Adidas Stabil and a box

Adidas is a German sports apparel corporation. The company is named after its founder, Adolf (Adi) Dassler, who started producing shoes in the 1920s in Herzogenaurach near Nuremberg. Many erroneously believe that Adidas is an acronym for All Day I Dream About Sports (or Sex).

Rudolf Dassler, Adi's brother, founded a rival company, Puma, in 1948.

Competitors

The chief competitors of Adidas are Reebok, Puma and Nike.

History

The history of the company, as presented by its official web site, is incomplete, maybe because it is indirectly linked to financial scandals.

After a period of serious trouble following the death of Adolf Dassler's son Horst Dassler in 1987, the company was bought in 1990 by Bernard Tapie, for 1.6 billion French francs ($320 million), which Tapie borrowed. Tapie was at the time a famous specialist of rescuing bankrupt companies, a business on which he built his fortune.

Tapie decided to move production offshore, to Asia. He also hired Madonna for promotion.

In 1992, Tapie was unable to pay interest of his loan. He asked the Crédit Lyonnais bank to sell Adidas, and the bank bought it for itself, which is normally forbidden under French law. Apparently, the state-owned bank tried to do a favour to Tapie, to get him out of trouble, because Tapie was a minister of Urban Affairs (ministre de la Ville) in the French government at the time. Forgetting why the bank actually bought Adidas, Tapie later sued it, because he felt spoiled by the sale.

In February 1993, Crédit Lyonnais sold Adidas to Robert Louis-Dreyfus, a friend of Bernard Tapie (and cousin of Julia Louis-Dreyfus from the Seinfeld TV series). Robert Louis-Dreyfus became the new CEO of the company. He is also the president of the Olympique de Marseille football team, to which Tapie is closely linked.

Tapie went bankrupt himself in 1994. He was the object of several lawsuits, notably related to match fixing at the football club. He spent 6 months in La Santé prison in Paris in 1997 after being sentenced to 18.

In 1997 adidas AG acquires the Salomon Group.

Management

• CEO: Herbert Hainer
• CFO: Robin Stalker
• Managing Director, India: Andreas Gellner

Former management

• CEO 1993-2001: Robert Louis-Dreyfus. He has been highly successful with managing the company until 2001. His self-admitted secret was simply copying what Nike and Reebok did.

External links

• adidas-Salomon - Overview (http://www.adidas-salomon.com/en/home/welcome.asp)
• Adidas web site (http://www.adidas.com/)

Articles

• Academic article (http://www.its.caltech.edu/~xiuqin/strategy/adidas.htm)

Data

• Yahoo! - adidas-Salomon AG Company Profile (http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/92/92632.html)