BERLIN (Reuters) – Puma, a German sportswear company, reported Wednesday that its earnings for the second quarter were better than expected, thanks to “very strong growth” across all of its products. It also raised its revenue forecast for the whole year of 2022.
The company said that its earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) increased by 34.4% from the previous year to 146 million euros ($148.06 million). This is more than the average estimate of 128.94 million euros that analysts had for EBIT.
Chief Executive Bjorn Gulden said in a statement, “We feel that the increased investments in R&D, innovation, and product development over the past few years are starting to pay off.”
When the value of money is taken into account, sales in the second quarter went up by 18.4% to 2.002 billion euros. The company said that all of its performance categories, such as running, training, teamsports, golf, and basketball, were growing quickly.
Gulden said, “We do see more uncertainty in the world,” but he added, “I’m still optimistic about our industry and the PUMA brand in particular, and we even raised our revenue forecast for the whole year of 2022.”
PUMA said it was changing its full-year sales growth forecast from at least 10% (with room for growth) to somewhere in the mid-teens (when sales are adjusted for currency). It said again that it thought EBIT would be between 600 and 700 million euros for the financial year 2022.
Late in June, Puma’s competitor, Nike Inc (NYSE:NKE), said that its first-quarter sales would be lower than expected because it planned to discount more and is having trouble in China, which is its most profitable market, because of the pandemic.
($1 = 0.9861 euros)
