Targets and strategy

PUMA started 2023 by sharpening its strategic priorities.

Our strategic framework consists of a triangle: Elevate the Brand, Increase Product Excellence, and Improve Distribution Quality. Within this context, we placed a special emphasis on implementing this strategic framework in the US and China – two key countries where our current market shares are significantly too low. The strategic framework triangle is based on our three foundational pillars of focusing on people first, evolving sustainability and digitalizing PUMA’s infrastructure.

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‎By elevating the brand, we want to anchor PUMA more deeply in the hearts and minds of customers, to become more consumer centric and to focus our investments on fewer Tier 1 ambassadors with a bigger reach. Finally, we will also improve our focus and engage with consumers with fewer, bigger and better brand and product campaigns going forward.

With our rich history of having served athletes since 1948, our PUMA brand has some of the best logos in the whole industry and a huge archive of the most iconic sport moments, athletes, and products in history. This unmatchable DNA gives our product designers and marketeers a unique opportunity to tell our brand and product stories with the authenticity and credibility of a true sports brand.

We continuously focus on enhancing our product excellence and we put innovation and quality at the heart of our designs. All PUMA products will have 100% sports DNA. While we celebrate the sports roots of our shoes on the Sportstyle side, we push for new innovations on the performance side to make our athletes even faster. We keep on leveraging our NITRO™ foam technology in our key running styles Deviate, Velocity and ForeverRun and are continuously evolving to improve the cushioning, responsiveness and weight of our shoes. We are also continuously evolving our three strong football footwear franchises FUTURE, ULTRA and KING, which is reflected in our ongoing market share gains in this highly competitive market. Finally, we also introduced the All-Pro, which we believe is one of the best basketball shoes in the industry and we will continue to evolve our All-Pro proposition going forward.

PUMA is continuously improving the quality of its distribution in wholesale. Our retail partners are our key priority as we believe that the consumers enjoy a multi-branded retail environment to make the best product choices. To cater to the requirements of our retail partners and to build long-term partnerships with them, we provide our retail partners with the best and fastest service in the industry. PUMA continues to pursue its direct-to-consumer business as a complementary offering in its distribution strategy to realize the roles which our retail partners cannot fulfil, namely brand storytelling.
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In the United States, we see significant opportunities to enhance our market share in the world’s biggest sports market. To achieve this, we need to position ourselves as a credible performance brand. Our initiatives in basketball, motorsport and even football - as our new partner CONMEBOL will host the next Copa America in the US – will all contribute to this target. With our roster of athletes including LaMelo Ball, Scoot Henderson, and Breanna Stewart in basketball and Christian Pulisic in football, we have the right brand ambassadors in place to connect with our target audiences in a credible manner. Furthermore, we’re also focussing on creating more US-first products, improving our distribution quality in the US and strengthening our local US organisation.

Next to the United States, we see significant opportunities to enhance our market shares in China, the world’s most dynamic sports market. PUMA also has a clear strategy in place when it comes to our rebound in the Chinese market. We want to position PUMA as a global sports brand in China, leverage our local-for-local resources both in terms of design and sourcing to deliver the right product to the Chinese consumer, improve our distribution quality in this digital-first market and strengthen our local China organisation.

Putting our people first is an important part of our corporate strategy. PUMA’s working culture is characterised by diversity, inclusion, and equality, as our employees have many different nationalities and backgrounds. We believe this diversity to be one of our key strengths and we were thrilled to be named a global Top Employer in 2023. Our commitment to equality was rewarded when an independent agency certified that we had closed the adjusted pay gap between women and men among our employees in Germany. We will continue to work hard to provide our employees with an inspiring place to work which reflects our values.

The aim of our FOREVER.BETTER. sustainability strategy is to fully integrate sustainability into all our core business functions. By 2025, we want to make nine out of ten products with materials such as certified cotton and viscose or recycled polyester. We also want to become more circular.

With our RE:SUEDE project, we showed in 2023 how we can successfully turn an experimental version of our classic Suede sneaker into compost under certain tailor-made industrial conditions. Going forward, we will continue to innovate with our partners to determine the infrastructure and technologies needed to make the process viable for a commercial version of the RE:SUEDE, including a takeback scheme.

To reach younger audiences with our sustainability strategy, we started our “Voices of a RE:GENERATION” initiative. The Voices, who are GEN-Z activists and environmentalists, regularly join PUMA to give our senior management feedback on how we can further strengthen our sustainability strategy. The voices also visited the factories of our partners in Asia and Turkey and helped us communicate with younger audiences throughout the year. We believe that new ways of communication like this and transparency are essential for the journey towards a more sustainable world.

To operate efficiently and to keep up with our growth momentum, we constantly improve our infrastructure and processes. This includes investments in our IT systems, distribution centres and offices around the world.