterdam’s Kalverstraat. That makes it one of the oldest active names in Dutch retail. Aktiesport is younger: the first branch was opened in Gouda in 1982.
Over the course of a century and a half, the Netherlands became acquainted with numerous American or British products through Perry, he wrote Our Amsterdam in 2016. The monthly magazine delved into the city archives and came across advertisements for raincoats and rubber drive belts, “overtweed coats” and “umbrellas.” Perry also introduced the board game Monopoly in the Netherlands. It is no coincidence that the cities and street names in the Dutch version are also places where Perry had a branch at that time.
Through various acquisitions, the company came into the hands of Unlimited Sports Group in 2006, which was already the owner of Aktiesport. When it went bankrupt, both brands ended up with their previous owner, JD Sports, through a restart. At the time, both chains still had almost 190 branches. To reduce the persistent losses, JD Sports has significantly reduced that number in recent years. For a while that seemed to be successful, until the corona pandemic broke out and parent company SUR ended up in the red again, causing the last reserves to evaporate.
It is still unclear how the group has performed in recent years: in the latest available figures for 2021, the sports equipment seller suffered a loss of 9 million euros, on a turnover of 95 million. A year earlier the loss was 18.5 million.
Unlike JD Sports, the new owner of the Perry and Aktiesport brands does not only focus on sports stores. That is where the origins lie: Fraser Group started in the 1980s with the sports chains Sports World and Sports Direct – today the largest sports chain in the United Kingdom – and then grew through the takeovers of other retail chains.
The company was given the name Fraser after it acquired the Scottish department store chain House of Fraser in 2018. In addition to the sports shops and the department store, Fraser Group (which has a turnover of almost 3.6 billion euros) owns about fifteen brands, including fashion brand Jack Wills, games store Games & Belong, boxing brand Everlast and Slazenger, one of the oldest British sports brands.