Sports/Olympics / Off the Field

Adidas set to top earnings goals from World Cup: chairman
(AFP)
Updated: 2006-04-04 11:02

FRANKFURT - Adidas, the German maker of sportswear and equipment, will achieve its earnings goal from the upcoming World Cup football championships, group chairman Herbert Hainer said in a newspaper interview.

"We're more than satisfied with the sales of World Cup products," Hainer told the regional Berlin-based daily Tagesspiegel published Monday.

"We'll meet all the goals we have set ourselves for the World Cup."

Adidas, official supplier for the huge sporting event that Germany is hosting, is scheduled to publish first-quarter earnings on May 9.

And the company expects to "easily" achieve its goal of around one billion euros (1.2 billion dollars) from football products this year, which would represent an increase of some 20 percent over last year, Hainer said.

"We're going to sell more than 10 million footballs, 500,000 football shirts of the German national team and more than 1.5 million Adidas football shirts," the chairman said.