Adidas Expects Record Soccer Sales Next Year, Hainer Says (1) c.2011 Bloomberg News (Updates with CEO’s comment in third paragraph.)

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Adidas AG, the world’s second- largest sporting-goods maker, expects record soccer sales next year as the European championship finals take place in Ukraine and Poland, Chief Executive Officer Herbert Hainer said.

Revenue in the category will exceed the 1.5 billion euros ($2 billion) of 2010, after being little changed this year, Hainer said at a press briefing in Moscow today.

“We will definitely have a new record here,” he said.

Adidas is the official partner of European soccer’s governing body UEFA for the Euro 2012 finals, which start in June. The Herzogenaurach, Germany-based company plans to expand its market-leading position in Ukraine and attain leadership in Poland by 2015, he said of the tournament’s host nations.

Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States will become Adidas’s third-biggest market “in two-to-three years,” Hainer said. Sales in the region will be more than 1 billion euros by 2013, he said.

Adidas, which has supplied sportswear to Soviet national teams since the 1960s and opened its Russian office in 1992, will have 800 stores in Russia and the CIS countries by the end of 2011 and will add another 400 by 2015, Hainer said.

Russia is Adidas’s fourth-biggest market globally after North America, China and Japan. The three biggest sales regions are expected to contribute 50 percent of Adidas’s revenue growth, or 2.5 billion euros, by 2015, the CEO said.

--Editors: Paul Jarvis, Marthe Fourcade.

To contact the reporter on this story: Marina Sysoyeva in Moscow at msysoyevabloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Jarvis at pjarvisbloomberg.net