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Across The Border | Shift towards e-commerce leads Chinese sportsware brand Li Ning’s recovery

The eponymous sportswear company founded by China’s former Olympic gymnast achieved staggering 58 per cent revenue growth in its e-commerce business in the first half of this year

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Li Ning, China’s former Olympic gymnast and executive chairman and interim chief executive officer of the firm bearing his name. Photo: Sam Tsang

Chinese sportswear brands are taking full advantage of the country’s fever for everything related to e-commerce, with online sales helping to boost revenue growth, while also forcing some smaller local stores owners to cater to this new generation of tech-savvy shoppers.

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And none more so than Li Ning, the eponymous sportswear firm founded by China’s former Olympic gymnast, which achieved staggering revenue growth of 58 per cent for its e-commerce business during the first half of this year, as the recently-struggling firm finally got to grips with its operating efficiency compared with last year, according to its latest interim report.

In contrast, to other sales channels, direct retails had low single-digit growth compared with last year while wholesale through franchised distributors had a growth of about 5 per cent in the second quarter this year.

But the percentage of units sold by a retail outlets and distributed to it wholesale, including e-commerce, increased by about 13 per cent.

As at the end of June this year, the company’s had 6,329 points of sales in China after a net decrease of 111 in direct retail and wholesale sites.

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The company closed another 200 stores at the end of last year, after reporting a loss of 781 million yuan (US$119 )million) in March 2015 and that its namesake founder would retake over as interim chief executive as part of a restructuring plan.

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