Puma

Puma SE is the Herzogenaurach sports company founded in 1948 by Rudolf Dassler, who split from his brother Adolf — the founder of adidas, across the same small Bavarian town — and built Puma into one of the world's three largest sportswear brands, across footwear, apparel and accessories for football, running, training, golf and motorsport. Puma's shares trade on Xetra in Frankfurt under the symbol PUM. The French luxury group Kering (then PPR) held a majority stake from 2007, which is how Puma sat alongside Gucci in a fashion group's portfolio; in May 2018 Kering distributed most of that stake to its shareholders, and Puma has been an independent listed company since.

Company Profile

The wholesale record matters for Puma because its model is the classic sporting-goods one: seasonal footwear and apparel lines sold through sporting-goods chains, shoe retailers, department stores and its own stores and factory outlets, with sponsored athletes and teams — from Pelé's era to present-day football clubs and Formula 1 partnerships — doing the marketing work that drives the wholesale orders.

The Dassler split is not background colour; it structured the industry. Two of the world's largest sports brands grew up on opposite banks of the Aurach river sharing suppliers, workers and a town, and Puma's periodic reinventions — the Suede in street culture, the Speedcat's fashion revivals — are the smaller rival's answer to its brother's scale.

The range behind the name is footwear, apparel and accessories for football, running, training, golf, basketball and motorsport, plus Cobra Golf equipment. Its customers are sporting-goods chains, shoe retailers, department stores and Puma stores and outlets in more than 120 countries. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Puma in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Puma with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Operating — Puma SE is an independent listed sports company; Kering distributed most of its Puma stake to Kering's own shareholders in May 2018 — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

Company summaries of this kind were the working tool of the apparel trade as much as of investors: a buyer, landlord or supplier checking Puma could see its scale, its headquarters and its own description of its business in a few paragraphs. Those dated descriptions are kept with their dates, because a store count from 2013 or a strategy statement from 2019 is evidence about that year, not about today. The current position is the one given in the snapshot: operating.

History in Brief

The October 2013 summary describes Puma SE as a Germany-based company engaged in the manufacture of sporting equipment, operating worldwide through subsidiaries, designing, developing and marketing sports and sport-lifestyle articles in three product groups — Footwear, Apparel and Accessories — from cross-training and motorsport shoes to team kits. That single dated summary is the whole of its record here and is folded into this page.