Adidas unveils new five-year plan to strengthen business growth

Sportswear company Adidas Group has unveiled its new, five-year plan to focus on football, running, women, children and its Originals brand, according to the company's statement on November 6th.

The Herzogenaurach, Germany based company has recorded strong third quarter results with an 18 percent growth in sales during the first nine months.

Football, running, women, Originals and kids are the five main drivers at the heart of Adidas' plan to lead in mindshare, with football continuing to be strengthened and running anticipating a significant growth as more and more people take up running -- not just serious athletes, but recreational runners too.

Over the next five years, Adidas intends to maintain its relevance to women's aspirations and consolidate its leading position. Adidas will be opening many more category-focused stores -- from 4 to 20 by 2020.

Adidas will continue to increase the number of Originals stores from 350 to more than 650 in five years' time.

In addition to naming the above key categories, Adidas has defined three strategic choices in Creating the New. They focus on cities, speed and open source.

The 'city' attack strategy includes Shanghai, which is one of the six key cities around the world that Adidas has identified as a top priority for sustained investment, plus 22 other cities which represent a significant share of the company's China business. Adidas will be enhancing its retail footprint and key city attack plan to expand in future cities, which will account for a large proportion of its growth by 2020.

With its brand NEO, Adidas set new standards in speed to market, by significantly reducing production lead times and increasing in-season creation. The company is rolling out the mantra of 'speed' across the entire Group, and as a result, the design-to-store process will be much faster -- as fast as 45 days from the design brief, through design and manufacturing to shipment into stores.

The Adidas Group has core brands including Adidas, Reebok, TaylorMade and Reebok-CCM Hockey. In China, the Group employs more than 3,000 people and generated sales of EUR 1.8 billion in 2014.