Recently, ANTA Group released its full-year financial report for 2021. The data shows that the group's total revenue for the whole year reached 49.33 billion yuan, and the operating profit was 10.989 billion yuan, and the two indicators increased by 38.9% and 20.1% respectively compared with the previous year. So far, the free cash flow scale of ANTA Group has reached 10.37 billion yuan - apparel and textile enterprises have extremely high requirements for the stability and relaxation of liquidity, and excellent liquidity often means that enterprises can show their strength in the next stage of development.
The total revenue of Li Ning Group for the whole year was 22.57 billion yuan, the operating profit was 5.13 billion yuan, the two indicators increased by 56.1% and 22.8% respectively compared with the previous year, and the operating cash flow increased by more than 13% to 6.525 billion.
In addition to Shenzhou International, whose manufacturing business is the main business content, ANTA Group and Li Ning Group rank first and third in the list of local sports and apparel listed companies respectively. From the comparison of the 2021 financial report, it is not difficult to see that ANTA Group has been firmly in the leading position with its overall volume, and it is also very likely to achieve the milestone of breaking 50 billion yuan of revenue in 2022. As the world's third largest sporting goods group, ANTA Group has left fewer and fewer opportunities for latecomers to surpass.
But Li Ning Group has shown a strong growth ability. In addition, Li Ning Group is still a single-brand group and has not yet developed into a multi-brand group, while ANTA Group has a brand matrix composed of fila, descente, Kolon Sport, Amer Sports and other international brands that can cover different market segments and tracks in addition to the main brand ANTA. In the overall revenue of the Group, the main brand ANTA accounted for more than 48% of the total revenue with a score of 24.012 billion, with a growth rate of 52.5%. Also as the most well-known "Chinese brand representative" at home and abroad, the competition between the two brands of ANTA and Li Ning still seems to be inconclusive.
A few days before that, Xtep Group had already released its 2021 financial report first. To the surprise of the industry, Xtep successfully entered the "10 billion yuan" club. The Group's total revenue was 10.013 billion yuan and operating profit was 1.396 billion yuan, and the growth rate of the two indicators was 22.5% and 51.2% respectively. The main brand Xtep generated revenue of 8.841 billion, accounting for 88% of the group's total.
Xtep
On March 23, 361° Group also released its 2021 annual results, with turnover reaching 5.955 billion yuan with a growth rate of 15.7%.
Regardless of the competitive situation between the four major groups, on the whole, the strong development of China's local sports apparel industry is an indisputable fact.
In this process, the comparison between the operational strategies embodied by the two giants of ANTA Group and Li Ning Group shows quite intriguing differences.
Overall, anta Group's brand layout strategy is highly comparable to that of Nike Group, which operates seven brands, including Air Jordan, Converse, Umbro, and Cole Haan, in addition to the main brand Nike.
The deep binding of the Anta brand to the "Olympic concept" has achieved explosive returns at the Beijing Winter Olympics, especially consolidating its professional attributes as a professional sports equipment brand (not only clothing and shoes). In terms of the group's operating strategy, the mid-to-high-end market position and professional attributes of the ANTA brand are together with the "haute couture fashion" of Fila, the second largest brand of the group (2021 revenue increased by 25.1% year-on-year to 21.82 billion), and the brand group of Kolon Sport, Amer Sports, etc., covering special sports projects and high-end groups. We have built a market tentacle system that can cover almost all sports projects that are both global professional events and can be popularized into the daily lives of consumers.
Kolon Sport store
Compared with Lululemon, which ranks fourth in the world, although the latter's products have gradually expanded to other sports other than yoga, the overly powerful "professional yoga sports equipment" attribute will inevitably have a siphon effect to a certain extent, weakening the professional characteristics of other project products. The brands of ANTA Group have distinct characteristics and can work together to win greater market share and revenue conversion for the group.
As a single-brand group, "Li Ning", which has a very high national favorability, extends the main sports professionalism of Li Ning, the combination of sports and fashion of China Li Ning, li Ning 1990, which aims at the high-end market with retro style, and gives each sub-brand a marketing and publicity strategy specifically for its characteristics.
Li Ning 1990
Especially for China Li Ning, the industry's recognized founder of the national tide, the group's deep binding with youth culture and fashion now seems to be an extremely successful marketing strategy.
China's Li Ning held three large-scale events in Zhengzhou, Henan, Nyingchi, Tibet, and Sanya, Hainan in 2021 alone. Given that Li Ning Group has not separately announced the performance of each sub-brand, we cannot judge their current revenue contribution ability and investment proportion within the Group, but from the slight weakness of the Li Ning brand in international large-scale sports events and the inability of consumers to accurately distinguish the reaction of Li Ning and Li Ning of China, it can be seen that China Li Ning is already the "façade brand" of Li Ning Group. In the more growing female market, China's Li Ning has also won higher attention and reputation.
Does this mean that the brand, created by one of China's finest professional athletes, will become increasingly fashionable? This is an issue that deserves the attention of industry watchers.
Under the "heavy pressure" of the top two, Xtep Group focused on the "contraction" of running sports and provided cost-effective products. Running is one of the most "equal" of all sports, and the difference in equipment caused by spending power should not be the threshold for entering the sport. When the cutting-edge international brands represented by On Ang Run, Lululemon and Hoka One One continue to exert their efforts to form fierce competition with traditional head brands in the high-end running shoe track, the market gap left by the mid-range and below positioning is huge and the reality does not meet the demand, which has just become the field where the Xtep brand has shown its fists.
Hoka One One
While grasping the primary consumer market, Xtep is also launching high-end products to meet the advanced needs of consumers and continue to retain consumers. Xtep also launched the high-end label "XDNA", featuring high-end fashion sports products and combining Chinese cultural elements to achieve a national tide of heat. By partnering with Di Lieba's brand spokesperson, Xtep Group has also begun to attack the young fashion women's market with women's wear products.
So far, the impact of the "Xinjiang Cotton" incident on Nike and Adidas has not completely dissipated in the domestic market. Coupled with the serious shortage of production capacity caused by the impact of the epidemic on the production base of international brands in Southeast Asia, these situations have brought objective external benefits to local groups. Coupled with the domestic market for local enterprises from the time and place and aspects of the preparation of sufficient conditions, the development trend of local sports clothing in the next few years, as Ding Shuibo, chairman and ceo of Xtep International Holdings Co., Ltd., said, "With the improvement of Chinese mainland awareness of health, driving the sports boom, coupled with the state's support for the sports industry, the sporting goods industry in the Chinese mainland is bound to be able to look forward to a better long-term development prospects." ”
Different research institutions have given different figures about the size of China's sportswear market: Global Industry Analysts Inc. The report released believes that by 2026, the size of China's sports and fitness clothing market will reach 27 billion US dollars (about 172 billion yuan); the Prospective Industry Research Institute believes that this market size will exceed 340 billion yuan in 2022 and is expected to reach 600 billion yuan by 2026.
Regardless of the exact value of this number, the Chinese market has provided a strong enough basic disk for the local sports apparel industry. But it shouldn't be the farthest away they can see. In the next stage of development, backed by the thrust brought by the Chinese market, production capacity and cultural output, the head of the local sports and apparel group should invest more of its own eyes and actions on the global market, put itself in the context of the global market to develop, and no longer be satisfied with becoming a group with international brands and markets, but build its original brand into an international brand with global influence and competitiveness. WWD
Written by Ma Xiao Thorn
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