Asia is the biggest growth market for us, especially China, but also Japan. |
But I'm not disappointed about the results (in Europe) for the first nine months, and you will see positive revenue growth here in the fourth quarter, |
By combining two of the most respected and well-known brands in the worldwide sporting goods industry, the new group will benefit from a more competitive platform. |
Clearly there are challenges that Reebok will solve but these were not unknown when we made our offer in August and we remain fully confident in the synergies, |
I do believe they went a little bit too far on the music side. They have a lot of extremely good performance products, and this we'll definitely communicate much stronger in the future. |
In the long term, this new 11-year partnership has the power to make the NBA and Adidas synonymous in basketball. |
Many of our current efforts will now focus on turning around the Reebok brand. |
Our key region North America is stronger than ever, so that we have raised our group sales and earnings expectations for the year, |
Our mission is to be the leading sports brand in the world. This definitely brings us a huge step ahead, |
The countdown for the soccer World Cup has already started, and we are on track to achieve extraordinary results in 2006 and later, |
We expect further improvements throughout the year, especially in the second half, when initial results of our new strategies will become visible, |
We knew full well that an acquisition of this size would take a lot of work, and that Reebok had some particular challenges ahead of it. |
We try to work out films from the point of what the [sponsorship] market would demand, and not the other way round, which is the norm in the film industry. |
We would definitely like to see this as the start of a new tradition for the final match. We'll do this again but try to come up with something special for each final. |
While Paul has chosen to step down as CEO of Reebok, I am very pleased that he has agreed to remain a personal adviser and consultant to me. Paul's experience is invaluable to the organization at this time, and I look forward to continuing to work closely together. |