Okay, I think we're set. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Herzog and welcome to the adidas World of Sports. A warm welcome also to our media representatives who are following the day today, and good morning and good afternoon also to those people listening around the world through our website. We started our Investor Day yesterday evening with a very nice dinner event, which I actually enjoyed a lot. It was great getting to know all of you and spending some time with you. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our speakers from yesterday, Martin Shankland, Harm Ohlmeyer, and Michael Stanier, to take the time and give you some insights on our business in Russia and the retail business.
Judging on how you actually grabbed them and talked intensively with them the entire evening and didn't let them go, I had the feeling that you also appreciated the insights that they provided. I would also like to thank our events team, who did a tremendous job in turning our already beautiful employee restaurant into what somebody called the perfect wedding location. A great job done there. Enough about yesterday. I think all of you know our Take It campaign. In there it says, "Yesterday is gone. Today is up for grabs." I think that's what all is about. We want to take today to be remembered tomorrow. When we're talking about the future, I think there's no better place when we want to present our future business plan until 2020 than this place here. This is the adidas Future Lab.
This is where our future is being created. This is where our colleagues are working day in, day out on developing the best products for our athletes. This is where innovation comes to life. I'm sure you're going to take a look at it later in one of the breaks. You know that since the very early days of this company, we have brought an unparalleled amount of game-changing innovations to athletes around the world to help them perform at a completely different level. I think that's one of the characteristics of adidas over the last couple of decades. What made this company so successful is also the fact that we not only brought constantly new products to the market and invented new product, but that we also constantly reinvented ourselves.
This track top that I'm wearing today is actually part of a recently relaunched Franz Beckenbauer tracksuit. This tracksuit in 1967 was the very first piece of apparel that adidas produced. Until then, it was all about footwear. I think that's just one example of the inventions and the kinds of reinventing the business that we have seen over the last couple of years. Reinventing ourselves is not necessarily about new categories that we go in or new markets. Although you're going to hear much more about that in the course of the day. I think I'm not shy of saying that what we will present you today is, in my view, another proof point that this great group is constantly reinventing itself and Creating the New. I want to leave it with that.
You're going to see much more about how we are reinventing the way that we're doing our business and how we are Creating the New. Before we start with the presentations, I would like to mention a few housekeeping items. I would like to ask you to mute your mobile phones. The second thing that I would like to mention is the fact that I've said that this is here the future of adidas. The products that you're seeing here from TaylorMade, Reebok, and adidas are also our future. Some of those products actually haven't been launched yet. I would ask all of you, all investors and analysts present here, but also the press, to not take any pictures here.
With that being said, I would like to ask our CEO, Herbert Hainer, on stage to introduce you to the new strategy of the adidas Group. Before we do that, let's start with a little reminder of what we have done over the last 15 months.
Good morning, everybody. Trends come and go, but there is no doubt that sport is and will remain central to every culture and to every society. It is core to health for people around the whole world. The importance of sport, however, goes far beyond that, and we fully believe that sport has the power to change lives. Sport is our very purpose, and sport is why we are here today. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of sports. Welcome to Herzogenaurach. We have to talk a lot about today, and I'm excited to take you on a journey that brings us closer to what we believe is an exciting future, introducing to you our new strategy. Our industry is growing in size and scope and will continue to do so.
In fact, the sporting goods industry is growing faster than most industry, including the consumer electronics industry, and this trend will continue, no doubt. More people than ever before do sports, watch sports, and want to showcase a sporty lifestyle. Research shows us clearly that living a healthier and more conscious lifestyle is a major trend in both established and emerging markets. This, ladies and gentlemen, is very good news for us, because everything we do is rooted in sport. We also translate our competence in sport into streetwear and fashion, because sport is an attitude and a lifestyle. Our core brands, be it adidas, Reebok, and TaylorMade, have strong identities in sport. adidas appeals to athletes, Reebok focuses on the fitness consumer, and TaylorMade is all about the golfer.
The strategies of our brand complement each other, putting us in a position where we will be able to identify and to capture growth opportunities more effectively than ever before. Through our unique portfolio of leading sports brands, we cater to the needs and the desires of more consumers than any of our competitors. We are determined to get even closer to our consumers. We will hear more much about this as we go through our plans during the day, but stay tuned and be excited. It is not only our brand portfolio that allows us to reach more consumers. We are one of only two truly global players in this industry, and we enjoy leading market positions across all major markets and categories with an unparalleled strong market position, especially in the emerging markets. This setup allows us to balance our risk and mitigate challenges.
While quite a few of you may now immediately think Russia, let me also here make one point quite clear. Yes, the situation in Russia has hit us hard last year because, as you all know, Russia is a very profitable market for us. However, thanks to our strength in other regions, we were able to significantly reduce the overall impact of Russia on our group earnings. What is even more important, this broad and strong platform offers us tremendous growth opportunities going forward. Ladies and gentlemen, before we look into our future, let me also remind ourselves where we are coming from. Five years ago, a lot of you have been here. We presented to you our ambitious plan called Route 2015, and it was the most comprehensive plan this group have ever created.
When I look back at Route 2015, there are three things that come to my mind. Firstly, contrary to what many of you may think, we have been successful in making the adidas Group much better than 2010. Secondly, this is where criticism is due, we weren't as successful as we had hoped to be. Lastly, and this is most important to me, there were valuable key learnings from Route 2015 that we will now apply into our new strategy as we move forward. Let me start with our successes. When we close the Route 2015 cycle at the end of this year, we will have added close to EUR 4 billion in sales. Just to put this into perspective, EUR 4 billion, this is much more than the overall number, current number 3 in our industry has.
Therefore, I'm very confident to say today that by the end of this year, we will actually be very close to achieving our sales growth communicated, in 2010, with a revenue increase of more than 40% over this period. We recorded significant sales and market share growth in all emerging markets. In currency neutral terms, we have grown our business in the emerging markets by an impressive 70% since 2010. This includes, of course, catching up with our fiercest competitor in one of the most promising growth markets in China. We increased our revenues from controlled space activities from below 40% to over 50%. We introduced a fast fashion model with adidas NEO, a startup five years ago. adidas NEO will be a EUR 1 billion business in 2015. We aggressively expanded our own retail and e-commerce capabilities.
Almost non-existing five years ago, our e-com business will exceed its target of EUR 500 million at the end of 2015. In addition, we increased our market capitalization by around EUR 5 billion to date, delivered a total shareholder return of close to 70%, and created new jobs for more than 11,000 people. On top of that, ladies and gentlemen, let's not forget, we continue to be the most sustainable company in our industry, and we are regarded as a leader in this field by many independent organizations, such as Corporate Knights, the Dow Jones, and now, you might even not believe it, by Greenpeace. Looking back, I'm proud of what we, as an entire team at the adidas Group across the globe, have achieved. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our 53,000 employees for their fantastic support.
Ladies and gentlemen, does this mean that we are satisfied? The answer is clearly no. Every athlete knows the moment you become complacent, you start to lose. Therefore, looking back, we have also asked ourselves the question: where did we not meet our expectation? It's quite clear we lost some of our brand desirability because we did not focus enough on the needs of our consumers. This was a result of our function-driven organization, which slowed down our decision-making process, making us and our plan too static and not agile enough. Losing our number two position in North America is a direct consequence of that. We just haven't connected well enough with the U.S. consumer. We didn't focus enough on the right products, and we underinvested.
As a result of all of that, we did not create the halo effect for our brands in the U.S. In addition, I think it's also fair to say while Reebok is now where it needs to be, there is no question that the successful Reebok transformation into being the fitness brand took us too long. Most importantly, as a result of all of that, we did not reach the financial ambitions that we have set out to achieve. I know that we disappointed many of you on that, and in particular, with regard to the shortfall on the operating margin, and I take full responsibility for that. Believe me, it never feels good if you don't reach all the goals that you have set out initially, neither in sport nor in business.
The key thing for me, however, is that whatever the setback might be, giving up is not an option. Whether as a person, an athlete, or as a business, you need to grow and evolve always. That is exactly what we did. We reacted like true athletes. We worked hard, we adjusted our training, and we laid the foundation for coming back even stronger than before. Here is our most important lesson from Route 2015, where everything derives from. We need to sharpen our focus on what really counts. What really counts is our consumer. Our consumer has to be at the heart of everything that we do and that we will do in the future. We need to put our money where we can make a real difference in consumer experience.
That means we need to adjust and build a truly consumer-led organization, which we have already started. We don't need to win everywhere, but we need to win where the halo effects are created. Our processes and systems need to deliver on the ever-increasing consumer demands. We need to focus even more because we know we can win if we set the right priorities. With our successes at the 2014 World Cup being a prime example. Overall, through our successes, Route 2015 offered a strong foundation which we can now build on. Through its setbacks, Route 2015 has offered us valuable lessons and insights that both motivate and guide us on our way going forward. We feel that this plan has created a great deal of positive change within our company already.
In the following presentations, you will get a concise idea of how the foundations laid this Route 2015 will now help us to accelerate our growth. Key to achieving this, and that's a major learning from the past strategic cycle, will be to drive brand desirability and to win the hearts and the minds of our consumers. One key challenge in catering to consumer demands is to anticipate industry trends before everybody else does. We need to be at the forefront of change as we adapt to new consumer demands, innovations in technologies, and the expanding global market. What do we see are the three mega trends which are coming in the future? First, digitalization. Everything that can be digitalized will be digitalized. I'm not only talking about our consumers using Facebook, Twitter, or Google every single minute of their life.
I'm talking about an array of digital technologies that can be involved in the creation of value. Mobile phones, big data, analytics, cloud infrastructure, and so on and so forth. Digital services also offer completely new possibilities to connect and interact with our consumers. Secondly, urbanization. More than ever, the appeal and power of a brand will be determined by its success in ever-expanding key cities. Since 1990, the number of mega cities with more than 10 million inhabitants has tripled, and these are the halo locations where the perception of brands will be shaped in the future. From there, they will be spread to the rest of the world. Third, experienced individualization. Consumers relate to brands, but their relation to brands is increasingly based on their individual experiences with a brand, a campaign, or a product. Now, what do these trends mean to us?
We are all living in a fast-changing world. Only what is new is relevant to the consumer, and therefore, we have to relentlessly surprise our consumers, create what they experience as a new, exciting, and incredible personal product. In order to live up to this ambitious goal, we have to constantly reinvent ourselves as an organization to lead the change in our industry. Though, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Creating the New. Creating the New is the headline for our next five-year strategic business plan. Creating the New is the attitude that leads us into the future. At the very heart of this plan are our brands. Our brands are what connects us with our consumers, and therefore, the successes of our brands defines the successes of our business and of our company.
Creating the New is an ambitious, yet realistic plan that provides the layout for our accelerated growth, both on the top and the bottom line until 2020. Yes, this plan will last beyond my tenure at the helm of the group. I will do everything I can to get it off to a great start. One point is important here for me to tell you. This strategy was developed under the full ownership of the Executive Board of the adidas Group with the involvement of many, many members of our senior management team, both on a global and on a local level. It's not my plan. It's not Eric's plan. It's not Roland's plan. It is the adidas Group strategic business plan. It was a true team effort, all of us are fully committed to bringing Creating the New to life.
How does our ambition translate into concrete to-dos? As a group, we have taken three strategic choices that we want to focus on. Speed, cities, and open source. Let's now look at these choices one by one, let me start with speed. We will become the first true fast sports company. We have developed game-changer capabilities which enable us to listen and to win our consumers with the right concepts anytime, astonishing experiences everywhere, and their desired products always. We will increase speed to market. We will respond to consumer demand in season with an agile supply chain. We will deliver products faster through our omnichannel approach, and we will deliver them better through premium presentations across our unrivaled controlled space network, which we want to present more than 60% of our total sales in 2020.
We will get faster internally because we have transformed our organization to become completely consumer-led and digitally empowered as we plan to quadruple online sales by 2020. All this is going to happen across a tighter product portfolio. We are going to tighten our current portfolio by another 25% while increasing our marketing spend and thus significantly increasing the per product investment. This increasing mega brand approach has served us well with recent product category launches, such as the Boost, the Superstar, the ZX Flux, and the ZPump Fusion. These are success stories we plan to now build on across the entire organization. Cities. Global brands are shaped in global cities. Global brands are made in global cities. Our business in London today is bigger than our business in Finland. If we win running in London, then we win running in England.
We have identified six global cities in which we want to specifically grow the share of trend, the share of mind, and the share of market. Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Third, open source. We will be the first sports brand that invites athletes, consumers, partners, and customers to be part of our brand. We will open up so that they can co-create the future together with us. We are already working with some of the most creative and innovative people and organizations on this planet. Just think about our successful cooperation with Kanye West, which is just the most recent example of this openness. Kanye loves to work with us because, and I will use his own words, because we give him the oxygen to live his creativity while his former partner just wanted to put his name on the shoe.
We will take this spirit and give many more the opportunity to move closer to us, now to even become part of us and our brand. Speed, cities, open source. You will hear a lot more on these three choices as we go through today's presentation. I have no doubt that you will be as excited about their potential as we all are. We are going to execute our choices in a highly focused manner across the entire organization. By inviting consumers into our brand, we will engage and inspire much more consumers than ever before. By focusing on key cities, we will gain a halo effect across markets and categories. By increasing our speed to market and our controlled space network and better than anybody else.
All of this will be step changes for brand desirability and brand advocacy, which in turn will enable us to accelerate our top-line growth, to win significant market shares across key categories and markets, and to improve our profitability sustainably, which I know is what you are looking for the most. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no doubt we are a growth company and we will continue to grow. We aim to increase currency-neutral group revenues annually by a high single-digit rate on average. This performance will be driven by high single-digit currency-neutral growth rates per year on average at both the adidas and the Reebok brand. In a more or less stagnating market, TaylorMade-adidas Golf will benefit from its continuous product introduction and grow by an average growth rate in the mid-single digits on a currency-neutral basis per year.
Yes, if you do now the math yourself, you will calculate that this will all add up to a level of EUR 22 billion and beyond. Please bear in mind that this absolute figure is based on today's currencies. In addition, driven by gross margin expansion and operating leverage, we will increase our bottom line at a significantly higher rate than our revenues. We expect net income growth of around 15% each year on average going forward. While I will not go into details here, you will hear much more of the drivers of our profitability improvement during the course of today. What I will tell you, however, is that you don't have to wait until 2016 to see our new strategy producing already excellent results.
As our sales figures come in on a weekly basis, we can clearly see that adidas and Reebok have great momentum already in 2015 across the globe. Therefore, I can confirm to you here today that we are enjoying a strong start into the year. More on that we will give you when we announce our Q1 results in May. It goes without saying that we also remain committed to delivering strong shareholder returns and having the owners of our company participate in the future success of our group. Robin will tell you more about our adjusted dividend policy and the shareholder return program in the afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, we as a team are absolute confident about our capabilities to bring this plan to life, and we are here to win. There is no doubt.
We are a global leader with a unique platform in a highly attractive market. We have made major progress over the past five years, and we have also learned important lessons, both positive and negative, which we will now apply. We are focused and aligned as never before and firmly set on capturing the opportunities which present themselves to us. In short, we are ready to accelerate our growth story and to create the new adidas Group. To get into more details and to get you even more excited, please welcome now our Head of Global Brands, Eric Liedtke. Thank you very much.
Good morning, guys. It's great to be here. Very excited to be on stage in front of you representing global brands and speaking to you about two very iconic brands. Two great brands. Two brands that I feel are definitely on the rise, and two, if I may say, undervalued brands with vast opportunities. I'd like to start today with adidas, then we'll bring Matt up to really get into the details on Reebok. To start with adidas, I'd like to talk about where we are today. I was appointed about a year ago to this position that I now stand in front of you representing, and it's been a year, really, of reflection. Reflecting on what we've done well and what we haven't done well, what our strengths are, what our weaknesses are, opportunities, and of course, threats.
In looking at that, we made some hard choices. We went through a massive reorganization in our global brands that actually filtered through the entire corporation. We had about 40,000 people affected in the last year. We set about setting a new Strategic Business Plan, and we didn't sit there and say, "Okay, it's going to be an SBP, and what are we going to do?" I said, "What do we need to do differently to win more? What do we need to do for the next five years, the next two years, the next 90 days to start to win again?" We didn't want to get too far over our skis. We wanted to start looking at what we can do to win right now. That's been an ongoing task since for the last years, but really with a more determined focus over the last year.
While we've done all that, we had a pretty good year. From an adidas brand standpoint, we grew 11%. The market grew 7%. I know there's a lot of disappointment out there in some of our profit warnings, but let's remind ourselves that the brand is strong. It grew at double digits, and the market did not. It's not enough. We want to be the best, and we're still hungry. 11%, while it's good and we're proud of that, we want to accelerate more. It starts with really knowing who we are, and it starts really getting defined on what we represent. I'd like to show you a video that starts to get after what we want our people to feel and what we want you to feel about our brand.
We believe that sport is more than a game. That what happens on the field, affects our lives off it. In a single moment, sport can change us. The way we see ourselves, what we're capable of. Sport makes us better. We believe through sport, we have the power to change lives. We are creators, makers, and doers. We are the original sports brand, driven by innovation and a bias for action. We are obsessed with helping athletes make a difference in their games, in their lives, in their world. Our mission is to be the best. Best means designing, building, and selling the best products in the world with the best service and experience. Best is what people will say about us. Best is innovative, inspiring, and unique. We are adidas, the best sports brand in the world.
My favorite position for those types of things is to sit and watch your faces because I know you guys do this on a daily basis. You come and see investors, investment meetings, you can't help but be moved by some of the stuff on that. I debated on whether I even show it to you guys today because ultimately, it's an employee movie. It's an employee film to talk about who we are and get people to believe what we want to stand for. I thought, hell, the most engaged employers are the most valuable companies. You guys should see that. You should see what we stand for. You should feel something inside, because someday, if not today or tomorrow or yesterday, you've done sport and you can relate to that. We take a backseat to no one.
Let's walk through some of those things we just talked about. Our belief, it starts with defining who we are and why we do what we do. This is our higher calling, this is something for the group, and Herbert talked about it great. This is our why. We talk about our obsession. These are new words intentionally. Our obsession is what compels us as individuals. What are you obsessed with? You're obsessed with your jobs. You're obsessed with your lives. You're obsessed with your girlfriends, your boyfriends, whatever it may be. That's what obsession is. It's what compels you to do what you do. It's called passion in some places, obsession's a deeper, more action-oriented word. This is what we must do. This is why we all came together as a brand. We found each other here because we're obsessed with doing this.
We're obsessed with helping athletes make a difference. Best, this is what we must accomplish. This is our imperative. Some of the questions I've seen in the pre-reading, getting ready for this is, are you now ceding to second place? Are you now giving up on the race for best? Hell no. Who would ever admit to that? We have to be the best. We have to aspire for being the best, and we will be the best. We don't aspire for anything else. Tell me when the finish line is, and I'll tell you who wins. In this industry, in any industry, there's no finish line. We're going to be the best, and we're going to have a road that goes up and down. It's not a linear chart that goes up. There's bumps along the way. There's peaks and valleys to any great story.
It makes the finish better. I'm a Hollywood guy. Read any story or look at any movie from Pixar. There's always a down before there's an up. We're working towards that up. Best is also not just an anecdotal thing. We want to define best for you. What does best really mean? It means we design and build and sell the best products in the world with the best services and experiences. A brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room, and we want people to describe us as the best sports brand in the world, without a doubt. That's our singular message. Once people are saying we're the best, market share, leadership, and yes, profitability follows quickly. It starts with the aspiration to be the best in the world.
As we move into our position in the marketplace, we did a lot of work on this as far as how do we want to position ourselves, and it came pretty easily to us. We are the creators. That's something that's very rich to us. This is who we are. We make the rules. We shape the new. We create the new. We're confident. We're collaborative. We're courageous. Yes, we're unexpected, which is why we're hosting you in our innovation lab, one of the most secret places our company has. We wanted to bring you guys in here to show you behind the curtains a little bit, show you where the sausage gets made and not always the end result. This is who our founder was. He was the ultimate creator of the original sports brand, and that's what we keep very dear to us.
A lot of people say, "Well, you're based in Herzog." We're based in Herzog because this ground is sacred, and it's a great place to be in the center of Europe to work from. I can be in any major city in Europe within hours. You can't say that in Oregon. I'm from Portland, by the way, so I understand where the competition sits. You want to go to the East Coast from Portland, Oregon, it's a seven-hour flight. Plus taxi coming in from New York, get into the account, it's a day long. I want to get in London, I can be there an hour and a half. It's a difference. Let's put that in context of center of Europe can also be quite advantageous to us.
We looked inside ourselves and we said, "This is who we've always been." It's important to keep that in perspective because we live in a competitive landscape. There's no doubt about it. There's a lot of competitors out there. I like to look at it in context of sport. I think sport is always the grounding rule, so let's come back. We looked at it like player archetypes, if you will. Different brands with different personalities to kind of represent different players. There's the specialist, there's the team player, there's the ego, and there's the rebel. I'll let you guys put brands against identities because I don't want to waste time doing that today for you. We don't see ourselves here. We're a little different. We live at the convergence of sport and creativity.
That's why we see ourselves here, the guy who shapes the rules. We weren't looking for a white space. It kind of just found us because it was natural about tapping into who we are as the authentic sports brand. This is exactly what consumers are looking for today. As Herbert talked about, in today's world, consumers continue to digitize and go faster and faster. They continue to help shape and create new things in their lives. They want to be with a brand that lets them do that with them. This describes the type of people we hire, the athletes we sign, and of course, the partners we have. Let's take a look at our second video of the day to go in more detail.
Every day is a chance. A chance to flip the script. An invitation to take everything we know and reinvent it. Do it better. It takes courage. It's an obsession. Never settling for just good enough. It takes a true creator to make something out of nothing. It takes guts. Calling all creators, those who see obstacles as a chance to win bigger. Calling all creators, the game changers, the difference makers, the boundary breakers, the tomorrow takers. Creators, get up, invent, adapt, improvise, break new ground, write new rules. Calling all creators. It's a new day. Make something.
That's pretty much a rallying cry to all of us in the organization to get out there and get creating. It's also an invitation. An invitation for consumers to join us. It's such an important part for our brand to mean something with that kind of clarity. We're really looking forward to bringing this to the market because we feel this is a gigantic opportunity for our brand to make a difference with the consumers in our industry. Let me spend the rest of the presentation I have with you, outlining how we're going to win creators in a very step-by-step process. It all goes back to what Herbert presented earlier. It goes back to the three choices that the brand made. Those three choices, as you see, are outlined around focus.
It's very important as you go forward, that you focus on what you're going to do, but just as important is what you're not going to do. In this year of reflection that I mentioned earlier, we really spent a lot of time looking at what we need to do differently as far as what we need to do as well. It's important as we go through this, you guys will understand the clarity of the focus that we're bringing to market. It starts with sport. This is our brand mark. In the past, we've had three different brand marks, so encompassing with the linear. We want to get down to one that had a little bit more attitude. We're the original sports brand. There's no doubt about that. There's no historical confusion on that point. Our brand was born from sport. It makes us special.
Going forward, everything we do, every product we make, every commercial we create needs to begin and end with sport. It seems like it's a simple thing and obvious, but we haven't always done that. It does not mean we stop our lifestyle offerings. That's a compelling point of difference for us. It just means they need to come from sport. They need to ensure they're born from sport. I won't bore you with a lot of graphs, but it shows you like we've done this from clear roles and responsibilities is what we have. We have one brand with two sub-brands. The Badge of Sport, which is what we call the pyramid-looking adidas, is the best sports brand in the world. That is the one that's going to carry from the field all the way over to where the consumer wants it.
We're not going to artificially stop it along the way. It's going to go all the way across. Originals is going to be our premium sportswear brand. NEO, adidas NEO, is going to be the accessible sportswear brand. It's very important, I can't overstate this enough, is when we sharpen our brand, then we really sharpen our energy, and we really sharpen our line of sight against sport. That is an immediate clarification internally in how we take that then to the market with our point of view. We focus the organization. I mentioned it earlier. We reorganized the company to lower escalation levels, to get us faster, with clear, empowered teams to own the consumer. They have to be ownable, coming down from a footballer, to a runner, to a basketball player, to a trainer, to outdoor.
There's general managers in charge of each business unit that are empowered to make those decisions and own those things. Previously, we were split by function. You had design having ownership, or you had sports marketing having ownership, or you had brand management having ownership. Now we're going to be owned by consumer. That's a fundamental change, not just here at headquarters. It ripples all the way through the organization, into the markets, and across all the functions. It's a fundamental change to how we operate, to lower the escalation levels and make us faster. It's simpler, it's clear structure that moves fast, relentlessly focused, and it changes our behaviors, it governs our behaviors and our decision-making. We talk about consumers. We had to clarify our consumers as well, and we want to come up with clear battleground consumer groups. There are six.
Focusing our conversations on building the brand and the business. We can use these six to have a very in-depth conversation, be it vertical around running or basketball or training, but also horizontal. We can clearly say, "How are we doing against the female athlete as a brand?" Look at that from a horizontal perspective. It allows us to target a gender and a trend holistically across the brand. That page represents about 700 million athletes or about 85 billion at retail in opportunity. It's enough for us to sink our teeth into. The key to this page, though, is to kind of go back to what I said earlier. How do we win the creators on that sheet? Who are the creators? Knowing who those creators are, because the creators ultimately are the doers. They're the first to adopt. They're creating the content.
They create the new, as I said earlier. They're always focused on what's next and what's new. When we talk about that, we really want to focus in on the male athlete, the female athlete, and this guy over here, the streetwear hound. Those are the three that kind of have those creators most in there. That's who we focus in to influence the rest of the six consumer groups. Quite honestly, Herbert said earlier, we find them in cities. Creators, they either live in the cities or they absolutely want to live in cities because they create in the cities. They have the most impact in the cities, of course. Their impact then ripples out from the cities into the larger area. Call it a halo effect, a ripple effect, whatever you like. Cities are absolutely the most aspirational, influential in the world.
We've chosen six because they're the biggest of the big. Whether it be L.A. or New York, Paris or London, Tokyo or Shanghai, they are the global drivers of sport and culture. Roland's going to come up a little bit later and talk about how we really activate those cities. I want to talk about, again, reinforce why we're focused on these metro cities to really make a difference for our brand and our working budget and get to efficiencies. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't bring up this slide. We need to focus on America. It is absolutely our greatest opportunity, no doubt about it. It's over 30% of the sporting goods business. It has tremendous global influence on sport and street culture. It is the sport culture capital of the world, without a doubt.
We have a unique approach, and I touched upon it a little bit earlier. All the insights we gain from America, we can marry with German engineering. Everyone in this room should know that there's no better country in the world at engineering and innovating product and machinery than Germany. What we've done is we've started to stack more and more creative talent in the States. We put more and more insight-driven guys, leadership positions, creative direction, brand direction, digital direction, sitting in the States to fuse those insights that are coming from the culture, the global influence on sport and street culture, with the German engineering know-how and expertise. To me, that's a formidable marriage that no one else in the industry can offer.
We get a lot of criticism for not being in the States, I think this is the marriage we're looking for. This is the marriage we're working for. Mark's going to come up a little bit later today and really talk about how we bring that to bear on the market. Let's talk about product. We have to focus on footwear. While sportswear is important, I have yet to find a hoodie blog. That's a joke, okay. There's a lot of sneaker blogs out there. It's a tough crowd to play jokes with. There's a lot of sneaker blogs out there if you guys are following the industry. There's no hoodie blogs, right? Okay. Anyway, nothing rivals footwear. Footwear is the key item in everyone's closet.
That's the one that everybody goes to first, then you merchandise around that on your body, at least guys that we're tracking with what these creators do. It's the key driver of sport, culture, and brand heat. It actually has, from a method standpoint, it is the best driver of Net Promoter Score, which is something we track rigorously. Net Promoter Score correlates directly into purchase intent, which gives us market share. If we can win footwear, we can win Net Promoter Score, that takes us right into market share. It's the highest influence on perception of the brand, but more importantly, of innovation, of creativity, and of design competence. We talk about footwear. I don't just want to talk about footwear, I want to talk about reducing footwear and focusing on franchises.
Franchises are multi-year products that we commit to year in and year out. We don't judge them on the first week, not the second week, not the first month. We commit as a brand to drive them to influence culture and shape culture. We will build franchise, communicate, iterate, and expand upon these key franchises because we want to start to drive trends, not always react. That was one of the key learnings we had from our last strategic plan. This allows us to lead, capture the creator, and that's right, lead and capture the creator into our brand. That requires us to focus our resources. We're very ambitious to say that our top 10 footwear franchises will represent 30% of our footwear business going forward by 2017.
Again, I talk in 2017 because I want to have a plan that's only a couple of years so I can iterate along the way. I could put a 2020 number out there and say 70%, but I'm not absolutely sure. I know I can deliver. I know we can deliver on 30%. That's what's exciting because we're already down the road of 2016, and we're already seeing this pick up. That's a critical piece for us. Let me go into this mean more by doing less, which is what we talked about. We will reduce our models, our overall models, by 25%. We're well on our way to hitting our article reduction that we set ourselves on 2015, but I think when it gets into really looking at our plan and reflecting on it, really the place we wanted to cut down was in models.
For example, if we do a hoodie, going back to my example, if we do a hoodie in a black color, that's one model. If we do it in 30 colors, that's 30 SKUs, it's still one model. That's what a consumer wants. They want to see variation of a singular model. That cuts down workload. That makes me more efficient as a brand to operate because it's the same factory, just with different dyes that we can do. That's one model, 30 colors. Instead of maybe today, we're doing 15 models, two, three colors a piece. You can see the efficiency there. We're more focused on reducing models step by step by step. We can invest in fewer products to make better products. It's not a plan, guys. This is an action. This 25% reduction is underway from fall 2015 to fall 2016.
We'll reevaluate in fall 2016. We'll do it again if we have to. We're going to keep harnessing and reducing until we get to the right number to be competitive out there with things that drive the market. We talk about categories. One of the things we want to talk about with categories is not talk about these are key categories, and by default, these are not key categories. No one wants to be in a non-key category. Everybody wants to be the key guy. What we wanted to do is we want to talk about what are the roles. Each category, we gave an assignment. We want to lead in every market in the next two years in football and Originals. That's a clear role. We want to have growth categories, dramatic market share gain categories, double-digit, if you will, around running and Neo.
We want to amplify the business into our training area, which is typically the largest business we have in each market because that amplifies the brand. We build the brand heat, we amplify it through training. We want to have authenticators. If we're going to be the best sports brand in the world, we need to be true to sport, whether it be American football, whether it be rugby, whether it be cricket, whether it be badminton. In those key authenticators, in those markets, we need to make sure we're speaking to the consumer as a sports brand, not just a commercial engine. Each one has a role to play, and each market then will define these categories for their roles as well.
Let's go deeper in just a few so I can touch a little bit more and let you know about some of the ones I thought you might be most interested in today. Football. If you want to lead in sports, you need to lead in football. It's pretty simple. It is the number 1 sport in the world. We are the leader in football, make no bones about it. We always have been, and I'm here to tell you today, we always will be. We clearly want to be number 1 in every market. We have to talk about who the consumer is. It's not different. It's the football creator. It's the male athlete. He's a playmaker. He's a game changer, but his game is changing, and we're changing with it. 60% of the time, he's not on grass when he's playing football.
He's in the cages, he's on the streets, he's playing his game. That's the kind of guy we want to get into. That's what we want to have those kind of insights fueling us. Going forward, we've changed our whole football footwear franchises. This fall 2015, not 2016, not 2017, not a plan, action. We're going from five different silos we've had down to three because we believe there's really 2 types of players. There's a playmaker, which we go after with the Ace. There's a game changer, which we go after with the X. There's the greatest of all time. Anybody? Lionel Messi. We have his signature product as the third. It's pretty simple. We'll go after those, and we'll reduce, and we'll focus, and we'll spend, and we'll invest, and we'll lead. Let's talk about Originals.
Again, our goal is to be number one in every market. We have clear leadership here. We have clear momentum here. It's based upon the authenticity of being the original sports brand. It's that simple. Not only are we the original sports brand, we're the original sports brand to take it to the street, to take it to sportswear. It's this kind of authenticity and creativity that the streetwear hound, remember that other consumer we're going after as a creator, embraces us for. He desires authenticity. He doesn't want a poser brand. As we talk about who he is and where he is, he's the creators of street culture. He's the heart of street culture. He's always on the hunt for what's new and what's next. He's now looking to us like never before to define new territory.
We'll go after that through clear franchises within Originals. Our Originals franchises include some of our iconic basics or some of our iconic Classics. Last year, we reintroduced the Stan Smith. We sold 1.8 million pairs to the right people on the streets last year with Stan Smith. By the way, Stan Smith is a 44-year-old icon product, but we're managing the life cycle so well. We take it out of the market, we bring it back. We take it out, we bring it back. We can pump up our numbers by almost 2 million pairs when we do that on an annual basis. This year, it's all about the Superstar. Again, we reduced, raised price, made it premium, now we brought it back. You may have seen this week, we released 50 colors by Pharrell.
Again, collaborating with one of the biggest production artists out there to bring back an iconic Classic. We don't just rest on our icons. We don't just rest on our laurels. We also are constantly defining new territory with our contemporary products. The ZX Flux is the fastest-growing product in the industry, bar none. The ZX Flux. Ask your retailers, ask your contacts in the industry. It's taking the world by storm, and we're not nearly where we can be with that silhouette. Tubular is a product we just launched, and we're bringing it out slowly just to get it rolling out there, but we're going to commit to these four silhouettes. In Originals, we plan to grow our business already at a healthy number by 50% in the next five years.
By 2020, we'll look to grow Originals by another 50% than it is because we have leadership and we have growth. Let's talk about running. Running is our biggest opportunity. It is the fastest-growing sport. It is the testing ground for new innovations. We've had double-digit growth here for four consecutive years because we have the best footwear in the industry, bar none. We have momentum, and clearly, it is time to strike. How do we do that? Well, we go after the female athlete. We go after this creator. She has the greatest opportunity because she buys, quite honestly, 80% of all running product. They make up 55% of all runners. She's buying a lot of us guys' product and her kids' product. We do that with the best product in the world. We have Boost. Boost is a game changer in the industry.
It is unrivaled success. We've won 34 global races. Berlin and Tokyo marathons, not only do we have the winners, but the interesting to me is we have the guys like me that run a somewhere around four-hour marathon. I'm honestly not a good runner. We have more and more market share there. If we do a shoe count of four hours and under at Tokyo or Berlin Marathon, we're finding that we're getting upwards of 30% market share on shoes. Our number one competitor has somewhere in the neighborhood of 10%. That's the difference that happens because it's starting to happen already. Boost is converting already just in a few short years to getting on runners' feet that's now going to trickle down into the high street. We, of course, have the world marathon record that was set in Berlin.
We were along for the ride, but Kipchoge set that with 202:57. We've just upped our market share in running alone in Germany in the last 12 months by four points. Good things are happening here. Of course, we have tons of Runner's World awards. You can look those up on your own. The other thing that's interesting is we've gone from zero to seven million pairs in Boost in two years. I stood before you, I think a year and a half, two years ago, and talked to you about Boost, introduced it. We did the bouncy balls. It was pretty cool. It gives us responsiveness, energy like nothing else. Seven million pairs we're doing now in two years. We see this as really untapped potential to really drive forward our running growth.
It's not enough just to be in Boost because we know the price points are higher than we like. We will build clear winning franchises around Boost, but that's primarily going to be at the 120 and up. We have to come in underneath that with a new innovation, with a new technology. I'd like to introduce to you today a thing called Bounce. Bounce is a takedown Boost technology that's an EVA compound that's going to hit those price points from 80-120. We will have clear Bounce innovations, clear Bounce franchises built around those price points. We aim to double our running business in the next five years. That's how aggressive we are here as we want to really get some growth going.
The last focus here I'd like to within the categories is really not a category, we call it a gender. Women. It's a good business for us right now, but we're not where we need to be. Again, one of our reflection points. She's the chief purchasing officer in the household. As I said earlier with running, she has 80% of all athletic apparel purchases. Obviously 100% for herself, 67% for men, and 91% for kids. We've got to be talking to her stronger than we currently are. We've got to be getting more of her heart and mind than we had before. She's active in all sports. She dominates social media. We look at her primarily in two areas. We look at her as a vertical athlete, and we look at her as a versatile athlete. The vertical athlete is still when she's playing competitive sports.
She still is in her prime. She's on the team. She's wearing a uniform. She's got a coaching program. She's being trained up. She has a schedule, and she clearly has defined wins and losses. The versatile athlete uses sport to make a difference in her own life. She defines wins and losses. She's typically doing four or five, six different sports during a week, whether it's with friends or not. If you're living in a city, which most of you guys come from, I believe Frankfurt or London or even New York, you know what I'm talking about. It's the age of the boutique gym. It's the age of the running clubs or the training clubs outside in the parks, having some fun in the park runs. She defines her own world.
It's important from a product standpoint that we look at her as different, but the same. Different, of course, because the team girl, the vertical girl, she wants compression products. She wants uniforms. She needs functional product for that specific sport. The versatile woman, a little bit older, she's looking more for a product that's a little bit more cross-sport. Where they come together is that circle in the middle. Where they come together is these must-have key items. The bra, the tee, the tank, the tight, the running shoe. Those are five things we can focus relentlessly on. We're going to aim to be the best the business and the industry's ever known in those five items. We'll relentlessly focus as a brand on those five key items. Then we can bring to bear our sports style offering against that.
We've got collection of designers and collaborations that the industry can only be envious of if we put them to this. We put a Stella McCartney against this bra or this tank or this tee or this running shoe. It gets really aggressive and really exciting really fast. Because of that, because we want to have a holistic view for women, we're looking at having a horizontal women's team that works across categories. Because I'm a firm believer what gets measured, gets done. As we look at that, we need to make sure we have a team that's measuring and planning and working with the business units to set direction for creative, ranging, merchandising, and marketing for all adidas women's. We're looking to partner with people that can show us the way that have been there before as well.
We'll bring all this women's activity together into what we want to talk about as a women's boutique, both a digital boutique and both a four-wall brick-and-mortar boutique, but someplace that caters to her needs. It won't just be a vertical store. We want to bring in other brands. We want to bring in a collection of things that are important to her. Of course, not competitors, but other brands that are important to her, whether it be or whatever. The next focus here I'd like to talk about in the last area is our focused marketing. We need to focus our funds to have the biggest effect on the creator and our franchises. That means we need to make hard choices. We need to say goodbye to some things while committing to others.
A lot of you guys have read the last few weeks about our decision not to extend with the NBA. It's not an easy decision any of us took. We have to make some of these decisions to make sure we can put money where we really want to put it and to drive our franchises forward, to drive our strategy forward. Going forward, we have four different areas we want to invest in. The first is we want to relentlessly communicate a reason to believe in our brand. We have to let the world know that we're the best sports brand in the world. The videos I showed earlier today give you a taste of what those things are to come. Imagine the Calling All Creators video you saw on TV. That's what we want people to feel in the industry.
That's how we want them to see us, that we're the world's best sports brand with a clear point of view of being the creator. Second, we have to communicate our franchises I talked to you about. We have to put more money against fewer things. We need to do less. We need to mean more by doing less. Give people a reason to buy that Boost silhouette, that ZX Flux, that new football Ace shoe. Third priority, we need to put hands on feet. We got to win the locker room. Locker room is where loyalty is built and earned. If we know anything, we know that loyalty cannot be bought. We know it has to be earned, right? We know people need to get in there and fight for it. You have to build it from the ground up.
We have to go back to the locker room and really redouble our efforts there. The fourth area, I'll talk to you about it a little bit later, is really engaging and building our community of loyalists and getting those built up like never before. Summary slide, just to give you guys a chance to catch your breath. I'm going to have a glass of water. Okay. Focus. Everything comes from sport. Clear. Create for the creator. We're going after a very specific consumer archetype. We're focused on finding those creators in six cities. We're building around footwear franchises, which means we got to do less, right? We have clear roles for each of our categories. We're targeting women like never before, knowing that we've got some ground to catch up. We're focusing our marketing spend differently than we have in the past.
Let's talk about the agenda again and what we have to do with the two, what I feel are game-changing new opportunities in open source and speed. Okay. How did we get to open source? Many of you think, okay, open source. Open source by definition is opening up your source code. It has roots in the software engineering world. I get it. We're co-opting it. We're marketers. We want to bring it in and kind of own this for ourselves. Simply put, open source means you're collaborating with someone. Open source means you're allowing people to come in and create with you. That's how we're looking through the spectrum of what open source is. We learned a lot about open source in digital sports, because digital sports was something we really have worked on for the last few years.
I want to talk about and introduce some of the things we've been doing in digital sports and tell you how it led us to doing a more aggressive open-source strategy. Digital sports, we entered in 2008. Why did we do it? We did it to push the boundaries of sport and innovation. It was a proof point, really a proof point about who we are as a brand to help all athletes be better. We made acquisitions. Why did we make acquisitions? We made acquisitions for two reasons. One, to gain expertise. Two, to build an IP portfolio. An IP portfolio that we're growing rigorously day in and day out, and we're also aggressively protecting. There's been a lot of noise in the industry about one of our competitors buying up companies. Good for them.
We're in court with them right now protecting our IP as we feel they're stepping on our IP portfolio in the wearables area. We entered into wearables, apps, and services, and our combined services generated, just last year alone, 2.5 trillion data points. That's a lot of data points, and I'm sure none of you in this room knew we were doing that. That means we had measurements of athletes' speed, distance, whatever, and different time and run. The quality of data is unmatched, and we have many different companies coming to us for the data that we possess on athlete movement. We have the best teams in the world training in our wearables with the miCoach Elite Team System, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, the world champion DFB, and the runners-up, Argentina.
They all train with the Elite Team System to get ready for the World Cup, and their on-field performance is unrivaled. Our miCoach users have compiled 5 million marathons, 3,000 years of workout time, and they've burned 60 million hamburgers. What did we learn here? What did we find out here when we talk about the wearables area? We learned a lot, we iterated a lot, and we discovered it's virtually impossible to go it alone. This space is way too technical and moving way too fast to do things by ourselves. We had to find partners to go forward with. In this space alone, we're partnering with the best of the best, Exos and MilanLab, for example. As we took that forward, we took this open source model, we said, "This isn't just good enough for digital sports.
This collaborative behavior partnership, this open sourceness, if you will, should be a governing behavior for the brand, how we create and innovate across the entire brand. We believe, and we've always believed this, again, it's true to who we are, we're better when we do it together. A little sidebar is today's consumers expect it. They expect to get involved. They expect to participate and be able to co-create with brands. Look at some of the most successful brands out there that are building up in the new generation. Look at GoPro. You guys study this industry. You guys know this industry. I think it's about 100% user-generated content. Red Bull, Airbnb, Uber, all these things, they're all in their own way user-generated content. That's today's model. Our industry hasn't been there. It's going there now. It's going there with us.
Let me talk to you about four areas that we're going to open up our brand to invite creators in to join us in shaping the future of our brand, but more importantly, the future of our industry, as we are the first open source sports brand. The creator collaborations. We're going to partner with athletes, artists, musicians, designers, turning over the keys of our brand DNA to unleash their creativity. We're already doing this in many places. We want to 10X it now. We want to accelerate these things. You've heard about the Kanye lines. We're working with Alexander Taylor. Damian Lillard is posting all the time and wearing shoes that are now created for him by his users, by his consumers on Instagram, by his followers. These are all things that already happen. Now we just want to accelerate that.
We want to open things up and lower the walls. What does it mean to unleash them? What does it mean to give them unrivaled access? Well, we give them access to our archives, our prototyping studios, our tech and material labs, our factories. Herbert said it earlier. Kanye said it was like giving him oxygen by showing him all the things. He comes here and works till 3:00 A.M. in the atelier right across the hall here because he's a creator. He wants to be part of it. It's not like made something for him. We weren't always comfortable with where he was going, but we let him create. We gave him the freedom to do that, and we partner with him. Just to give you some numbers, our archives alone have 85,000 items in them.
When you're the original sports brand, when you've been around for half a century, you've got a lot of stuff, and you keep it, and you refer to it, and it helps you influence the future. We have 90 craftsmen sitting in this building alone, prototyping, building, creating, shaping, doing. We have 11,000 materials in our tech and material labs, 850 discrete technologies. Yes, we've got 45 different factories around the world on three different continents, all with specific expertise. You unleash creative minds into that kind of open source, and there's a lot of magic that can happen, a lot of magic. We're not just going to go for the names that are known out there. We're going to look for new names, new followers. We're going to start to set up farms.
We call them creator farms because we don't just want to be passive and answer the phone when these guys call us. We want to go out there and find the next, find the new. We'll actively go out and connect with creators in their own environment, inviting them to shape the future with us. These farms will focus where the creators are in the Key Cities. Again, I can't say it enough. The Key Cities are places that we're going into in many different fronts. Our first one's going to be in Brooklyn, and you've heard a lot about it because America's important. Keep saying it, especially the influence in this industry. We'll make sure we make that our first and our best and our biggest so we get those insights coming from the leading place in America into this engineering powerhouse. The second area is community.
What do I mean when I say community? I kind of mean consumers. What kind of consumers are we talking about? We're talking about athletes. We're talking about opinion leaders. We're talking about bloggers. We're talking about people with followers out there. Funny story that, working with Kanye, I had no idea how big Kim Kardashian's follower network is until I really started to follow. 15 million people on Instagram are following her. Why? She's part of a community, but she has her own media channel that we've tapped into to launch some things. It's an amazing thing when you start to add those things, those pieces up. These athletes, opinion leaders, bloggers, they co-create with us. Right now, it's primarily messaging, but in the future, it could be product.
With the technologies that are coming from a digitization standpoint, we could start to co-create product with them remotely. From a consumer standpoint, that gets pretty exciting. One way we're doing this is through our newsrooms. Again, places that are already set up, again, across the world in different key cities that are influencing. Eight locations are already in motion right now as I speak in key cities, inviting, connecting, deepening, and building local communities of brand advocates because we know when we have brand advocates, it leads to purchase intent. It leads to market share. All this is very methodical, and we measure each one of those things. We measure how we're converting people down the chain of advocacy down into promoters.
We piloted this newsroom idea because these are all proof points. I don't want you to say I'm standing up here presenting a strategy of hope. It's a strategy of action. Right now, we have the Rio World Cup example, which was a great example. It was our first one. We put it in Rio. We had the clear ambition to own the World Cup and be the most talked about brand, and we did it by far. We're 22, 23, 24 percentage points higher than our nearest competitor as far as conversations around the World Cup. It's one of the reasons we sold the most. We did it by doing fun things, too. Not only did we have a newsroom, but we gave voice to the Brazuca. We also let consumers in Brazil name the Brazuca.
It was a pretty cool thing, and there's 550,000 consumer interactions just with Brazuca. By doing cool little voices to an inanimate object, you can have a lot of fun with it, too, and it became a kind of a rallying cry. We don't just have fixed newsrooms. We also do pop-up newsrooms. We recently launched in New York our Ultraboost, the best running shoe ever made. We turned content creation over to the community. We opened up access to our technical expertise, our product expertise, our brand leadership, and we then built studios for opinion leaders to use. It wasn't your normal product launch. We set up a studio. We had the stylist. We had makeup people so people could style themselves and stand out there and own the content and shoot it out for them. They had all the answers they wanted.
They owned and controlled the message. We didn't. You have to be confident to do that, but you also know when they come in to help you do that, you deepen the relationship with them. Today, our community across these newsrooms is about 135 million. They've chosen us. They're advocates for us. They share us. They like us. They talk to us. Our job is to draw them in deeper. We have to draw them in deeper so that they not only advocate for us, they generate value for us. Again, getting them down that channel, getting into the promoters, getting into the purchase intents. Our goal going forward is to really turn over more to them. In the next two years, I want to have 30% of our content to be created by consumers.
If we can do that, we can really start to channel this community into not just having a deeper relationship with us, but to really shaping the future with us and going to bigger numbers. Not only do we want to do 30%, we want to grow our number from 135, a competitive number, to 250, a leadership number. That's where we really start to get in. It becomes a media channel in its own right. I talked about the power of Kim with 15 million followers. What does 250 million followers look like, and what can we do with that to shape and drive the conversation in our industry and for our brand? Okay, fourth area. Partners. Partner collaborators. Here's where we realized that we could never be as successful as we are without the expertise of the best partners in the business.
No one knows sports as well as we do, no one. No one knows the athlete as well as we do. That's clear. We don't always have all the answers. To give her, to give the female athlete, the solutions she needs, we have to be confident enough to ask her for help. Ask her. To ask for help. The world is too technical, it's too advanced, and it's way too specialized to be arrogant enough to believe we have all the answers. We got to open ourselves up and be confident enough to say, "Hey, can you help me solve this? This is something I'd like to partner up on." These are more professional partners. Exos, the world leader in sports science and athlete training. They help us understand movement of athletes, the protocols, the products we build, and the elite team systems I spoke of earlier.
Red Bull, they're the world leaders in consumer experiences. This is not a comprehensive list, just an example list. In consumer experiences, we worked with them on events and new media channels, new media delivery. Google, we actually opened up our wearables to their developer network to really work on better solutions for our wearables. It's pretty cool. BASF, we've talked about Boost before, but utilizing our expertise with their chemical expertise to make the best footwear technology in the industry. This one in the end is not new, it's just really cool, and you guys may not have heard about it. The German government itself is investing like crazy into automated solutions to create the future of manufacturing. We're at the forefront of that with them.
It's a really cool partnership, but again, it goes back to the point of German engineering applied with American insights can be a powerful weapon. The next partnership I'd like to tell you about, I'm excited about, as it is a topic close to my heart, is Parley. Parley is a foundation whose goal is to take plastic out of the oceans. We've all read about it, and we all bemoan it with our families or friends about the famous plastic island somewhere floating north of Hawaii that's bigger than Alaska, so they say. We see the films, and it all makes us really sad. Here's a company that we're going to partner with to do something about that and then to turn it into performance apparel. It's not a philanthropic effort. It's an effort to put us, again, to maintain our leadership within the sustainability area.
It's a huge opportunity not just to make a difference, but to, again, further that leadership position that Herbert talked about earlier. Greenpeace is even our friends now. How do we take that and go further? It also gives us a weapon of considerable emotion to then start to market our sustainability leadership. Again, this means something to those 250 million we're going to have, and we want to talk to them about that and let them share and let them help us. Parley is a very exciting area for me. The fourth area of open source is customers. This is all about speed, which is the second game-changing choice we talked about. Cities, open source, and now speed. Speed in every sport wins. It's that simple.
It is the difference maker in every game, we are partnering with some of our key customers to revolutionize the current model of our industry. I'd like to introduce Claire Midwood, our general manager of style and our agent of speed, to the stage to talk to you about our speed initiative.
Good morning, everybody. We're the first fast sports company in the industry, as Herbert has already mentioned. In 2013, we told you we were going to use Neo to learn how to change the game. Through new business models and new speed capabilities, we have developed a business that in 2014 was more than EUR 850 million in net sales. What have we been doing? We offer permanent freshness with a focus on speed and value for the consumer. Through consumer interactions, trend monitoring, competitor analysis, sell in and sell out data, we understand the consumer needs and are flexible in capturing trends and identifying additional business opportunities. This results in monthly range creation and fresh drops for apparel and footwear on a weekly basis. Today, 25% of our business is created on these shorter lead time programs.
We offer permanent visual merchandising and consumer activation, considering consumer feedback and high street mainstream trends. Speed for us is really twofold. All-over printed T-shirts from four to six weeks from design to shelf, reacting to consumer and market needs. The real game changer here is that we have the fastest footwear creation to shelf within the industry. New products in 45 days in footwear from brief to shelf. In fact, 50% of our footwear business is built on lead times of just 45 days. We operate a vertical business model through our end-to-end responsibility from creation to store, clear roles and responsibilities, and experts empowered to make decisions. Shorter and leaner processes, we continue to push boundaries.
We continuously innovate at retail to test on behalf of the brand, such as RFID, which provides us with a 99% inventory accuracy in-store and on-floor availability, consumer Wi-Fi, NPS data, which I'll talk to you about in a moment, and iBeacons. We have learnt a lot in Neo to take back into the brand. Our model is built on consumer centricity. Net Promoter Score, as I mentioned earlier, measures consumer loyalty, has been established by Neo. We've learnt, we've understood, and we've transferred it back into the brand. We listen to our consumer, taking their voice into consideration to help shape our decisions to impact the consumer experience and the retail environment. We permanently socialize with our consumer. Through social platforms, we understand the product relevance, we steer sales, and we impact future collections.
Our social engagement today versus the vertical high street retailers is six times higher than that, for example, of H&M. Neo collaboration is key. A lot of our successes are down to the fact we are fully open sourced. In 2014, we curated another Neo runway in New York, which was built entirely on consumer inputs on social platforms. We captured over 22,000 consumers contributing on social platforms. The runway show was entirely open sourced. The consumers decided the makeup, the set design, the music, the hair, the outfits that were worn in the show. It was fully open sourced. All this generated, of course, a tremendous brand exposure for our global teen audience. We won awards for this because it was an industry first. We are the change enabler for the brand, always pushing boundaries on process, on speed to market, service, and operational models.
Knowing the consumer needs and wants is not enough. We must be able to react and respond. Therefore, we have established two critical business models that enable us to offer our consumers new collections that are created in season based on trends and market data, and planned responsiveness programs that enable us to react and recreate bestsellers reacting to sellout data via our own retail channels. Through these business models, we generate three times a higher rate of sale than that of our longer lead time programs. Through our own retail findings and new ways of working, we excited our wholesale partners so much, of course, they wanted in. We took these business models to key accounts such as Deichmann, Sports Direct International, and Famous Footwear in America, offering read and react services and in-season creation.
In 2014, we generated over EUR 170 million in net sales using these business models. Our partners love the fact they can better manage their open-to-buy, they can take less risk on newer items, drive more sales out of their best lines, and be flexible to react in season to real-time sales data. Our pilot has been our proof point. We now are ready to take this to the wider group. We've already, for example, replicated the Neo footwear setup in Reebok. In 2014, Originals moved closer to the market and closer to the consumer, leveraging speed capabilities and delivering almost EUR 20 million in net sales on speed programs. Through apparel injection pack programs, we offered own retail and wholesale freshness at retail to generate an additional EUR 15 million. We captured and commercialized trends. We delivered ongoing freshness for the consumer.
Through in-season creation programs in footwear, in particular the ZX Flux, which Eric already has mentioned, we generated a further EUR 5 million. What's important here is not only the fact of speed, it's the combination of speed and enabling the consumer to be the creator of their own shoe. We invited consumers to create their own ZX Flux using the ZX Flux Photo app. We reached over 650 million downloads. Each one of those downloads takes five minutes, so that's the consumer interacting with the brand for five minutes each time they use the app. Overall, the great thing, these initiatives delivered more than 70% full price sell-through. Now we're ready to unleash speed to the rest of the group. What's important here is no one else in the sports industry can do what we do.
We are ready to scale up the existing vertical capabilities and to leverage them across categories to turn the group into the first fast sports company in the industry. Through speed, we will excite our consumers with concepts that are fresh and desirable, available where they want them, when they want them, with an unrivaled brand experience. We are involving them in a unique brand experience. Their passion for the brand will be further ignited. To deliver speed, we have built on four game-changing capabilities. We will create brand-driven and space-led concepts. In 2015, we will map space and deliver assortments tailored to available shelf space of our key concepts in 900 of our most important concept stores worldwide. This process, we will further extend in future seasons. We will also strive to be insights driven in everything we do, from product design to sales.
Being insights driven and using consumer insights and analytics, we can already read data, of course, from our own retail stores to enable us to react at speed and determine what we create and when we create it. In 2015, we're focusing on capturing data from 27 of our most influential wholesale accounts and franchise partners to further complement the data available. A digital process revolution will enable speed. As Herbert already mentioned earlier, everyone is digitalizing. However, we're taking it one step further. Our end-to-end process will be digitalized to improve flexibility, speed of design, development, and our sellout and sell-in processes. Excuse me. While others are digitalizing in store, we are taking digitalization to a whole new level. We have developed digital capabilities in design, in creation, sampling, and in 3D and in-store execution. More than 35,000 articles a year are already sampled in 3D.
We will further accelerate innovative solutions in modular design, integrated planning, purchasing and inventory management, material management and production, as well as agile distribution. Offering maximum agility and fulfillment will help us win the game. What's our goal? It's to offer 50% of all ranges on speed programs and increase full price sell-through by 20% across the brand on these speed programs. We want to go one step further with speed and envision the future of manufacturing. We're investing as a brand, of course, in many different areas. Right now, we are piloting new areas of manufacturing. One fully automated cell, which you can see in this area, the Speedfactory. This will allow simplified manufacturing of apparel and footwear and product innovation through new manufacturing technology. In 2016, we will pilot running footwear using patch placement technology, and in 2017, we will further add football and basketball.
In 2018, we aim for our first modular production. We are combining two key strengths here with the Speedfactory. German engineering, as Eric has already mentioned, combined with global consumer understanding. We are supported by the German government. We're using high-end technology, knitting machines from Stoll, robotic technology from Manz, which you can see over to the left here, and foam engineering from Kurz. This is the start of our journey. Our 2020 vision is to have a fully automated and scalable manufacturing with independent cells wherever we want and wherever the consumer desires it. I've taken you a few through. Oh, excuse me. I've taken you through a few things. Got it.
I've taken you through here and how we've built new business models, how we've opened up the brand to the consumer, and how we're taking planned responsiveness and in-season creation to the wider group, and of course, the future of manufacturing. What's the size of the prize? Our share of volume sold at full price will increase because speed articles are fresher and more desirable for our consumer, thus more full price sales. The risk of overbuying will be reduced due to the shift of volume from pre-season buy to in-season buy. In-season creation and planned responsiveness programs will enable us to have the right products at the right time. Overall, our inventory term will increase due to a higher rate of sale, less risk, and lower working capital involved.
Average markdowns on articles sold will decrease because speed articles better respond to consumer desires who therefore are willing to buy at a smaller discount. Speed offers significant potential for adidas to increase operational performance and economic value. To conclude, before I hand over back to Eric, we are, as we've already told you, the creators. We're changing the industry. No one in the industry can do what we do. adidas has revolutionized the world of sport and style time and time again. By bringing speed to sport and collaborating with our consumer, we will ignite our consumer and continue to shape our industry. Thank you, and enjoy your day.
Thank you, Claire. I think you now have got the idea that we have some game-changing opportunities with clear focus. Plans are great, but it doesn't matter. All the strategy in the world doesn't matter until you execute, until it shows up in front of the consumer. These are the things that we're going to put on everybody's desk. These are the things we're going to put on every wall. These are the things we're going to hold ourselves accountable for and break down into 90-day executable plans. Brand desire. How are we creating for the creators? We need to continue to do that.
We've started it already. We've got work in the marketplace today, but it needs to get better, and we need to reshape it. By the way, we've just hired a new world-class agency to help us do that when it comes to 72andSunny. World-class coming out of L.A. Focus. We're going to mean more by doing less. I went through about 15 or 20 slides of all the things we're going to do, and by association, the things we're not going to do. Cities. We're going to focus on where the creators create. We're going to own the cities to own the markets, to let that ripple out and carry the message for us. We're going to open source our brand more than we've ever done, or anyone's ever done in our industry before. We're going to take down the walls, build the bridges, and invite people in.
As Claire just said, we're going to be the first fast sports company. Speedfactory's been an unbelievable pilot model for us. We've learned tremendous things as we set out to do it five years ago. Now we can take that, as Claire said, to the rest of the brand. We're not just stopping there, we're now automating to take the next step in the future as well. Speed wins. Those are the one, two, three, four, five points that we're going to execute against. It's a unique plan, and I firmly believe it's a winning plan. Now to turn our attention to the second iconic brand we have, to Reebok. I said there was two great brands in our portfolio. I should have probably said three, but I'm only here to represent the two. TaylorMade comes later.
We talk about Reebok, we talk about all the things they've been through and all the resetting we've done. That work is underway. That work is done. We have incredible business opportunity with this brand. Not only is it one of the most iconic brands in the industry, it is on the rise. To tell you exactly what we're going to do next, I'd like to introduce the President of Reebok, Matt O'Toole.
Good job, buddy.
Good luck, buddy.
Thanks, man. All right, good morning, everyone. You guys have been very, very attentive for the last 2 hours. I have an idea. Would everyone just stand up? We're going to stretch a little bit for 30 seconds, being a fitness brand, so please go ahead and stand up. You can do it. You're going to feel better after you do it, I promise. There you go. Just kind of move around, get those limbs There we go. We definitely have a stretcher in the back there. This is scientifically proven to make your brain work better, just that little bit of movement that you're doing right now. You can go ahead and sit back down right now, but it's a way to make sure that we're all ready for what really is the second and most exciting part of our fitness story.
As Eric mentioned, Reebok is a unique opportunity for the adidas Group. We have a unique point of view as a brand, but we're fortunate enough to sit on a platform that allows us to move quickly and efficiently and powerfully inside the global sports community. As Eric also mentioned, we have a formula as a group that will apply to both brands. I'm going to take you through that. Starting with where we are today, there's really three important messages that I have for you. These three things are really simple. The first is we have a clear and powerful strategy for the Reebok brand. It's not changing. What you'll hear about today is what you've heard about before and what you're going to hear about in the future.
The second point I want to make is today, not enough consumers around the world have been exposed to this point of view. The good news is when they are exposed to it, when we let the consumer see what Reebok is all about and the deep meaning of our brand, we win them over to our brand. This brings me to the third and most important point of the next five years for Reebok. It's all about execution. I'm going to show you a simple strategy that allows us to execute and make this great brand even bigger and more powerful in the marketplace. That's my whole presentation, now I'm going to dive in and give you a little bit more. You heard Herbert earlier talk about the last five years, and that Reebok has certainly been a challenge in the context of those five years.
We haven't moved as quickly as we would've liked to. We haven't made as much progress in markets like America. We've had some key concepts that have been meteors through the night sky and really haven't held and been resilient. Most importantly, we probably took a little too long really clarifying the specific role of the Reebok brand inside the adidas Group portfolio. That work's been done. As you heard earlier from Herbert and Eric, we're starting to build momentum. That momentum is really around a simple idea, that Reebok will be the absolute best fitness brand in the world. We've done this by going back to our roots, taking a tour around the old neighborhood, if you will, where we started as a fitness brand, as a brand that was about movement.
At the time, we were a brand that was giving women permission to work out, to sweat, to have muscles, at a time where this wasn't the thing to do for women. Today, we're recognizing a whole new generation of people who are looking at fitness in an entirely different way. To do that, to become the fitness brand, we had to make some big changes. The good news is a lot of those changes have taken place already in this journey where we really have stepped on the accelerator and started to do things like massively change the talent profile at the Reebok brand, where we've brought in top designers and engineers and people from the digital community to really help us speak directly to our new consumer. We've overhauled entirely our product line.
We've gotten rid of a lot of the traditional sports products that you're familiar with from Reebok and replaced them with cutting-edge and new fitness products. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that. We've done it with new suppliers and new technologies. From a relationships point of view, we've taken the old model and really turned it on its head. We've got unconventional partnerships now with the leading fitness suppliers around the world. We're really developing deep relationships with instructors, most importantly, we're looking at the way we market in an entirely new way. We don't have the big platform. There's no World Cup of fitness. What we do have is a very passionate consumer who wants to be connected to us 24/7.
The results of the work that I've just told you about have been also pretty astonishing and something that I'm particularly proud of. That over the last several years, we've really changed the entire profile of the Reebok business. We've replaced almost EUR 550 million of traditional sport business with the sport of fitness, with fitness business. This fitness business is much more healthy for us, it's much more repeatable for us, and ultimately, it's much more profitable for us. We're on a journey. We're going much faster, we're accelerating, and the best is ahead of us. I think if you look at these numbers, and we'll talk a little bit more about Reebok's ambition for the next five years, they're in the context of a EUR 76 billion fitness industry. This is an industry that's growing.
One in four consumers in the developed world recognize themselves as a fitness person today. We see 5,000 new gyms opening up every year. It's a big opportunity, and you can do the math, if we had a 5% market share or a 10% market share, what the opportunity is for Reebok and the adidas Group. Let's get started. Eric showed you this simple formula, and we're going to follow this as well for Reebok. It's first all about focus, and when I talk about focus, I'm going to tell you about our brand point of view. I'm going to tell you about our consumer, and ultimately, I'm going to tell you about the categories and products that we make. Then we'll get into these key choices that really help us leverage and catapult our brand into the consumer's mindset. Let's start with fitness.
Reebok's version of fitness is not the fitness maybe that runs through your mind when you see rows of treadmills and ellipticals and people with their headphones on. No, that's not our fitness. Our fitness is physical, it's gritty. It's got a real addictive feeling to it. It's got an attitude. It's definitely not the fitness that's worn on your wrist and uploaded to a website. It's the kind of fitness where you look each other in the eye and you hold each other accountable and ultimately, you are pushed beyond your limits. We call it the sport of fitness, and it really connects to our purpose.
Our purpose as a brand and a business is simple, that we want to inspire people everywhere to be their absolute best, and that we believe through living a physical life, living an aggressive, active life, that you can be your absolute best mentally, and socially as well. There's a tremendous amount of research to support that as well. Then our mission, our role in all this, is to produce the absolute best product for our sport, the sport of fitness and our fitness athletes everywhere. We've built this idea on four simple beliefs that are really the beliefs of our entire Reebok organization around the world. That first, we have to honor the body we were given. We got one vessel to travel through this experience in. The second is the gym is everywhere.
The gym is our opportunity to really express our physical life wherever we are. The third is the secret sauce of Reebok, we believe, and that is we believe in a very community-oriented, a tribal version of fitness that keeps people coming back and ultimately, potential is limitless. That if we can accomplish things in our physical life, this allows us to accomplish things in the rest of our life as well. With that, we launched our first global brand campaign for Reebok in many, many years, and it really tells the story of our brand. Take a look.
Are we weirdos? Can we be obsessive, fanatical, extreme? Okay, maybe just a little. Maybe you have to be crazy if you want to spend every day beaten and muddy and sore. For what? Why do we do it? We're not out here flipping tires to be better tire flippers. We're doing it to be better, period. Better leaders. Better parents. Better, stronger, more determined humans, capable of anything. To honor our bodies and sharpen our minds. To Be More Human.
All right. I'm really proud of that, and it's been really, really well-received by our consumers around the world. We kicked this off on Super Bowl Sunday in the United States. We have today over 1 billion impressions for this particular campaign. Ultimately, it speaks to the heart of our consumer, why they do fitness, and you can see from some of the tweets and posts up here that this is really an authentic expression of what motivates them. It's not about a six-pack abs. It's about really being the best version of themselves. What I'd like to do is introduce you to this consumer and welcome the Fit Generation. This is Reebok's consumer, and they are a different fitness consumer than maybe you've typically understood or experienced.
I know some of you, I've actually had the opportunity to do CrossFit and some other fitness activities with, so I know you know this consumer. Who they are is they're typically a post-university student, guy or girl, who is really looking at their life in three particular areas. They've got their new career, they've got their friends and family, and then they have the expression of their active and physical life. They're working out four or more times a week, and I think the really interesting thing is they're doing three or more different activities every week. They might go Monday morning for a CrossFit workout. On Wednesday, it might be SoulCycle for a spinning class, and on the weekend it might be a run with a group of friends through Central Park. This is our consumer.
They're mixing it up. A lot of different fitness activities are really how they're experiencing their active and fitness life. Certainly, most importantly, they're dual gendered. Right down the middle, 50/50 men and women, the Fit Generation. From an opportunity point of view, they represent today 20% of the active population, and they represent about a third of all purchases in the fitness category, which is about 40% more than the average consumer. This research that has produced these numbers has been done across the globe now. This isn't just an American thing. We're talking about Europeans, we're talking about Latin America, we're talking about emerging markets. This Fit Gen consumer who's really looking at fitness as a definition of who they are is becoming a very important and a big opportunity for the Reebok brand.
If we do go back to that broader group of consumers, the 850 million who exercise and consider themselves part of the active population, we also think that our focus on the Fit Generation. Let me see if I can get this to click, guys. Our focus on the Fit Generation will provide a halo effect, and we're seeing this in the research after we've run our Be More Human campaign, that our engagement scores and our communication are as high with the active population as they are with the Fit Gen. While we're speaking authentically to the heart of our Fit Gen consumer, it's resonating with the broader active population. Our Fit Gen consumer also has influencers, and that's the 700,000 coaches and instructors and trainers around the world. We're working as a brand to aggregate them and build their relationship with the Reebok brand.
One of the really exciting statistics since we started this just a few years ago is that the incidents of our consumers saying they were influenced to purchase our product by an instructor or a trainer has doubled, and we're seeing that continue to rise month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter. That's our consumer. Let's talk about the gear. Our job, our mission as a brand is to create the best gear for the sport of fitness. To do that, there's probably no group that's done more CrossFit WODs, done more burpees, rope climbs, waded through more mud pits, and danced on more studio dance floors than the Reebok team. We've done that because we want to understand what our consumer understands and be able to build the best product for them.
One great example is this shoe we call the Nano, which was built for the CrossFit activity. We built this shoe in conjunction with our CrossFit athletes. We listened. We're on our fifth iteration of the shoe. Our Nano 4.0 last year sold over a million pair, and we expect this to continue to grow season after season. It's a EUR 130 fitness shoe that really is pioneering a whole new category for us and a big opportunity. The bigger idea behind this best gear concept is a simple one. That Reebok, by understanding our consumer better, by specializing in these fitness activities, can really redefine the uniform of fitness. We've seen the forerunners of what fitness is with the black legging.
What's happening today is our consumer is replacing their knit workout shorts with a board short that we're defining and going forward with, as you can see on some of the mannequins up here. This consumer's redefining the way they even wear socks, from Peds to knee socks, and going from a traditional running shoe to a CrossFit Nano like the shoe I told you about before. We're totally reimagining what our expression of the fitness uniform is and what our consumer wants to wear. We're doing that through 3 categories that each represent about a third of our overall business. Before, we had 7 different business units as a brand. We've narrowed that down to 3. Eric talked before about reducing the number of models.
We've already at Reebok reduced our number of models by 25%, and we'll do that again in the next 2 years. We're doing that by really getting focused on the most important things that our FitGen consumer does, which is they run, they train, and they live. Let's start with training. We're looking at training like a specialist. We have our CrossFit and functional fitness activities, which is our fastest-growing part of our training business and contributed to the fact that we've grown double digit over the last 3 years in training, which is primarily an apparel business. Dance, yoga, spin. In 2015, this July, we're going to introduce one of the most exciting opportunities for us, not only for our brand expression, but from a commercial opportunity, and that's combat training.
There's 35 million FitGen consumers around the world who identify combat training as their primary way of working out, and this number is the fastest-growing single segment of the fitness industry. This July, in conjunction with our new partner, the UFC, which has 25 million fans around the world, we'll launch a brand-new expression of what combat training is for her and for him, and then the UFC athletes in the octagon will be wearing this expression. We're really excited to share it with you soon. Unfortunately, the official unveiling is in July, and you'll see some of the top UFC fighters bring this to life. It's a way that Reebok can really start to get a platform for this new look and expression of what combat training can be.
I think easily this is a EUR 100-plus opportunity for Reebok, on top of what already is a fast-growing training business. That brings us to our second category, which is running. We look at running the same way we look at training. How does our consumer run? What they do is they have speed workouts, they've got long-distance workouts, they have terrain workouts, which is obstacle course races and other, and then they're out on the trail. We're building our running category to really support that with some key platforms that'll go across those categories and really start to accentuate our drive towards technology as an advancement of their running experience. The biggest single key platform in the future will be Pump.
Pump is an iconic technology from the Reebok brand, one of the most iconic technologies in our industry. We're bringing it back in a totally reimagined way. All right. That's our new ZPump Fusion shoe. As I mentioned before, Pump is not only have been a successful technology for Reebok, being the number one technology in terms of product sold for Reebok ever, but it's one of the top iconic technologies in our industry. What's really cool is we've totally reimagined the role of Pump in the shoe. Before, if we go back in the past, we were putting the Pump into a traditional shoe and it was an extra element. Our engineers have figured out how to actually make the air bladder the structure of the shoe. There's only three components.
It's the Pump air bladder, it's a compression sleeve that goes over the top, and then our outsole. This has created a super light, super functional, great fitting product that we launched first just a couple weeks ago in the ZPump Fusion, then we'll bring it across our top running categories and then ultimately across the brand. It gives us a really clear position around fit and function for Reebok using an amazing technology. You're going to hear a lot more about this. Later, I'm going to talk a little bit about our launch in the U.S., and I'll give you a bit more information. That brings me to our third and final business unit, which is Classics. Classics is a real differentiator for the Reebok brand.
If you look at some of the other businesses that are competing and brands that are competing in the fitness category, they certainly don't have the heritage in fitness like Reebok has with products like our Freestyle, which was the original shoe that kind of kicked down the barriers for women in fitness, and our classic leathers and others. These give our consumer an expression of their fitness lifestyle outside of the gym. We're also seeing some really positive trends in how this whole traditional, what we call our Franchise Five on the far left here, are really becoming part of what our consumer is all about. We also have another category in Classics, which we call Retro Running, that's driven by our Ventilator concept. Finally, we're coming up with new expressions of what our heritage in Classics and our heritage in fitness looks like.
This is a great example, the Furylite. You'll continue to see an evolution of what our street style and heritage in fitness looks like through Classics. Three business units, three great opportunities, driving each about a third of our overall business. Who we're talking to first on every occasion is her. Winning with women is critical for Reebok. The one thing that's really exciting about Reebok is we continue to outperform the industry in terms of the percentage of our business that is for women. A few years ago, we were just over 30%. Today, 40% of our revenue is from women, and we believe that by the end of Route 2020, we will be at 50%.
The nice thing about this is she is buying much more frequently from us directly through our e-com platform and some other platforms I am going to tell you about in a second. She is much more engaged with us on social media. We have the second highest engagement level of any brand right now on social media with women. She is more profitable. We actually are performing much better from an overall average selling price and margin with our female consumer. How we are planning to continue this real clear focus on women is 4 key elements. One is we are putting her first in everything we do. When we are creating product, when we are creating our marketing activities, when we are building our system in terms of influencers and other icons, we are thinking about her and how we influence her.
Second, we are not thinking about her as a single category consumer, a running consumer, a training consumer, a Classics consumer, but we are dropping our product into our retail stores and our partner stores in what we call mashups. Every month, product that is cross-merchandise across all categories and brings a unique expression for Reebok. We also have introduced Rally, which is a direct-to-consumer mail order piece. We will have this in 10 countries. We will have 6 million consumers who will receive the Rally magazine by 2017. It is a direct connection to our e-com platform and our physical Fit Hub stores. Finally, brand messaging. You hear a lot of other brands talking about, "Hey, here is our women's campaign, this is what we are saying to women. Over here we are blood, sweat, and tears and everything else." This is not what Reebok's doing. Reebok's primary message is to women.
Our Be More Human campaign indexes higher with women than it does with men. Although it is tough and gritty, it is speaking to her real understanding that the reason she works out is to be a better version of herself. Wowing her is a big element of Reebok's long-term strategy, and we are off to a great start. This brings me to the 3 key choices that first Herbert mentioned, Eric really showed you how powerfully we lead that through the adidas brand, and we will do the same thing with the Reebok brand, focusing first on key cities. Our key city attack is really centered around what we think is a very exciting and unique concept, and that is our Fit Hub. We have opened around the world 443 Fit Hub locations. This is about half of our overall retail fleet.
These stores perform on average about 27% better than the store format that was there before. What we are doing is we are not only looking at it as a store, we are looking at it as a place for our consumer to come and get information about their fitness life, about activities in the area. We are staffed by fitness professionals. We have a fitness community manager. Ultimately, we are becoming a destination that we can build our city concept around those communities. You will continue to see this being a critical part of our overall strategy going forward. If we look at open source, the nice thing about open source, I really like Eric's definition of open source, that this idea of inviting the consumer into the brand and really being co-collaborators with us, is that we have a highly engaged consumer.
This is a photograph of a young woman in Sweden who finished running a Reebok obstacle course race and decided that the way she wanted to express her fitness lifestyle was to have a Reebok Delta tattoo put on her body in a pretty aggressive way, I might mention as well. What's happening with our consumers, they're really embracing this as a critical part of who they are and not just an activity. What this means is you have higher engagement scores in terms of social media, in terms of co-creation. What's interesting about this story is that after that Reebok obstacle course race, we actually allowed consumers, if they wanted, to get a free Delta tattoo. You could get it any size. You didn't have to get it that size.
We had so many consumers line up to do it that we had to let 91 come back the next day and do it. I think this really speaks to the fact that Reebok's starting to mean something different to our consumer than just a logo or just a brand. We want to take advantage of that by allowing our consumer in the digital space to co-create the brand. As part of our Be More Human campaign, we have elements called the Human Score, where you evaluate your own humanness and post this to all your different social media outlets. We have a concept called Break Your Selfie, where you post your images after your workout that always maybe aren't the most flattering, but I think have created a really fun opportunity for our consumer.
Gray Matters, which is connecting the physical to the mental success, and allowing our consumer to also look at how their trajectory from a cognitive point of view is developing in their fitness life. Cool things there. Everything we're doing from an open source point of view, though, is centered around our partnerships, these really unconventional and unique partnerships that we've created that really are unrivaled in the industry. We've partnered with CrossFit, which is far and away the fastest-growing fitness movement in the world. We've partnered with Spartan Race as the number 1 obstacle course race in the world. Just one thing about obstacle course races, in the U.S. alone, more people will run an obstacle course race next year than a marathon. This is really growing, and it's becoming something that's really important to our consumer.
Les Mills, the number 1 provider of in-gym programming content. We talked about the UFC, and of course, our Strala Yoga partnership really allows us to have more of a unique expression in yoga, which we saw in a The New York Times article just a couple of days ago called "Grunge Yoga," which Tara Stiles, who's pictured here, is really helping lead the charge for. It's what our consumer is thinking yoga is, and all these activities lead us to 500 million consumers who are linked to these activities and who we have access to in terms of our overall communication campaign. We're inviting them into the brand. We're also inviting a really important subset into the brand in our open source concept, which is our instructor network.
A couple years ago, we launched a LinkedIn for fitness professionals, and we already have 65,000 profiles of fitness professionals who are using this as a way to communicate with their peers, learn more about their profession, and ultimately, in some cases, get the best gear. We see this consumer also, or the instructor also purchasing from us. Today we're at 65,000. We believe we can easily aggregate half of the instructor population and continue to propel that statistic that I told you earlier about, where the instructor is really recommending and driving Reebok sales going forward. Finally, one very cool concept that we're pioneering at Reebok that is born from our Your Reebok customization program and inspired by Kickstarter is a simple idea, and you heard Eric talk about it. We have this incredible design capacity as an organization, this incredible creation capacity.
We don't want, from an efficiency point of view, to range everything we design. What we want to do now is let the consumer look at some of the things that maybe didn't make it to our official range. We'll post these designs, let them vote, and then based on their voting and based on their putting up their credit card and ordering them, we'll purchase once we reach a certain level. We'll go into immediate production and take advantage of some of the things that Claire talked about in terms of speed as well. Some very exciting things to attract what already is a very highly engaged consumer. That brings me finally to speed.
Speed obviously is an imperative for any business, I think that you heard earlier from Claire that we have the opportunity as Reebok, being part of the adidas Group, to sit on a platform of the absolute fastest sporting goods company in the world. One example of that that's occurred recently is, you heard about the success Claire's had with Neo. Right next to our Neo operation in Vietnam, we've built what we call our Royal Creation Center that's operating on the same lead times. It's offering a value-oriented part of our Classics business, and we're delivering to our consumer now in 45 days in many cases and really building our business in this kind of a fast fashion part of our Classics business as well.
It's an opportunity where we're leveraging the success of the adidas brand to Reebok and getting the same kind of results, increasing overall share of products sold at full price, seeing our margin expand, and reduce obsolescence in terms of our inventory. All of this, every one of our speed initiatives that we want to drive back to the big theme of the Reebok brand in terms of a strategic execution, which is we have to become more and more direct to consumer over the next several years. These initiatives, whether they're e-commerce related or our Fit Hub store related or our shop-in-shop stores, keeping freshness and newness at retail and really understanding the trends and buying habits of our consumer. Right now, we're about 40% direct to consumer.
We believe we'll be 50% in the near future, and we can drive this business at a higher overall operating margin. That covers our focus, which is our brand point of view, our consumer who's passionate about the sport of fitness, our products that are built for our consumer and are really focused on the activities they do, and then those key choices that both Herbert and Eric mentioned. I do want to have a special call-out for our most important market, which is the U.S. The U.S. represent a little bit more than 30% of Reebok's overall business today, but a considerable opportunity as we look forward.
As I mentioned when I started, this is an area where we haven't had as much success yet, but through six key pillars, we'll drive our growth and understanding with the consumer and ultimately sales in the U.S. First is really leveraging our partners. Most of these partnerships are born in the U.S., and they're connected to our consumer. Second is we won't just do a Be More Human brand campaign for the few months of the beginning of the year. This is a consistent effort, season over season, year over year, where we're going to tell our brand story and really have a bigger purpose and meaning to the brand. Third is direct to the consumer. We're going to continue to build out our Fit Hub concepts, drive our consumer to this omnichannel approach of our Rally magazine, e-com, and Fit Hubs.
We're going to do it through some major product and concept initiatives like Pump, which I'm just going to click forward and show you a really cool situation that we have right now. One of our most important partners, Finish Line, has just executed what we call a store takeover in 400 doors where we have windows, try-on areas, specific areas in shelf, and then all around the perimeter of the store are Pump advertising graphics. This is a way of really showing the consumer that Reebok's back in a big, powerful way, and we're off to a great start with about 10.5% sell-through year-to-date. Good things happening. I'm going to go back to this list here for a second. We're also launching our Ventilator concept in the U.S. now. Again, this is an opportunity to really captivate our FitGen consumer on the classic side.
Finally, I mentioned Combat Training. Combat Training is a fast and growing opportunity, particularly in the U.S. We have assets like up in the upper right-hand corner here. This is Ronda Rousey, who possibly is the most popular female athlete in the U.S. She's a UFC fighter. She's appearing in many films, on the cover of magazines, and this is really from a pop culture point of view as well as a fitness activity, a way that we can really endear ourselves to the U.S. consumer. I'm telling you a little bit about that. Mark's going to come up here later and tell you about the adidas strategy for the U.S., but I wanted to let you know that we've got some exciting initiatives going on on the Reebok side.
Herbert started out today to tell you that we're going to grow high single digits on the Reebok brand. That is in fact the case, there's a lot of opportunities for us, as you can see, to really grow inside the fitness world, not only with our FitGen consumer, but also as we provide a halo effect to the broader active population. Thank you very much, we're very excited about the future of Reebok. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Matt, that actually brings us to our first coffee break. We're a little bit ahead of time, we will regroup here at 10:40 A.M., in the meantime, you can refresh yourself outside. See you in a bit.
So many people telling me one way. So many people telling me to stay. Never time to let my mind make up. Caught in motion and I don't want to stop. So many people telling me one way. So many people telling me to stay. Never time to let my mind make up. Caught in motion and I don't want to stop. So many people telling me one way. So many people telling me to stay. Never time to let my mind make up. Caught in motion and I don't want to stop. So many people telling me one way. So many people telling me to stay. Never time to let my mind make up. Caught in motion and I don't want to stop.
I think the exact stuff you have seen already. This is correct, yeah. This is not a criteria for applying in our company.
That's a good question.
Yeah, there isn't anybody-
There is two people. There is five people.
That is why we are not spending the whole time in the gym. We are working from time to time as well. Okay, see you. Bye.
Yeah, I am a man, yeah, man, I'm up in here. I run around and act like I don't care. When you see me flying by on a planet mood, it don't mean that you're pointless everybody, I'm just like you. Watch while I'm going crazy. Switch by switch inside my head. I see dark black, green, brown running together running through my brain. Suddenly realize the fears inside my brain. I'm taking my ways, I'm taking my chains. No, they're not in chains. Am I going crazy? Do you think the same things? Will I ever get away?
The strategic choices that we have taken. Let me start with the first one, which is open source. How does open source, you will ask yourself, relate to the world of the execution? How does it relate to the world of sales? What does it mean for us? To illustrate that, I would like to take you on a journey. I would like to take you on a consumer journey. I would like to take you on a consumer journey of that female athlete that Eric talked about before, let's join her as she's in Tokyo. Let's understand what happens in today's consumer journeys. Let's imagine she spends her time at Imperial Palace Park, and she's hanging out there, and there's lots of people running. There's actually one of those runners that she follows running in a new pair of running shoes. She quite likes them.
It's the same that I'm wearing today, the UltraBoost. She says, "Wow, that's really intriguing. What's that?" As she walks through the city, she's browsing online, she's checking it out, she understands what's happening. Then she's sharing with friends. Sharing is a critically important thing. They are permanently connected, as we all know. She's sharing, then she's getting feedback from her friends and on the web, actually in Google Maps, probably also in Japan, finds a store and says, "Oh, there's a store close to my journey. All right. Let's go there." She goes there, she finds our store in Shibuya. In Shibuya, we obviously have the product available. She tries it on, quite likes it, great fit, but she's not so sure if she should purchase. She takes a picture of herself in that shoe, she posts that, she seeks approval.
She posts it and asks her friend to comment and say, "Do you think I should do this? Do you think this is good for me?" Right? The friends come back to her and say, "Absolutely. UltraBoost, that's the thing you need." Right? She comes home, is at her home, goes on the web, goes on our .com site, executes the purchase. This might sound a little contrived to you, but in all fairness, this is what probably happens in most mature markets today. 60% of all consumer journeys today involve a digital element. Peer recommendation is the most powerful element of marketing that we can build upon. Peer recommendations is what really makes people change their behaviors. Lastly, 20% of all purchases that happen today are executed on .com.
If we think that this is the journey today, this is the journey today in Tokyo, this is not just the journey in Tokyo, this is very clearly the journey as we see it in every one of those global key cities that we have defined and that Herbert has pointed out. If we project ourselves 5 years down the road, we believe this will be the exact consumer journey that we will see around the world, even in places where internet penetration today is low, places like India or even Russia. This will be the journey, this is what it means to us. We need to get ready for this journey. Very clearly from understanding this journey, one thing is crystal clear to us, that we need to provide a seamless consumer experience across all those touchpoints.
Whether it's the connection that she has with us on social, on online, or in a physical store environment. Everything that happens with her around the data and the data that we capture, all needs to be stored. CRM, that's a critically important weapon to develop in the future. We need to understand what she does. We need to store it, big data, and we need to be permanently in touch with her and her friends through mobile. We call this omnichannel. Over the last 12 months, really since we've reorganized our global sales function, we have really worked hard and diligent to define what does omnichannel, which is not a new development in our industry, quite the opposite. The industry will be omnichannel. What we have done differently is we've defined what it means for us.
We've defined what business models are the ones that we're going to focus on. We've decided that we're going to invest and roll out four specific business models over the next couple of years. Let me walk you quickly through which they are. Inventory check, pretty straightforward. You're sitting at home, you want to understand if a product is in the store, you go online, check it out. Simple. Click and collect. You're sitting at home looking at an online website. You're really interested in the product, but you want to try it on. Instead of sending it to your home, you're actually saying, "I'd love to have this one at a store so I can try it on there, see if it fits, if it's the right size, the right color.
I can switch it over in the store." It's waiting for you in a store. Ship from store. We're turning our stores basically into mini distribution centers. Instead of sending it from a distribution center, which could be five, six time zones away, think of the size of Russia, we're actually shipping it from a store which is maybe just half an hour down the road. Endless aisle. That's the model where we are actually now in a store environment, where you are actually looking at the store and there's actually tons of product that we have available beyond what we can physically present in a store environment. The consumer goes online, checks it out, and actually is impressed by the choice, has it sent home or has it sent to the same store, basically to try it on back there.
Those are the four specific business models that we've decided upon. Those are the ones that we're investing behind, and those are the ones that we're rolling out. We're already having significant proof points that this is working for us. I give you one example, potentially came up last night in the conversation that some of you might have had with Martin Shankland about Russia. We took the click and collect business model live in 20 stores in Moscow a couple of weeks ago. In the first week, we increased our net sales in those stores 30% in one week ahead of the rest of the fleet. That's significant. Based on that proof point, we're rolling out click and collect to 200 stores in Russia before the end of August.
We've decided to also do the ship from store functionality given the vast geography of Russia, 11 time zones, massive place. Right? We're taking the click and collect functionality and the ship from store functionality together to about 30, 40 stores before Christmas. Over the last 12 months, ladies and gentlemen, we've really ramped up our internal capabilities around omnichannel. We've built up the necessary IT foundations, invested into technology, are ready to capture all the data that is now coming our way. Secondly, we've extended our supply chain, and you can imagine that is a massively different act to do to send out lots of small parcels that some of them come back, rather than sending out containers or full boxes.
Probably most importantly, we have brought all our internal capabilities that exist here in Herzo and around the world under one roof, under one omnichannel roof. We firmly believe that we need to build the capabilities and the insights, and we need to train all the people that we have in the markets to really become experts about omnichannel. Some of you could meet Harm Ohlmeyer, the young gentleman who's leading that effort for us and creating an omnichannel sales strategy and excellence team, is really setting us up for success. We believe, though, that what really puts us apart and will create a strategic advantage for us versus anybody else in this industry is our unrivaled store network. Already today, we have 2,900 stores worldwide. 2,000 of them are concept stores. To be successful in omnichannel, you need to be omnipresent.
You need to have touchpoints which are close to where the consumer is. This is something that we can offer like no one else in the industry. It's not just about our own concept stores. It's about the 11,000 franchise stores that we can pull into this network. Let's remember, our e-commerce business has dramatically improved over the last years. Herbert mentioned it this morning, we will exceed the EUR 500 million objective that we gave ourselves a couple of years ago. We're already live with our own e-com platform in 30 countries. It's growing. Every day, every month, every week, we're rolling out more. The rollout plan for omnichannel is pretty straightforward. This year, Russia. Next year, we will take omnichannel to three critical important markets, to Western Europe, to North America, and to Latin America.
As of 2017, we will integrate our key accounts into this omnichannel network. Why are we doing this? Well, we go back to the whole notion of open source DNA. We need to create a system where we bring customers inside, and we can actually learn from their experiences. Every one of our retailers out there is developing its own omnichannel strategy. Every one of them is investing into the same capabilities. We firmly believe that we can be the first that really integrates this with their efforts to learn together. This is such a fast space. This is something that happens so quickly that we believe that if we partner with the right customers, we can actually drive much more efficiency, much more speed around omnichannel for both them and us. First point, omnichannel, open source. You will ask yourself, is this everything we need to do?
Is this the only thing that is relevant? I clearly say no. We need to understand that that consumer roaming in Tokyo, there's not just us that permanently talks to her. The attractions that exist around her, everything that happens in Tokyo, in a big place, there's so many attractions, and there's so many distractions for her. The second thing we're embarking upon is that we need to say, we need to basically look at every one of those touch points and raise the bar. At every one of those touch points, we simply need to be better than what we do today. Every single touch point. We call this premium presentation, and we have the ambition to wow her at every one of those touch points. It starts very clearly with the experience that we can provide in our own stores. That sets the bar.
That defines the flight level. That defines where we need to play. It's not just about the own stores. We need to take that experience across all the different points of sale that a consumer touches. We need to think of Tokyo or any other place, really, as a place where it's all about consistency and ensuring that the same experience is happening, not just where we control it, but where everybody else is involved. Yes, we will continue to roll out new and very exciting new store formats. Some of you could experience our HomeCourt store format yesterday in Nuremberg. We are really happy with the way that this is developing. Neighborhood, our premium concept for the adidas Originals banner, again, lifting the brand. Matt mentioned it just now, Fit Hub stores.
The Reebok Fit Hub stores are providing a much better consumer experience than anything we had seen before. To give you a feel for how we're thinking about stores today, let me give you an example. A store is much more than just a place where a consumer buys something or where he gets some advice. Today, a store is a place where it's really all coming together for us. If we're bringing the energy of a brand into a four-wall environment, and we connect it with the assets that we have, yeah, we can drive amazing things. The example here is the opening of our Barcelona HomeCourt store, mid-February. What did we do? Well, we first of all, of course, built a beautiful store. We asked Lionel Messi if he would join us for the opening.
We had projected a wall against the facade of the building. We asked Lionel, you see him here on the picture behind me, to kick a ball to basically take the facade and the wall down and open the store. Just to give you a feel for what that means for the consumer, within 24 hours, we had 1.2 million consumer engagements from that activity. We know that the consumer today expects us to do things in a very different way and bringing all those touch points together to really create those halo effects that Herbert talked about before. We had a cumulative TV audience of 17 million people, mainly in Spain, just about a store opening, and that's one store. That store, again, looks beautiful. It looks different even than the store that you saw, which is a couple of months older.
The attitude that we're taking to stores is it's not really about rolling out one store format at a time and keeping it the same. Our approach to stores is launch and iterate, launch and iterate, learn from it, do something better, bring the next one up, which is even better than the one that we opened a couple of months ago. Digital screens, the full focus on footwear, all the innovations that Eric talked about, building loyalty from the feet up. That's the centerpiece of the HomeCourt arena. Into these stores, we are now bringing a premium experience. That's the next consumer touch point. We've launched a complete new consumer service model into our stores over the last couple of weeks. We call it connect, engage, and inspire. It's different than we used to do it.
When we started the retail journey, which in our history is not a long journey, as you know. We wrote a consumer service model, I guess, like a German company would write it out. Seven steps that one had to follow. We had trained 30,000 retail associates out there in the markets on those seven steps. If you were on step 5, and you now had to go to step 6. That was the way we had done it in the past. It worked for us, it didn't work well enough. What we're now doing is we're saying, "Let's bring our open source DNA also to the way that we engage with the consumer when he stands in the store with us. Let's be personal. Let's bring the consumer in.
Let's also explain of who we are." We're encouraging our store associates now to talk to those consumers about their sport, about what they are good about, right? To really build a personal and very intense connection with those consumers. You might wonder what that's going to bring to the table, to the party. We had tested that model in our own top stores. In those stores where we had tested it, the conversion rate, so people walking into the store, converting it into shoppers, that conversion rate went up by one full percentage point. We get 400 million visitors every year into our concept stores. One percentage point is 4 million more tickets, is 4 million more shoppers. That's significant. We're rolling this out to all the stores.
As a result, if you start to ask me for some numbers, and by the way, as I mention these numbers, they are adidas and Reebok combined, and Robin has asked me to make sure that this is understood as a currency-neutral development, very consistent with the way that we gave guidance. If you look at our concept store development over the next years, we will continue to drive double-digit CAGRs from the concept store over the next years, no doubt. As we are bringing those premium presentations with new store formats there, as we're bringing our service model there, and as we are leveraging our omnichannel capabilities, it's very clear that we will drive double-digit growth going forward. We will continue to open stores, and we will continue to close stores.
Just to give you a rough number, we believe that we can open about three stores a week, every week, next five years. That's about 750 stores. If you take a few store closings, we'll probably end up with 500 to 600 more concept stores by the end of 2020 than we have today. If we think of space, we don't just think of the space that we command and manage ourselves. We very clearly start thinking about the space that we have together with partners. We today have more than 11,000 franchise stores, and we again going to bring these new insights that we're developing from our own concept stores, and those concept stores were always meant to be proof of concept places. Leverage those capabilities into the world of franchising, and take more responsibility with our franchise partners of how our brands get presented.
We will get involved with the merchandising. We will get involved with the assortment planning. We will get involved with, this is exactly the way that the brands show up, because we know it now from our own stores. We will take franchising as a business model to different geographies. We're very successful with franchising today in places like China and Korea. We've taken it to Latin America. We've brought it to Western Europe. We're going to bring it to other places like Japan over the next five years. We believe in franchising. We're on a roll. It's happening. Before the end of this year, before the start of the new Creating the New plan starts even, we will have opened 100 HomeCourt stores, 30 Neighborhood stores.
We will have added another 170 Fit Hub stores to the proud fleet of 443 stores that Matt mentioned before. We will have taken the look of Fit Hub, of HomeCourt, of Neighborhood, to about 500 points of sale in our customer environments. Understanding that this is not the only thing that we need to think about, the physical environment, the four-wall environment. Of course, to wow the consumer at every touch point means we also need to bring that premium presentation, that experience that is at the same level. We need to bring that obviously into our whole world of .com, the digital websites that we are operating, the e-commerce platforms that we have, and we're going to do that.
If you then all wrap it up together and say, "You're doing all these things, what is going to be the impact on e-commerce as one of the channels that you operate?" We're very confident about e-commerce, having taken it practically from a business that didn't exist five years ago to a EUR 500 million business. Going forward, we will very clearly focus on a much more personalized interaction with our consumers. We will know more about them than ever before. We will be very personal to them. Our experience will be much more brand led, much more product led. We will tell very exciting innovation stories online, and we can do this together with our consumers much better today than ever before. We will play on the whole topic of availability. Our challenge internally is to say we're never out of stock on .com.
If a consumer comes, we must be available. We're building our sales capabilities where we can do stock sharing between retail, wholesale, and e-commerce, something that we didn't do before or couldn't do before in a world which was segmented by channels. We will introduce the notion of exclusivity. It could be a timely exclusivity, it could be for a few days or weeks, but it could also be entire product lines that are only available via experiment. If you take it all together and understanding that these omnichannel capabilities that I talked about before will be brought to e-com, we're confident that we can 4x our e-com business and take it to more than EUR 2 billion by 2020. E-commerce will become the fastest-growing, but over the years, also the most profitable channel that we will operate.
That gives you, hopefully, a firm feeling for the first promise that I would like you to understand and take away from this, which is to say we're going to continue to bring scale to the point of sale network that we already have. Let me go to the second strategic choice that we have taken, and let me talk to you about speed and how speed is relevant for us in the markets and the channels, both across adidas and Reebok. What's a dream for speed? A dream for speed for us would be if a consumer walks into one of our stores, looks at our fantastic product offering, likes a product, and says to the people in the store, "Hey, can I have that product in my size, but in a slightly different color? By the way, my two feet are a size apart.
Can I do that?" Our store manager would actually say, "No problem. Take a seat, have a cappuccino. We'll have it for you in 15 minutes." That's speed. We're working on a project which we're very excited about, the speed cell that you find at the back of the room is a critically important element for it. Claire talked about it before, how much more progress we are making. Think of real-time retail production of being something that we can bring to the industry, that we can be the first in, because we will connect German engineering with our power of our brands and bring this to the point of sale and make this available. That's going to rock the industry. This is currently a concept. It's a few years away, but it might actually happen much faster than we all think.
In the meantime, we're doing some more tangible things that have an influence on our business right away. Claire talked about the two new business models that we're doing under the speed umbrella: in-season creation and planned responsiveness. These are huge benefit drivers for us on the execution side of the brands. We will generate more business from those, we will have more reactivity, we will have less stock at the end of the day, and the real benefit will come from a higher full price sell-through. We're challenging ourselves to develop 20% more full price sell-through from these speed programs. This is going to bring money into our own pockets where we operate the stores, but it equally will be highly attractive for our retail partners to jump onto this bandwagon together with us because it will improve their profitability and again, deepen our relationships.
Secondly, end-to-end supply models. We're learning a lot about how we need to then develop product in order to be available for speed. We need to understand what is the space that we have available in a store or in a customer's environment in order to then think about how do we design and develop product to get there. Last but not least, and that's a key point, I can't stress that enough, to capture the full data, to capture the full insights that we're generating requires a lot of IT and big data understanding. We've invested a lot of money and will continue to drive this forward over the next years to be able to have a faster reaction time against the consumer trends. But speed to us also means that we're challenging ourselves to simply be faster in our own decision-making.
I just want to give you three examples of what we can do better going forward. First of all, we can much more actively manage our chain. If we talk about chain, yes, we're back in the world of own retail. We can decide where do we open stores. We have a much better understanding, and again, the consumer insights and the big data that we are generating helps us to even better understand how a location works, where are we offering which assortments, what is selling through in a better way. We can be much more precise in the way that we open stores and operate stores. Secondly, we can certainly streamline some of our processes, like openings and closings.
Those of you that talked and listened to Martin Shankland last night, I think you hopefully will be quite impressed about the ability that we have today to react against changes in marketplaces. Closing 100 stores last year and closing 200 stores this year is a pretty significant reaction ability. We can open 100 stores or 200 stores in the years to come because we have streamlined those processes. Lastly, we are working on reducing the number of retail formats that we operate in the world. As we developed into a retail company, we obviously tried different things, and as you walk around the world, and as we walk around the world, we see a number of retail formats that we have launched over the years still existing. Going forward, we will focus this number of formats very clearly to a much smaller number.
In fact, we're trying to halve it. That's going to create two benefits to us. First of all, we're going to have a consistent consumer footprint. No matter where the consumer goes, he will see us as a HomeCourt or as Neighborhood or as a Fit Hub environment. That's a consumer benefit. Also for us, it will allow us to open, close, operate stores with many less formats involved, which obviously makes it easier to roll these stores out at a lower cost. If you then wrap all of this together, we're bringing the omnichannel capabilities to store, and we're improving the staffing, we're working on the new service philosophy of consumer engagement. We will do a much better assortment planning because we know what is the space that we have out there available. We can actively shape our chain, have a better insight.
We'll do that across less retail formats with a very clear focus on footwear, because this is really where the brands will innovate and drive up. We believe that we can beat the record that we have set for ourselves as far as productivity in the stores is concerned. If we take the last five years, and we're currently excluding Russia for a minute because of the volatility that the Russian business had. Every year over the last five years, we've been improving our net sales per square meter in concept stores by an average 5%. That's significant. That's a significant improvement every year, and it's testament to the fact that we have become a better retail company over the last years. Going forward, we're challenging ourselves to say 7%. We can still do better.
If you just work that through, I believe you can see what a massive productivity improvement this will bring. With that said, I hopefully have explained to you how we can connect speed in the world of sales to driving productivity across our sales platform. That takes me to the third choice that we have taken as a board, the focus on cities. You will ask yourself, why the cities? Well, as Herbert explained it this morning, urbanization is one of the key global mega trends. 50% of the global population today lives in key cities. By 2030, this will be 60%. These 60% of population will generate 80% of the global GDP in a few years' time only. Cities are the incubators for the new. Even today, some cities are larger than countries. Shanghai equals Poland and Portugal taken together.
New York is three times Denmark. Paris, no offense meant to anybody here in the room, Robin, is Norway and New Zealand taken together. That's significant, and that's today. We have the aspiration that if we want in the future to win, we need to win in these key cities. We need to be the number one in these key cities. We need to be the number one in mind share, in market share. We need to be the most visible. We need to be the most desired group of brands. We need to dominate all those relevant consumer touchpoints I just talked about. We need to create brand heat in these cities to take the brand heat beyond the borders of these cities. This is the halo effect that we talked about before.
Herbert already explained that we have decided to focus on six key cities globally. Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Shanghai. We've selected those key cities based on their consumer relevance. These cities influence the world. We've also selected them on their commercial relevance, the economic growth that we're seeing there, the disposable income, the size of the market, the presence of international retailers. These cities are most relevant for sports. These are the places where sports participation is highest, where viewership is fantastic. They have geographic reach, these are places where a lot of the global sports events are taking place. Lastly, we've looked at their relevance for streetwear culture to ensure that it's not just about hard participation sports, but also the other lifestyle-driven side of the market is taken care of.
These are the six cities, and we are focusing on those first. We're developing ourselves a model of activation, and once we have covered those six, we will bring that knowhow, that toolkit, that understanding down to the next level of cities as we roll it out to the next tier of cities on and on. Both Mark and Gil will talk about how we do this in North America and Western Europe in the afternoon. The way that we're going to go about it is that it's going to be a street-by-street, pitch-by-pitch, block-by-block approach. This is hard work. This is grounds up work of activation.
We'll take it one at a time, and we believe that as we do this, we will be seen on the right streets, we'll be spoken of in the right media, be part of the right event, be part of the right debate, and ultimately be desired by the right consumers. We have already started. A couple of years ago, we launched what we then called the Integrated Distribution Roadmap. In every one of those key cities over the last years, we have developed a deep understanding of how the distribution side of the city hangs together between our own stores and what customers do, and where consumers go and who shops where. This is all understood. We're in the process of the second step, which is to control the right places.
This is what we're currently doing, and the next step is now to activate and shape these places into the right way that we need to be successful. These cities will be played by a full category approach. Every one of our categories, from football to running, to training, to Neo, to Originals, every one of those categories will play there. It's not just the adidas categories that will play there. Reebok will play a key role in every one of these cities. This is where we will test our next level of flagship stores. This is where we will open the next thing that comes after Home Court because there is no stopping. We continue. This is obviously where we have already opened our newsrooms or will continue to open them in the future and focus them.
This is where we're going to connect between grassroots sports and culture to make sure that we're capturing the consumer in a holistic way. The last thing which we're doing in these cities is that we're installing city teams. What is a city team? A city team is a team that we will dedicate against a city to manage the entire ecosystem that exists out there. Yes, we will continue to measure what a store delivers to us, and we have a specific retail P&L, store P&L in place. Yes, we will continue to measure how much business we do with a customer. Yes, we will know how many tweets and how many, all these things are coming from a newsroom, all that.
As we take all these things together, we believe that it's becoming something that we can only measure as a total system. There's compound effects from doing these things all together, as we have seen, and some of you were following us for the All-Star Weekend a few weeks ago in New York. You could sense that as we do all these things in a very focused, in a very concentrated way, it's really creating a massive consumer impact. We believe that we can dedicate the smartest people that we have in the company against being the city managers in the future. It might sound funny if we talk about it that way, but we believe that to be the city manager in Shanghai or in Paris, it's probably one of the most attractive positions that we, in the future, can give to our future generation of managers.
It's more important to be a city manager in these places than to be a country manager, let's say, in Norway or in Greece or anywhere in the world. These are the real battlegrounds for the future. Again, we will make sure that the smartest kids that we have in the company are taking these roles. That's an opportunity for us that we don't have right now. How will it all feel like? Let's go back to Tokyo. Let's go back to the place where she was running before. Digitalization. Herbert touched upon it. Digitalization allows us today to understand our consumers like never before. We know from systems like Strava, that's a screenshot from behind me, where does a consumer run today?
We know exactly how many are running where at any given moment of the day, whether they're in Yoyogi Park or whether they are actually somewhere in the neighborhoods. That's amazing for us. That's an insight that we didn't have before. Modern technology and digitalization is helping us. We understand where they play sports. We've been in Tokyo for so many years. We know every one of those places. We are deeply involved with the sports culture in any one of those cities. We obviously know where they shop. Over the last couple of years, we've developed with the Integrated Distribution Roadmap a massive understanding of how that all hangs together. Very clearly, we know where our stores are, but we also know where the stores of our customers exist.
With a deep understanding of how this all hangs together, we obviously now know what a specific store does for what specific consumer group. That's an insight that we didn't have before. To win in the key cities, to win in those places, we obviously need to integrate our key partners into this one. Going forward, when it comes to the world of wholesale, the work with customers, we will focus our activities on 20 customers globally. These are the customers that we selected based on their presence, on their relevance, on their potential in those key cities. With these customers, we will focus on six things. First of all, a much deeper understanding of their strategies and how it relates to us. We call this strategic planning. Secondly, we will focus our investment with these customers on sell-out.
We will very clearly focus on the point of sale and how we can sell out to the consumer. We're building dedicated individual end-to-end supply models with every one of those customers. We're focusing on premium presentation, and at the end of the day, as I said before, we are expecting that their stores will feel and look and have the same experience that we can generate in our own stores, be it HomeCourt or Fit Hub or Neighborhood. We will focus on their key destination doors, and that's going to be the focus on the key cities. Again, we will bring them into the world that we're driving. Innovation, digitalization, the Reserve app that we launched with Foot Locker a couple of weeks ago in New York, laser engraving that we do today with customers like SportScheck in Munich.
These are all innovations that we're bringing to the party, those will be focused against those 20 customers. The part that I'm probably the most excited about, because it's very tangible already, is the fact that we are bringing our deep understanding of retail and our retail knowhow now to these customers as we're rolling out modular packages, as we understand what space we have available in the stores. We can actually bring modular product packages to these stores and go away from a product-by-product selling, but actually go to a package selling. That's a much faster, a much simpler, but also a much more interactive way of working with customers. As we know which space we have available, we can merchandise for that space.
If you then ask yourself of how is this going to convert, how is this going to translate into numbers of what we have to do over the next years? We believe that we can double the business that we do today in wholesale managed space. We will add roughly 300,000 sq m over the next years. That is space that we command for our brands in a customer environment. Wholesale managed space will be the key driver for our wholesale business, and we forecast the wholesale business to grow at mid-single digits over the next five years. Make no mistake, this is not a small endeavor. We will add EUR 2 billion of top line to our wholesale business over the next years.
This will be driven, as I just said, by those strategic partnership, focusing on these customers for our wholesale business and in bringing the e-com capability in. If you then all add it up and say, "e-com, concept stores, franchising, factory outlets, even the space that we command in the stores, how is this going to look like five years out?" We call this controlled space. That's our term for taking these things together. When we started the journey five years ago, we were below 40%. As Herbert mentioned this morning, we have exceeded the 50% barrier already last year. For the next five years, we believe we can bring this to more than 60% of our business. We are backing this up with a significant investment.
Over the next five years, we will invest EUR 1.5 billion to drive the space, to create the halo, to make sure that we have the right places in which we can bring our brands to shine. This will result in 1 million sq m of more space for us, where adidas and Reebok brands can live and excite the consumer. That said, I hope I could give you a feel for how our focus on cities and how our three strategic choices will now allow us to shape our own destiny. There's a fourth point on this chart here which talks about focus. Where does the difference come from over the next couple of years? What's going to be different in the execution of everything we do compared to what we've done in the past? It comes from that word focus.
This takes me into the whole structure and the execution into the markets. Let me start, first of all, to explain to you how our markets are set up today. A couple of years ago, we used to have 16 markets that we operated globally. Over the last years, we have brought this down to nine. Nine is already much more focused than 16, no doubt. The changes that we have made over the last years, to briefly talk about those, is first of all, that we have brought Western Europe together as one market. Gil, later on in the afternoon, will talk about this one, and he will tell you how the change that we have brought to Western Europe has already ignited our business there.
We have integrated Brazil with the rest of Latin America to create one team, building on the experiences that we have made last year in Brazil and bringing that knowhow from the Brazilian team into the rest of Latin America. Thirdly, we have grouped India together with the emerging markets. These changes are now allowing us to have a much more focused approach across the nine markets. It's not just having less markets to operate, which obviously makes my life easier. It's also that over the last months, we have very clearly defined which are the roles that these markets will play in the future. Very similar to what Eric shared before about the categories and the role that every one of the adidas categories will play for the future, we have assigned clear roles to these markets. Let me walk you through the logic.
We have three markets where by 2020, we believe we can lead the market. These markets are challenged to create market leadership where we're not in a number one position today. This will be in Western Europe, Greater China, and the emerging markets. The second bucket, the green bucket in the middle, is going to be the grow markets. We will drive dramatic market share gains from three markets between now and the end of 2020. This is going to be in North America and Latin America and everything that we do in Southeast Asia and Pacific, we call this SEPAC. There's three markets where we already are the very clear market leaders today. These markets will have a strategy to extend their leadership over the years to come. This is true for Russia, Japan, and South Korea.
To give you a feel for how we believe that growth will come and exist in these markets, let me give you a CAGR over the next years. Growth will be highest in the growth segment. If you take the three markets together, if you look at it as an average growth rate over the five years, we believe we can grow double digit in those three markets. We believe we can drive high single digits from the markets where we'll take leadership, we believe that we can take mid single digits on average across the bucket of markets from the markets where we already are market leaders today.
Coming back to the point that Herbert made this morning about us having built ourselves a competitive advantage in the industry by being the first movers in most of the future growth markets in the world, just to illustrate what that will mean five years down the road, those markets where we will be market leaders, either by extending our leadership or will hold 77% of the global population by 2020. This sets us up for tremendous opportunity towards 2020, but of course, beyond, because it will include markets like China or India with a huge population opportunity beyond 2020. Lastly, before I come to the specifics of China and Latin America, let me just explain to you how we see growth coming our way. 80% of the absolute growth of adidas and Reebok between 2015 and 2020 will come from four markets.
We call them focus markets, these are the ones that we will talk about in more detail between this morning and the afternoon. It will be North America and Western Europe. It will continue to be China, it will be Latin America. These are the four that will drive 80% of the absolute growth. What does it mean for our most profitable market, China? Let me spend three minutes explaining to you about China. When we started Route 2015 back in 2010, we were the number four brand in China. We're proud to say that today it's a head-to-head race between us and our most competitive competitor out there in every metric that exists. Every metric, we're head to head. Whether it's brand appeal, whether it's consumer salience, it's everything we're head to head.
The good news is, even if we measure sell through, this is what the consumer really takes out of a store or a store network, we're actually head to head with our main competitor. This has obviously been achieved through double-digit growth over the last years. Again, back in 2014, we drove double digits. We have a massive network in China, and by the end of 2015, as we start Creating the New, we will have more than 9,000 doors between our own stores and our franchise network. We are already today the number one in Football, the number one in apparel, and we're very clearly winning the consumer when it comes to streetwear, street fashion with both Originals and Neo. What is the role of the categories that Eric talked about in the morning? What role will they play in China specifically?
Well, the good news is the same role as globally. We are already leading in Football and Originals, and by 2020, we will continue to lead these categories. The growth opportunity over the next years will come from both Running and Neo, where we can capture dramatic growth rates. We're already the leaders in apparel, and we will amplify our position in the training category. We will use categories like basketball and badminton to further authenticate our brand. When it comes to the distribution side of things over the next five years, we will drive for a premium presentation in China through doing more segmented retail formats. Expect us to open basketball stores. Expect us to open running stores. Expect us to open women's stores.
The fleet of 9,000 that we have today will become much more segmented as we do this and clearer in its profile to the consumer. The second thing which we're embarking upon is to drive e-commerce into our own environment. Our e-com today is a very fragmented approach given the situation in China. Over the next years, we will bring this in-house and control it better to have it much more brand-driven. The third thing we're doing about premium presentation is that we're rolling out this hard franchise model I talked about before. Where we take more responsibility also towards our franchise partners by getting actively involved in the ranging, in the merchandising, in the presentation on store. Not only to have a better consumer footprint our side, no, to also bring more profitability to our partners there.
We will bring omnichannel functionalities, all four that I mentioned this morning, to China over the next years. Of course, the key cities will be the third aspect of how we're going to drive forward, focusing on Shanghai, but then taking it to another level of markets like Beijing, Hong Kong, where we will focus on. Ultimately, we're looking at another 20 markets, another 20 cities in China. We believe that those cities that we will focus on will drive 50% of our business in China by 2020. Our deliverables by 2020 at the end of the Creating the New plan will be that we will be the market leaders in China. We will have grown our business by more than 50%.
We currently estimate our store network to then encompass 11,000 stores, and we believe that 80% of all e-commerce activities will be done through our own e-com or through that of our authorized partners. Again, we're very confident about China, and we believe that China will continue to be a significant growth and profit driver for the group. Lastly, let me talk about Latin America, our fastest-growing market. We grew business there last year 19%, having driven it before in 2013 by 18%. It's growth on growth. Very clearly, the World Cup last year has helped us tremendously in Latin America. If there's one geography in the world that is football crazy, it is Latin America. I think we have all enjoyed the pictures that we saw last year from the World Cup coming back from Brazil.
We're extremely well set up, obviously, there with our strong federation partners, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico. This was a tremendous experience for us last year, and it drove 27% growth in Latin America if you just look at the football category. It wasn't just a game last year about football. Every one of our key categories last year had a double-digit growth. The last thing I want you to remember is that we have a first-mover advantage in Latin America by owning and operating our own retail network. We currently have 300 own retail stores already, and that puts us up for success. We're the first that operates e-com across all of Latin America, not just in one or two markets. Again, what will the role be of the different categories on the journey towards 2020? Well, highly consistent with what Eric shared this morning.
We will be the number one in market share in football and in Originals, no doubt. We will grow in running and Neo. Training, again, will act as the amplifier of our position to be the biggest category in the market. The authentication of our brand will happen through categories like outdoor, where we are already the number one outdoor footwear brand in markets like Chile, a very attractive outdoor market. Our focus over the next years will be to continue our leadership extension in those markets, as you see behind me, where we are leading, and to grow significantly in the two markets where we're not the number one player yet. The key cities that we will focus on are the five key cities in Latin America, where more than 10 million people are living. We will continue to drive direct to consumer.
We're already set up for e-commerce, we will open more stores where they make sense. Franchising, we have brought to Latin America. We're the first operator of franchising in our industry. Very clearly, given the growth rate that we have achieved and the growth that we're still expecting, we're investing heavily into our infrastructure and bringing state-of-the-art IT systems and new distribution centers on stream. By 2020, we will be the market leader in most markets, potentially all of them. We will have driven more than 50% growth from Latin America over the next five years. Our retail fleet will be about 500 own retail stores, and e-commerce will be five times bigger than it is today. Very excited for us is to share the news about Reebok. Wherever we brought Reebok to Latin America, we have really created tremendous success.
We walked away from distributors that were existing in the '80s and '90s and took it under our own management in Chile, in Mexico, in Peru. Everywhere where we've done this, we are now the number 3 brand in those markets. Over the last weeks, we have agreed to settle the joint venture that we had for many years in the two biggest markets in Latin America, Brazil and Argentina. As of January 2016, we are the masters of our own destiny with the Reebok brand in those two markets. Again, that offers us a tremendous growth opportunity knowing what we have already achieved in the other Latin American markets. We're confident that by 2020, Reebok will be the number 3 brand in Latin America, no stop.
Having talked about the strategic choices we have taken, how they relate to the things that we can do around the channels globally, having done a short deep dive on China and now Latin America, let me wrap it up for you. Over the next five years, we're confident that our strategy of Creating the New, the three strategic choices that we have taken, and the relentless focus in clarifying what is the role of a market, it sets us up for success. We believe that we can leverage the scale of our existing point-of-sales network for more success in the future. We have identified clear levers and action drivers of how we can continue to drive productivity from our sales platform. Very importantly for us, we believe that we can shape our own destiny. We will be the masters of our own future, in that speak.
The strategic advantage that we're building ourselves will be to be the omnichannel leader in the sporting goods industry. We believe that our unrivaled store network sets us up for success there. Remember, omnipresence is needed to be successful in omnichannel. The two things that we're setting up to win is the key six cities. This is where it all starts. This is where the halo effect will get created. Then lastly, 80% of our growth will come from four markets. This is going to be the recipe for the next couple of years. I personally, but also my team, are extremely excited for Creating the New. It's an all-encompassing strategy, we're very excited having developed it together with our friends in brand, happy to execute it. Thank you very much for your attention. Look forward to your questions later. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Roland. Well, Roland has just said it. We definitely want to be and will be the master of our own future. For the next 45 minutes, you're actually going to be the master of our future because now we're starting with the first Q&A session and bringing what you've heard so much about, open source, to life. We want to get in contact with you and answer your question. I would actually like to ask all presenters from this morning to the stage. Herbert, Claire, Eric, Matt, and Roland. We just need a couple of minutes because our dear guests from the media will have their separate Q&A session in a minute. Some time to take a glass of water and think about what you want to ask.
Got one?
For those people watching us on the Internet, you also have the chance to ask questions. Just click on the button and we will make sure that your questions will be answered here as well. This, of course, is only possible for investors and analysts.
Claire, why don't you go there?
Roland, do you think a good
I'll go the other way around. Do you want to go there? I want to go next to Claire.
Okay.
Are we all done? Thank you. I think we can slowly start. Antoine, please. Maybe you could mention your name and the company you're working for before you ask your question.
Yeah. Hi, it's Antoine Belge from HSBC. Two question, if I may. First of all, you decided to give targets for sales on net profit, not to mention a precise EBIT margin target. I think if we work out the numbers, it should be around nine or 10%. Can you maybe explain the rationale for not being so precise? The second thing is, I think you've given a lot of details about your e-commerce strategy. Yet at the same time, I think a lot of other consumer companies have been doing the same thing and probably Nike as well. Would you consider yourself in a sort of catching up phase, or do you think that you're leading the pack? Thank you.
Okay. Let me start by asking the first question. Roland, I think you can take the second one. Coming back to what you said, operating margin. We have given you a clear guidance how we want to grow our net income per year. If you do the mathematics as you have said, then you end up close to 10%. There is no doubt that we want to go to double-digit operating margin. We also have learned in the last plan that we have been bound to this 11% and this has made us too static. We definitely want to act flexible and agile in the period to go. There is no doubt, as I said, we want and we will go to double-digit operating margin.
We also want to have the flexibility when we have to act and when we have to invest, that we will invest. One point is for sure, and I hope we have brought it into the focus of all of you. We want to win the consumer. This is the ultimate goal for sustainable success of this company. This is what we will do. Don't worry, we will get to that. Roland.
Antoine, about the e-commerce question. Everybody else is doing e-commerce at some level, so do our competitors. The whole trend of the world is going into the digital world. Digitalization is a mega trend that stays with us, so we expect everybody to get about it. What we believe we will lead is the omnichannel aspect of the industry. We are set up to be the leaders of this trend, and that trend will shape the future of e-commerce. We believe that everybody who is not an omnichannel player, in a few years' time will actually not exist in the eyes of the consumer, because they're not able to do that seamless consumer journey and offer that to them. That, we believe, sets us up for success for the future.
Yeah.
Thanks. Two questions from my side. First, a pure numbers question. The CapEx level you expect to have for the next five years would be of interest given all the developments you're planning. Secondly, we've seen over the last Investor Days, last 10, 15 years, several initiatives that you put on stage. Some developed positively, some did not. At the end of the day, the question was on execution, which did not really materialize as it was expected. I think, Eric, you talked about a 90-day plan that you're trying to put in place. Could you please explain to us in more detail as to how you want to make sure that these targets that you have put in here will develop positively, that you can really execute on that, and that we, in 2020, sit here again and have a clearer picture that this will be executed?
What exact targets do you mean? We have given out a lot of targets today.
Basically all of them.
Basically all of them. This takes a little bit longer to explain them. First and foremost, to your first question on CapEx, we don't want to steal the thunder from Robin in the afternoon, so he will definitely answer this question to you as well. Of course, we are convinced that we will achieve these targets, otherwise we wouldn't have put it out today. Of course, we have learned of the last five years where we have failed. I also want to make one point clear what I said already in the morning. When you look to the sales numbers, we have really driven this market, and we do believe we can do even more. Where we have failed is on the operating margin.
There have been some external factors, as we all know, with the currency development, and there have been their own mistakes which we have made. We definitely learn out of these mistakes, and therefore, we have put even more KPIs into the targets of all of our guys. You might have read it in our annual report, what the targets for the board are. This is North America. This is margin. This is all these KPIs, and these are clear objectives for anybody in the bonus and long-term incentive programs to get there. We will be measured permanently. I think Robin will also tell you in the afternoon that we will hold in the future so-called tutorial meetings, or however we call it, where we give you every three to six months updates on specific categories, on specific targets, on specific KPIs.
Then you can permanently measure and hammer us on these targets, because we want to be as transparent as possible, and then you can make up your own mind. Over there.
Cédric Lecasble, Raymond James. I have a question on the overall sourcing organization. You've been speaking about flexibility, speed to market, lead times. How are you organized today in terms of being in a position to deliver the stores more rapidly? What's the global challenge around that? How do you see the organization three, five years from now? Thank you.
Good. I do believe in sourcing. We are organized very similar to our main competitors around the world. We have the biggest part of our footwear sourcing down in Asia, with the main country China, and then Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. On the apparel side, we are more spread. We have a big apparel sourcing part in Europe with a liaison office in Turkey, which is quite big. We have some sourcing in Latin America and Middle America, and then obviously in China as well. Apparel is much more fashion-driven, therefore it's much faster, and you have to make sure that you're closer to market. This is exactly what we want to be in the future with our footwear sourcing as well.
We want to get closer to the market because today everything is located in Asia, and obviously it takes you normally six weeks from the production site to your retail store if the product is finished already. Six weeks is too long. What you have seen already on the charts today and what you see here around, we don't know where we'll be there in two or three or in four years, but we will bring production back to Europe. We will bring production back to where the main markets are, with this automated production. This will make us then much faster. Obviously, this will help us in all the economical factors because then we don't need to produce three months in advance. We can directly produce to the market. We don't have distribution time, et cetera. This is what the future will be.
I can't give you any exact date today that I can say on the 1st of July 2018, we will have the first production here back in Germany. This is definitely the future. I absolutely believe we will be the leader and the first mover there. Yep
Thank you, sir. Julian Easthope from Barclays. I was very impressed by the 45-day speed to market from inception to store. That was very specifically, I guess, in the more casual or the sports style products. I just wondered how, on that basis, how you compared with probably the competition there, which is more like H&M, Inditex, and Uniqlo, those kind of companies, whether that you think is your main competitor. Also in the same vein, how long is your speed to market for your real sports performance gear that I think you said was one and a half years for most companies. I just wondered how you compare with that. Thank you.
I think this is for you.
Yeah.
Will Claire do it?
Yeah. Good.
Okay.
You can start.
I'll default to Claire when it gets into the expertise. Currently, our industry's been based on 18-month futures program. That's how it is. We buy it on six-month futures, and we ship it into market. That's the way it's been since the industry was really resurrected in, I guess, in the mid-1980s. We aim to change that. That's very clear with our speed initiatives. We started it with a pilot in Neo, which Claire, I think, talked about very clearly, to experiment in that area. Make no bones about it, we're here to reset the sporting goods industry. All right? That's very clear.
When you talk about the Inditexes and the Zaras and the H&Ms of the world, they have their own model, and we've learned a lot from them, but we've created a better model for the sporting goods industry, whether it be for more of the sportswear product, the streetwear product, or yes, even the sports performance product. Our goal, as Claire said, I believe, was 50% by 2020 to have all of our product, and that includes sports performance product, on the shortened lead times and the planned responsiveness and in-season creation. Claire, did I miss anything?
You didn't.
Okay.
No. You were spot on.
Yeah. I steal all the thunder from you. Does this answer your question? Good.
Maybe we'll take a first look into the internet and see if we have.
Questions there. Question?
We have one question from the webcast. By how much will you have to increase your advertising spend to get to these 2020 numbers? Thank you.
Good. Overall, as we have said that we will invest more marketing working budget in the years 2015 and 2016. This we have already told you a few months ago. For certain initiatives, especially on the North American market. Finally, in the course of the years to 2020, we want to go back to this around 30% marketing working budget where we have been before. Don't forget, with the growth which we have, the 30% is in absolutes much more than what we have today.
Kelly.
Does this make sense? You're looking so critically.
Yes.
Okay. Good.
Hi, guys. This is Kelly from Telsey Advisory Group. You guys have clearly talked about how North America is a market where you need to improve and win. I think part of the global sales strategy was to take more ownership of the wholesale managed space. Could you talk a little bit more about those efforts in North America specifically? What do you intend to do when you manage that wholesale space? We've seen a lot of your competitors be successful in opening up shop in shop. What exactly are you doing when you manage that? What type of lift have you seen when you manage that space? Does that mean that the profitability in North America goes down as you make those investments, or is it kind of a straighter trajectory upwards?
Kelly, everything I explained this morning, of course, is absolutely relevant for North America as it is for every other market. This afternoon, we have our friend Mark King come on stage and really talk about our approach to North America, and he will mention I've seen his speech. He will mention the work that we're doing in retail space management and some of our key partners. If you wouldn't mind to take the answer then, and we'll make sure that Mark takes care of that point specifically in his presentation. Great. Thank you.
Yep. Yep.
Simon Irwin from Credit Suisse. Within the e-com target that you set yourself, how much of that do you think is going to be direct from yourselves? How much do you think via stores? You weren't very clear as to whether you expected kind of collect at store to be purely through your own stores, or whether your wholesale and franchise partners would be part of that.
To explain the EUR 2 billion, that is the business that we believe we will do ourselves with end consumers directly. We very clearly will leverage our store network that exists to ensure that that e-com business is thriving forward. For example, if you go to one of the omnichannel models that I explained where you can actually order in store. You are looking at this endless aisle, and you order something. That we would count as e-commerce. This is where the businesses come together, right? Of course, our customers, the Foot Locker and Decathlon of this world, they will also have their e-com business that is not included into the EUR 2 billion.
Right. You did not say much about wearables today. I mean, do you see wearables as predominantly being a hardware solution, or do you think it is much more about the software and the customer engagement through that?
I think it is.
It is a combination of both. I think that you have to have some wearables, or you have to have a wearable offering so that the consumer can benefit from all the applications and the software that comes with it. The key is, how do you partner with a wearable, or how do you create wearables yourself, and how do you partner with the software, or do you do that yourself? The magic is to be in the game. As I talked about a little bit, how we got into digital sports and the data we achieved last year. It is also then the offering always needs to evolve. I think partnership is key theme for me today as far as how we look at partners in this space will be critical for our success in this space as well.
Okay. The obvious question is how you set up for Apple.
How we set up for Apple?
Yes. Will you have any kind of potential of getting involved in that space? You talk about open architecture.
Well, I think right now we have applications already on the Apple app, on their library. We're already involved on their devices for people to download us. I guess that your question is will we continue to do that with their devices, as their devices are open to all apps that come in, as long as they meet their standards? That's clear. I can't really talk about anything else at this point from a competitive standpoint.
Thank you.
For cross-company.
Yep. Over here.
Stefan partner. One follow-up question on that e-commerce side. You mentioned this is a main growth driver, quadruple sales by 2020. How you manage that? Because you mentioned at one point also that, you will increasingly deliver it out of the stores, the shipment. Are there also distribution centers planned, new distribution centers? Because I believe if you want to quadruple sales, the SKUs in the stores are usually lower than what you have to offer in the full range. How are you going to manage that? Just a question about the midterm target. It sounds like, am I right that this time it's going to be much more equally spread out, the growth, what we see it's a more equal distributed growth figure than what included the previous guide, so we should have year by year more visibility on that. Is that right?
Let me ask a second question. Once again, Robin will tell you more in the afternoon about that. I understand the question, but as I said, if we don't want to make Robin obsolete, we spare the question for him in the afternoon. I mean obsolete just for this meeting, don't get it wrong.
Stefan, to your question about e-commerce and what's the impact going to be on our supply chain. We firmly believe that in the future, we need to bring all the inventories that we have in the company under one roof. We don't believe in an e-com specific warehouse. We believe that availability, quite the opposite, will be driven by us pooling our stocks across the different channels. Simply reading the market, understanding what the consumer requires where, and then being able to flexibly ship to where that happens in the fastest way. Again, availability we believe will be one of the key drivers for our success in terms of e-com acceleration between now and 2020. Yes, you're absolutely right.
The endless aisle philosophy is going to be one of the key drivers where we obviously connect e-commerce to the store network because no store in the world, in fact, can hold all the offering that we have. That's the combination between the physical world and the e-com growth then.
Okay. Over here. Over there.
Christopher Svezia from Susquehanna. Roland, a question for you first. China. I think you mentioned you wanted to be number 1 in China. Your competitor is roughly $3 billion. You're roughly $2 billion, give or take. Just your confidence level to sort of get there. Growth is accelerating in these markets, inventories are stabilized. I'm just curious about your confidence level in terms of closing that gap and surpassing. I guess, the second question, Eric, maybe for you. Product and, you talk about embracing the consumer and understanding consumer product. Product innovation is key. Obviously, Boost, you have a very innovative technology. Just maybe talk about maybe what else either you foresee coming in the future, whether in uppers or in sole technology or something that really entices and excites the consumer that adidas could really focus in on.
Andreas, do you want to-
I start on China. Thank you for the question. Yes, we're very confident that we will get there by 2020 latest because we are on a tremendous trajectory. What we're basing our sort of optimism on is the fact that we're selling through ahead of the rate of our major competitor, first. Second, we're the most profitable brand in China for our partners. As you know, the China model basically means that our partners decide pretty much every six months, I guess, how many stores they, in the future, will open. Profitability from brand is one of the key aspects of that one. We believe that our partners will continue to open more stores with us than with anyone else, and this is going to be one of the absolute key drivers.
Lastly, we believe that we're actually running the major categories that make a difference in China in terms of consumer insight. It's not just about running and football. Very clearly, our mono-branded Neo store fleet in China is making a dramatic difference. All the work that Claire and her team have done in China. We believe we're set up for market leadership by 2020.
Maybe I can correct the numbers a little bit. I think EUR 3 billion is overstated. The EUR 2 billion is right. Remember, we report in euros and not in U.S. dollars. Correct. Our EUR 2 billion is correct. I do believe the EUR 3 billion is overstated for Nike in China. The gap is much closer. We have been growing faster the last three years than our main competitor. Okay. Second question.
From a product standpoint, the innovations we have, we believe are second to none. There's no doubt about that. With Boost, with some of our Cleat technology and stuff, we know we have the innovations. I think to be very reflective and honest, we don't think we've always had the best upper innovations. Or maybe not innovations is the right word, but maybe aesthetics. I think what we need to do is combine those two much more readily. We're getting better and better at it every day. If I can reflect and be honest, I think our innovation pipeline is full. We can't disclose where that's coming, but we continue to get better there. We need to make sure we continue to stack talent in design and specifically in U.S. insights to fuel those products going forward.
Yep. I think he is already lifting his hand since 10 minutes.
Hi there. Thank you. It's Jaimie Bajwa from Goldman Sachs. Just the first one in terms of what you were talking about in terms of shared inventories, and how that's going to be rolled out across all of your distribution. I just wondered if you could help us explain how that will work, particularly with your wholesale partners. Particularly how you're managing growth between retail and wholesale and actually sharing the inventories together, and whether that even changes the agreements that you have with your wholesale partners. The second one is just on your store growth that you talked about, and adding new stores. How much of that is going to be split between the markets that you talked about in terms of growth markets, extending your leadership, and then the ones where you currently are leaders?
Thirdly, just on the omnichannel, particularly in terms of how you're managing the third party with your own e-commerce. I just wondered why you're thinking about going on your own in terms of e-commerce so aggressively first before actually using partners to try and actually scale up your business.
All right. I guess, [lot] for you.
Most of those questions go to me. Starting on the first question, which is about the inventory sharing. We obviously operate a wholesale model, which is very clearly driven by what Eric shared before, the futures business model, which are firm contracts that we take with customers. Don't underestimate that in the world of wholesale, you get cancellations, you have certain risk orders that at the end of the day are not materializing and so on. Then, of course, we are taking a risk ourselves and being available in terms of never out of stock. To your question, we believe that we can significantly improve the availability of our products online and in store without walking away from the business model that is a firm model.
However, if we have excess inventories or if we have additional availability, we will probably prioritize these quantities to our e-com and own retail stores in the future. That's I think the first aspect of things. Your second question was about where will the store growth happen over the next couple of years. Yes, I think we will continue to operate the stores and open the stores in those key cities. I would expect a significant amount of these stores that we mentioned and called out here to be opened first in those key cities, and then in the markets in which those key cities exist to benefit from the halo impact that we're generating there.
To your last point, I am not sure if it did not come across so well, our approach to e-commerce is certainly to open up our omnichannel system to the key partners over the next couple of years. As I briefly explained, as of 2017, we are starting to reach out certainly to our global key accounts to integrate them into our efforts of omnichannel, and we are in fact testing some of those affiliate models even today. Our drive across omnichannel and e-commerce is certainly going to include our key partners globally. Does that take care of the questions?
Yep. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, contrary in the past, we have not got any question to Reebok so far. I take it as the agreement that you all find with our direction. If you have a question for Matt, he is still here. Who is next? Over there.
Yeah. Hi, Geoff Lowery, Redburn. Two questions. You talked about a 20% improvement in full price sell-through, which feels like a huge number. Can you give us some context on what the starting point is on that or some color around what it really means for your business? The second one is actually on Reebok. When we look at the Reebok business, there is obviously a significant margin gap at a gross margin level versus Brand adidas. Of the many initiatives you described, does margin feature via mix or product type sort of getting that margin up as part of that sales strategy as well?
You want to start with Reebok?
Thank you. I do take the lack of questions as a compliment as well. Regarding Reebok's margin, this is certainly our biggest opportunity if we look at our contribution to the group overall. There's a number of factors that are going to expand our margin over the next five years. Some of them are distribution related, meaning, there's some places where we have shared our distribution with a partner like our joint venture in Latin America, which will cease to exist. We'll put that on our platform and see margin expansion there. Then there's some other distributor relationships that are opportunities around the world. Certainly the biggest part of our margin expansion is going to come from the increase in our average selling price.
That this is already happening, that we're seeing the consumer kind of trading up to a better version of Reebok than what we have historically known for Reebok. This is particularly apparent in our apparel business. We believe there's a significant opportunity in the footwear business because this consumer is a passionate, avid participant, much like many of the other sports that Eric's talked about. As such, they're willing to pay for the best gear. I think that these changes in distribution model, as well as changes in our average selling price and trading the consumer up to a better version of Reebok are going to be the two biggest contributors.
As far as the 20% lift in full price sell-through, we can't really disclose what we have today. We feel good about the number. We feel very good about the case we've built around Neo. We've seen our lifts come up, we've seen what it can do for our brand going forward from a maximization. We know we've got great opportunity on maximizing full price sell-through versus where we are today. We feel safe about 20% because it all goes back to giving the consumer what they want, when they want it, where they want it. That's the speed model. We don't have a strategy of hope anymore, where you stick it in, you hope they buy it. Now it's like, well, we're going to put a little bit in there. If they buy it, we double down.
If they don't, we get out without big inventory issues. That's the model.
Just if I can just have one follow-up. The 25% reduction in sort of SKUs or sort of lines, option, whatever.
That was the hoodie example, remember?
Yeah. What does that mean in absolute number? What do they contribute in sales?
Let me just make one more point to that, what Eric said. Where we exactly can measure the uplift of the 20% is obviously in our own retail system. From the wholesaler, we sometimes get data for full price sell-through, but most of the time, we don't get. Where we exactly can measure it, as I said, in Neo and in our own store. Now 25% reduction.
Yeah. Again, I don't want to talk in absolutes because it's a floating number season by season. But in general, as I told you, it's already in the book. As we've already started the fall 2016 creation season, it's already been reduced from what is in the designer pipeline right now from fall 2015. Going back to your other question, that's measured, that's done, and we're tracking that on 90-day increments as we go forward. I think spring 2017 and fall 2017 give me another opportunity, give us another opportunity to even sharpen more so. It's the first time we've really taken this approach to kind of look at everything holistically and continue to look at how we do more by doing less, mean more by doing less.
Thank you.
We've had another question from the web.
From the web.
The next question from the webcast. You were not able to achieve some of your Route 2015 targets. Why should investors believe that you can do it this time?
Simply because we have learned from the Route 2015 experiences and the mistakes we have made, as we said this morning. I do believe that when you, for example, look to the fourth quarter where you all have some numbers, you definitely see that there is momentum behind the brands. The adidas brand was growing by 11%, I think in Western Europe, if I have it right in my mind, 13%. As I said this morning, this momentum will continue because we get the weekly numbers. Therefore, we are absolutely convinced, A, because we took the learnings, and we admit it, we have made some mistakes, but we took the learnings. B, I can guarantee you and confirm that, especially adidas and Reebok really have momentum outside.
We have another question.
By the way, I think our stock is undervalued.
Go for it. Yeah.
Who else?
One more question. It seems like Reebok is finally turning around with a focus on health and active sports, a partnership with UFC, et cetera. Are you open to selling the brand, or can we be confident that it will remain in the group?
Yeah, definitely. There is no doubt. As we said this morning, these are the three main brands. My personal answer, we have got hammered for six or seven years for Reebok, and now we turn it around and it really is inspiring so many consumers. I think we would be stupid to sell it now.
Thanks, Herbert. More questions from the room? Adrian?
Thanks. It's Adrian from Deutsche Bank. We've heard great level of detail around how you're planning to push ahead with your controlled spaces and your wholesale partnerships. I was wondering whether you can comment on how you see your sourcing and distribution network prepared for that world. I understand that you have a new distribution center at the outskirts of Paris opening or going live next year. You've mentioned that there are new challenges, when you need distribution centers that are able to both handle orders from the online shop as well as shipping to wholesalers. Are you expecting a lot of investment and CapEx flowing that way? That'd be interesting to hear. Thanks.
Sorry. Can you take it?
Adrian, thanks for the question. First of all, we believe that at least in the major markets, in the four focus markets that I talked about this morning, I think we're really well set up. Our activities that we have taken already into investing into a new distribution center in China, our upgrading of our infrastructure in Europe, which with the massive investment into reset. Everything we have done about our Spartanburg facility in North America, and certainly what I mentioned about Latin America, where we are in the process of ramping up new warehouses and so on. I think we're absolutely set up for success, and we have obviously taken the direction of these centers is really to be an omnichannel player and to be able to use the availability and leverage our inventory pool to all these places.
In a nutshell, no, I don't think that we need to do much more beyond what we have already taken care of. Yes, there will continue to be certain learnings that we take along the way where we say, "We now need something more specific to the French market or closer to the Spanish market," or whatever. These are small investments, but we believe we're set up for success in our channel. Our distribution system is already in a position to satisfy these strategies that we've presented this morning.
Right. Thanks.
Over here. Yeah. Here. Yep.
Andreas Willmann, Commerzbank. Two questions from my side. First one on Russia. Yesterday, we learned it's still a growth region, and it was one of the attack regions back in 2010. Today, it's not anymore among the top 4 growth regions. How important is Russia? Are you trying to limit the risk of the growth region? Maybe some light on that. The second one on currencies. Are you also confident to achieve 9%-10% EBIT margin in the next years with euro, dollar, and ruble remaining where they are right now?
Let me start with the second question. Once again, Robin can give you more light to that. You know that currencies go up and down, and to a certain extent, they play into our favor, and to a certain extent, they don't play in our favor. Last year, we had them against us on the translation effect. This year, a lot of currencies are much better in terms of translation. Robin can give you a little bit more light to this one. The first one to Russia, I'll take it because 5 years ago, I was here as well. I think we have seen a fantastic growth in Russia, and Russia was definitely a very profitable market, one of the most profitable markets for us in the last 5-10 years, and we have gained a lot of profit out of Russia.
I definitely do believe Russia will stay a big market. You have 150 million consumers. We have a dominant position being market leader there with adidas. Reebok is a very strong number 3. We are still profitable in Russia, even with this ruble devaluation. I personally do believe the ruble will come back one day, the oil price will go up. We are more careful in Russia, therefore we put not all our money into Russia and drive its growth because we want to balance our risks there as well. We see much more potential for the near future in the 4 markets which we have described. Yep.
Yes. Ralf Stromeyer here from Allianz Global Investors. I'm intrigued by your target of improving sales productivities at your concept stores by 7% per annum, while you have achieved 7% over the last 5 years. That seems quite an aggressive target to me. One question is concept stores, how much of your business is there? What sort of size are we talking about? Also, can you speak a bit more about it, and what are the main drivers of that? I can imagine omnichannel should be a big driver because it includes online sales. Also, talk a bit about why are you so confident, and also should we just see that as an opportunity or also as a risk? You set up the business for growth, and if you don't achieve the com store sales, you won't keep your profitability.
Is there also a risk there? Is there a certain rate of growth that you need in order to not to dilute your margins?
Ralf, let me, I guess, take that question. First of all, the last five years, we've been improving our per square meter net sales already at a rate of about 5%. That's excluding Russia, and I believe I made that point clear. That sets us up for a solid base. We again have learned over the last years what are the specific levers to pull. Very clearly, conversion is a key driver for productivity going forward. If you just think through the one percentage point improvement that we are seeing from the new consumer service model being brought to the stores where we have tested it. You then just convert that back into a productivity number. That is a significant first element.
The second element I would say is that over the last years, we have learned how product, how assortment planning, how merchandising is working better and where are we achieving a higher degree of success. That is a significant big territory of further improvement. We have taken the head of retail, a person by the name Michael Stanier, I guess you met, most of you met him last night. We've taken Michael and asked him to now work in the brand together with Eric Liedtke in the so-called concept to consumer function. That basically means that all this work around merchandising, assortment planning, has now been taken into the brand. We in the markets in that sense, get a ready-to-implement solution from the very beginning. We believe that's a significant second opportunity as far as store productivities are concerned.
Then thirdly, I would just repeat what I said this morning about omnichannel and all the innovations that we're bringing. We're confident about the 7% on average. It will not be a straight line. It's the average over the five years. It's currency neutral, all the things we talked about before. Therefore, we are confident we can drive it. We look at it as a tremendous opportunity. We don't see it as a risk. We believe that the 7% will be a significant element, roughly half of the growth rate that we can drive from the concept store, roughly the other half coming from the additional store opening. I believe that's at least how we look at it. I hope you can share our perspective.
Just if I may add, one of the reasons Michael's come over is because he's now driving the reduction in models as well. Because when we get more directive on what we want to put in stores, we can be more directive on what the product is. Him being part of the brands influences more creation than ever before. It all kind of adds together. My 25% reduction with the increased productivity of own retail, we also see that carrying on to wholesale as we do more and more plan packages, as Roland presented. It's all working together by bringing those two things together.
In addition, we also put our money, marketing work and budget money behind the key franchises to drive them further, and they will be a key of bringing our 7% to life as well. Yep. You have been already good. Okay.
You get to go again.
Hi. It's Simon Owen again. Can I just come back to you when you're talking about marketing expense? Obviously, in the media rights, there's been massive inflation in recent years, which is very public. Rather less so, obviously, is your cost of sponsoring athletes. Teams, et cetera. Obviously, we hear examples like Manchester United. How do you know that EUR 750 or whatever the number is the right number? What kind of underlying inflation has there been in the cost of sponsoring athletes, and how are you confident you still get a good return on that?
Of course, you can imagine that we have several metrics, how to define what the right price is. This is an investment in the future, and you never can be 100% sure whether it pays out exactly like that. We have done the whole calculation on the past, what has happened on the fan base, on the subscribers for Manchester United, on the commercial potential, which they have already today and what we do believe they have. Therefore, we came up not only with the GBP 750 million which we pay, but also with the EUR 1.5 billion revenues which we want to make. I can tell you, without going into too much detail, that for the first year, which will start in August this year, we have started with selling already, that our internal target we will over-achieve in the first year.
There is some pipeline filling, et cetera, it depends a little bit how they play. We have done an in-depth analysis over months and months, what the brand can do for us. The Manchester United brand, what the commercial success is, how many consumers they have, how many people are engaged. They have around 670 million fans. They have 39 million subscribers, this is how we brought all to life. No worries.
Just to follow up on that. Typically, how much is there built into these contracts in terms of performance? For example, does it cost you more or less if they get into the Champions League? Does it cost you more or less if a prominent athlete gets injured, et cetera?
Good. This is a simple answer because as you know, Manchester United is on the stock exchange, they had to disclose all of that, it was clearly written in the disclosure that if they miss two times the Champions League, the contract is reduced by 30%.
That's common across the kind of contracts you all do with teams-
We put performance elements in all the contracts because it's not that much the general reputation of a club if they miss once a Champions League, for example, but it is definitely the commercial effect which we have. One more question before we then go to lunch.
Thank you. Thomas Grillenberger , Allianz Global Investors. Two questions, if I may. First one is quite straightforward. Should you do any M&A acquisitions, the targets would be adjusted. Could you confirm that, please? Secondly, my impression is that five years ago we've heard much more about the lifestyle initiatives you've had. I remember adidas SLVR and the adidas Originals Y-3, and of course Neo. We haven't heard a lot today on this yet. Maybe there's more to come. Can I interpret this as a bit of a de-emphasizing of the lifestyle segment in your strategy? Would that be a fair comment? There's a big emphasis on performance, obviously, today.
Yeah. Which we think is right because we are a sports company. Answering your first question, no, in these numbers, there isn't any M&A included. This is pure organic growth.
I think Eric's talked very eloquently this morning about our focus on sport. Of course, we know from a lifestyle perspective, we started the whole trend with Yohji Yamamoto 14 years ago, bringing sport and style together. We see that as part of our DNA as well. It's rooted in sport. It's part of sport. We don't plan to move away from that, of course. It's part of our overall brand portfolio.
Maybe in addition to that, Y-3, and I was there when we started the cooperation. Y-3 was always meant to help us to make the brand cooler. This was never a big revenue driver, and it definitely has helped us to make the brand cooler and not just be a football brand and male driven. With Neo, we have clear commercial targets. As we said, we will achieve EUR 1 billion in 2015, and obviously this will continue to grow.
Will we hear more about Neo this afternoon, or which countries? In Germany it's still a rollout or a trial, rather.
She can give you a few more information because she created the Neo business here and is running it.
Yes. Of course, Neo is, as Herbert's already said, is a growth driver. We continue to focus on growing the label in both wholesale and own retail. China, as I'm sure you're aware, and of course Roland alluded to earlier, is one of our biggest markets. We have a lot of successes within Japan and Russia as well. Of course, Western Europe with our stores in Germany, Czech, and Poland. Overall, a very successful business and growing in all markets. Also, which I think Mark will mention later on, doing very well in the U.S. too.
Any plans to expand into further countries in Western Europe beyond Germany?
From an own retail perspective?
Yeah. Neo.
In general. Of course, we plan to expand Neo, as it is a key growth driver, as we've alluded to and told you today. Of course, our plans, we don't want to disclose all of our plans going down into the Nth degree from a label perspective. Of course, we have growth plans, yes.
Yeah, just in addition, we are already in, besides outside of Germany, with the wholesalers in Austria and Switzerland, et cetera. One point, in addition to that, Claire, with Neo, we also get to a new target group, which we didn't connect so well before, this young, more female-driven consumer. This definitely gives us opportunities for the future as well, above the Neo business in general.
Okay.
Okay. I think that's about it. We'll have some more Q&A sessions in the afternoon, and I'm sure that everyone here is happy to answer your questions also during the lunch break. We will regroup again at 2:00, and then we're heading right into the regions and hearing more about North America and Western Europe. Thank you very much.
Bon appetit.
[Foreign language] Katharina, das ist ein Kabel von uns. Schau mal, ist es das hier? Okay, weil hier liegt auch noch mal eins.
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Like an angry force through doors of cars. Surrounding my sleep with his folded arms. He's got that early key to go. He's so mercifully free of the pressures of grace. Stay later than Satan, he's not bored of his place. He's so mercifully free of the pressures of grace. Stay later than Satan, he's not bored of his place. I know I won't forget you, but I'll forget myself if the city won't forget me. I know I won't forget you, but I'll forget myself if the city won't forget me. Are you cruising the room in a lost second hand? Are you drinking too hard to find the way you stand? Are you washing your hair off the drinking glass? Are you falling in love with every second song? Are you cruising the room in a lost second hand?
Are you drinking too hard to find the way you stand? Are you washing your hair off the drinking glass? Are you falling in love? Are you falling in love? Are you falling in love with every second song? I know I won't forget you, but I'll forget myself if the city won't forget me. I know I won't forget you, but I'll forget myself if the city won't forget me. See you turn 'round town with the girl I love and I'm like, "Forget you." I took a chance at my luck and it wasn't enough. I'm like, "Forget you and forget her too." Said, "If I was richer, I still be with you." Sure hope that French fashion, I give it to you, baby. Said, "Forget you." Sorry that I bought a Ferrari, but that don't mean I can't get you there.
She's an X5 and I'm more Atari. The way you play your game, I care. I pictured it, ooh. You fall in love with you. Ooh, I've got some news for you. Go and run tell your little boy. See you turn 'round town with the girl I love and I'm like, "Forget you." I took a chance at my luck and it wasn't enough. I'm like, "Forget you and forget her too." Said, "If I was richer, I still be with you." I had tomorrow. Beggin', stealin', lyin', cheatin'. Tryin' to keep ya, tryin' to please ya. Spendin' all the change we had been keepin'. I said, ooh-hoo, I'm fallin' in love with you. She's cold. Just like a stone. Ooh-hoo, I've got some news for you. I can't show up right now. See you right outside with the girl I love.
I'd like to forget you. I got the change in my pocket. It wasn't enough. I'd like to forget you and forget her too. Said, my expression could kill me where ya. The way that it shined. Oh, that pain in my chest, I feel it still the best. I forget you. Baby, baby, why you wanna hurt me so bad? So bad. So bad. So bad. I tried to tell my mama, but she told me, "This is one for your dad." She did. I go, "Why? Why? Why me? I love you. I still love you." See you right outside with the girl I love. Forget you. I got the change in my pocket. It wasn't enough. I'd like to forget you and forget her too. Said, my expression could kill me where ya.
The way that it shined. Oh, that pain in my chest, I feel it still the best. I forget you. Direction's fought and passes here. Sometimes it's much and sometimes it is. She may be off, but you'll be on her list. No time to touch, no time to kiss. A tolerate capacity. Could be a tip or it means to me. No one gets back all that empty hands. She's got the script, so you're on that. Some way, just go and love you up. Get out, shake off, and go clear. You run. Then you run. Then you run. It's not for good, but I think it's hers. You run. Just off her arms, you're gonna ground. Align a check, apply a chart. Come on, you've got control at last. You leave it on, it's bound to blow.
Twice you're wrong, the time is up. Then she sets you up, then she cuts you out. Oh, oh. Don't you let that dawn. You know you're wrong. Don't you ever be dumb. No time to waste, we're almost done. The pain remains. No time to lose, no time to run. You run. Then you run. Then you run. It's not for good, but I think it's hers. You run. Just off her arms, you're gonna ground. Then you run.
Don't put your hands 'fore I cool down. Just sit back. They gonna get stuck. Don't touch that. Before I cool down. Don't turn away. This is my town. Like a shotgun. Needs an outcome. I'm your prostitute. You gonna get some. Like a shotgun. Needs an outcome. I'm your prostitute. You gonna get some. Go ahead go way low where I can do no harm. Go ahead go way low where my honey love belongs. Go ahead go way low where I can do no wrong. Wrapped around my finger like the lonely lover's charm, like the lonely lover's charm. Ain't gonna care. I'm gonna go west. Just like a man. I'm the full threat. Like a shotgun. I can't be outdone. I'm your prostitute. You gonna get some. Like a shotgun. Needs an outcome. I'm your prostitute. You gonna get some.
Go ahead go way low where I can do no harm. Go ahead go way low where my honey love belongs. Go ahead go way low where I can do no wrong. Wrapped around my finger like the lonely lover's charm. Go ahead go. Go ahead go. Go ahead go. Go ahead go. Go ahead go. Go ahead go. Go ahead go way low where I can do no harm. Go ahead go way low where my honey love belongs. Go ahead go way low where I can do no wrong. Wrapped around my finger like the lonely lover's charm, like the lonely lover's charm, like the lonely lover's charm.
Test, Test. [Foreign language] Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf. [Foreign language] so. [Foreign language] Genau, die brauchen wir auch auf alle Fälle noch. [Foreign language] Wenn du mir diese generierst, kriegst du auch nochmal eine Mail. [Foreign language] Das ist jetzt keine Restriktion, keine Kritik, sondern das ist einfach so, dass wir auch auf YouTube promoten müssen. [Foreign language] Das wäre schön, wenn du uns da vielleicht noch ein paar LED-Wände und vielleicht noch wieder wirklich proper diese Runde mit 3 Kameras selber für uns machen könntest. [Foreign language] Genau, danke. [Foreign language] Du hast gesagt, du hast jetzt die anderen drei Videos nicht, dann würde ich mal nächste Frage: Wollen wir die Story weitergeben oder was? [Foreign language] Genau, die haben wir dann weitergegeben.
Okay. Is anybody introducing me?
Do you want to get up?
Yeah. Would you introduce me, please?
Hi, my name is .
I was just telling him we had a little late dinner at my apartment in Portland with your brother there, not so long ago, and somebody was talking about how much he loves running and exercising, yoga, and yoga. Herbert went up and says, "I understand you're exercising, but you still look fat to me." Not only that, but he actually went like this. "You still look so fat to me.
That's what he said about you to me. I said, "I'm really glad the way you're doing in your apartment.
Yeah. I had a big coat on.
Are you wearing your coat on stage? I've got a few.
I blame it on the coat. It is. I wear the coat everywhere. He eats more than any person I've ever met. Not bad. I mean, he eats all good healthy foods, but he eats a lot. Oh, yeah. When you start bulking up to 135 and 36. Barely. Don't talk about pre-diet, though, because I think you had him.
Does anybody want to try?
Is he talking about fitness?
No.
The opposite of fitness. I don't have a going concern; I have a growing concern. That's a good sign, yeah. It all starts with the going sign. Remember the first time we met, Dave was 10 years older. Obviously, there must be something wrong with you. Well, you're actually right. There is a lot wrong with me. Not just his weight.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're running a little bit late, since I know that most of you want to leave lovely Herzogenaurach tonight and want to get on the respective flights to wherever you need to head, I would ask you to take your seat again so that we can actually start. I think we can get started. I think we all know that the slot right after the lunch break is not the most favorite one. If there's one speaker that I actually think will be able to keep you awake and make sure that you really pay attention to what he has to say, then it is the following speaker. That's for two reasons. One is he's talking about a market that we have said is going to be a top priority for us going forward, North America.
Mark King is a person that I have to say is very inspiring, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing here on the stage. Please welcome with me the President of adidas North America, Mark King.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone.
Good afternoon.
Not bad. A year ago, I was sitting at my desk in Carlsbad, California, and Herbert called me and said, "Would you be interested in running our business in North America, the adidas business in North America?" He said, "Take a few days and think about it." During that time, I talked to Eric, I talked to Roland, I talked to a few people, and definitely understood that there were big challenges, and not only big challenges, but big expectations. The more I thought about big challenges and big expectations, why else would you want to go to work in the morning? For me, trying to be a part of something that is extraordinary is a lot more exciting than trying to be a part of something that's incremental.
When I looked at, during that week leading up to telling Herbert that I would do it, I just thought about why would I do this, and I would definitely do it because it's a big challenge, and with big challenges come big payoffs and big opportunities. When I talked to Herbert on Friday, I was more than excited to say, "Herbert, I know we have a lot ahead of us. I know we have a lot of challenges, but I'm really thrilled and honored to be the guy that you think could do this." It didn't take me very long to hear Herbert talk about we have the ability to change lives through sport.
I heard Eric say, "We want to be the best sports company, the best sports brand in the world." If you think about that statement, the best sports brand in the world, there's only really one way you could actually take claim to that if you wanted to be honest with yourself. We have to be the best sports brand in America. It's not like that's an option. That's what we have to be. As I got into this job, I really got inspired about making a difference in people's lives and coming from golf, which is a category within sport, to now say that you have kind of the kingdom of sport in a nation, and you'll be able to change people's lives through those sports and do something meaningful in society. How could you not want to be a part of that?
I think it's really important that our company have big aspirations, because nothing extraordinary happens without big aspirations. Especially in America, where fortune favors the bold. We live in an environment, in a society in America where people who take risks and try to do big things and try to disrupt and change the world as we know it, those are the people that succeed. If I bring nothing else, I bring, "I'm really excited about trying to do something extraordinary." We're one of only two global sports brands. We have resources that no one else has. We're going to use those resources in a much different way than we have before, and we're going to make a difference. It's the biggest stage in the world for sport. I think Eric said it was 30%.
It's somewhere between 30%-40% of the global sports market is in the U.S. It's the biggest stage. It's the biggest opportunity. It's where we have to win the consumer. You heard a lot today about controlled space and open source and all of these things that we're going to do to win the consumer. At the end of the day, the reason that we haven't succeeded as well as we wanted in America is we don't own the hearts and minds of the athlete and the consumers in America. How do you measure that? You measure it only one way, and that's market share. There's Net Promoter Score, there's all these things, really the ultimate payoff is how much market share do we have.
We will be really focused as we build our plan and we start to execute on two things, the consumer, the athlete, the people who define a brand in a country. We need the hearts and minds, that translates to market share. That's what we'll be driving for. Before I get to how we're going to try to do this and how we're going to move forward and how we're going to start to get market share, I think it's really important that Really, the board asked me to do this. I've been on the job since last June, officially June 1st.
I really started about in May, I spent the summer traveling all around, meeting customers, meeting our athletes, meeting our universities, just talking to as many people as I could Herbert and the board said, "Mark, before you start to put a plan together, let's really understand what we did right, maybe what we didn't do so right, and let's really get honest about where we are and who we are in America." I've got five or six things that I think we can really learn from and we can be better at as we go forward. The first is when you have a dominating position in anything, as we do in, I'm an American, so I'm not calling it football, I know I'm in the center of football in the world here in Germany, but I'm going with soccer because I'm an American.
When you have a dominating position the way adidas does in the world in a category, there's some really great things about it, and then there's some things you have to be careful of. That caution is, let's not just use one category to think that we can influence athletes in all of the different categories. Because there's something that's really kind of unique about America in sport. We have so many sports that so many athletes play. Let's take high school. The average high school in America has 15 team sports that both men and women participate in. Colleges in the U.S. have an average of 35 sports that kids, both women and men, participate in. If we're going to be the kind of brand, if we're going to be the best sports brand in America, we can't just dominate soccer.
We have to be very embedded in sport in America. All of these sports that really start to define our society because sport defines the society in America. It's so powerful, and I know it is in every other country, but in most countries, there's one sport that dominates. Very, very different mindset in America. We have to really focus on not only soccer, but all the other ones. Because of that, I think over time, it wasn't a plan, but over time, we lost connection with a lot of these different sports. What are those sports? There's football, baseball, basketball. Those are the three big sports in America. Football, that's U.S. football, baseball, basketball. There's volleyball, there's softball, there's lacrosse, there's field hockey, there's hockey, there's so many. There's tennis, there's golf, and all of these sports are played.
We have to be able to reconnect, not just to our soccer base, but to all these athletes. If you look over the past 10 or 15 years, the messaging to the U.S. athlete, the messaging to the U.S. consumer on adidas has been very inconsistent in America. In World Cup years, it's all about soccer. Sometimes it's about basketball, and sometimes we don't have a message at all. One of the things we said is if we're going to go forward, we've got to have a clear message of who we are, who we want to be, and we have to be consistently delivering that to our consumer over an extended period of time. There's a lot written and talked about the design and the look and the style of our products in America.
Look, we don't have a design problem or a style problem in general, but specifically, as you start to look at different categories, we've got to be able to generate designs and products and the messaging that really resonates with the U.S. consumer. That's really, really important. The other thing that's really different about America, because of the size of the market, 40%, really great technologies like Boost, although they resonate at the very top of the pyramid, the bulk of the business in America is in the middle. It's in price points from $70-$100 in most footwear categories. Where are we really strong as a brand? At the very top price points. High, big technologies like Boost. You heard Eric talk today about bringing Bounce out, which is a really great technology, and it's at lower price points.
If we're going to win in America, if we're going to win market share in any footwear category, we have to have strong franchises in these mid-price points. There's all this conversation about Herzogenaurach and the headquarters of adidas here and America, and how can that work? Yes, it's challenged because there's distance. Yes, it's challenged because there's the global nature of our company. One of the things we're going to do is we're really going to focus on, and I'll talk about in a minute, the real advantage that we have is what Eric talked about today, is the DNA of product and engineering and performance. If you can combine that with the insights of the marketplace in America.
If you can really do that, not just talk about it, but if you can really do that, we have a chance to do things we haven't done before. We really need to look at that. The last thing, and maybe the most important thing, it just needs to be a priority for our company. The American market has to be a priority for our company. Not just resources, not just money, but attitude, lens, cooperation, commitment over a long period of time to do the same things over and over and over, and start to build a real brand that consumers on a consistent basis, we show up the right way, we tell the right stories, and our messaging, our products, our design are all about the U.S. consumer, the U.S. athlete. Big challenge, but that's what we need to do.
As we go forward, the things that we're really going to focus on, number 1, we have to be one company. We have to figure out a way to use the collective power of our company to make a difference in America. Not, "Let Americans be Americans," and let them just break away from the headquarters and do what they want to do. No. We need to become one company and use the collective strength we have. All the resources we have here. When you see these markets where we dominate, there's no reason we can't do the same thing in America. No reason. We have to have a desirable brand. It has to be. How do we do that? We have to connect with all athletes and all of these sports on a consistent basis. We have to have a model for sustainable growth.
It can't go up a few years and then down, kind of grow a little bit and then not. We have to have a model for sustainable growth, which is really about what are we going to focus on, what are our priorities, where are we going to invest in, and how are we going to make a difference? We're not to this point yet, but we have to be disruptive. I think as we start this journey, and we have already started the journey, we have to build a foundation that we can grow on year after year after year. At some point, we have to really be disruptive because the world's not about incrementalism anymore. It's not. The reason open source is one of our strategic initiatives is because open source, at the end of the day, is trying to find something new and different.
It doesn't have the answer. It's a platform to find new and different disruptions to the marketplace because disruptions change industries, and they change it every day. If anybody's sitting here right now and saying, "adidas can never be great in America," you're wrong. Any company can be great in any country if they do the right things. Never before has the world that we live in been so fertile and ready for disruption. Can we do that? Let's talk in three years. I'm not going to try to convince you today that we've got the solutions, but I am going to tell you what we're going to do, and I am going to tell you that the answer for the future is in open source, finding new ideas, having the courage to experiment, doing things differently, Creating the New.
That's what we're going to do as we go forward. When I got started, the main thing that Roland and Eric and the board talked to me about, "We've got to do this together." I didn't understand that when I started. I really didn't. I actually thought the other way. "Hey, just let us do what we want in America." When I went around, I said, "That's not going to work." We have a lot of competitors, big competitors ingrained in society, in the community of American sport. We have to use more resources than what we have in Portland. The first thing that we did is we said, "We got to be one company." I have spent a tremendous amount of time here. This is my 10th trip to Germany in 10 months. I think Herbert's going to buy me an apartment.
Maybe not. Spent a tremendous amount of time with Roland and his team here, and his staff here. A tremendous amount of time with Eric Liedtke and his team. Not only that, but we brought in a guy who was running Korea. His name is Zion Armstrong. I would say he's one of the superstars in the group so that I'm not doing this by myself. I'm not even doing it by myself in America. Zion Armstrong, who's not here today, was one of the best operators. He built Korea to be the number 1, beating all competitors in a significant marketplace. We brought Zion in to work with me. Zion is infinitely connected with Eric's team and Roland's team here. All of these connection points that we didn't have so well before, we have them now.
I bring a little bit of the American flavor. Zion brings understanding who we are as a company, the DNA of the brand. How do we leverage that to be successful in America? That's what we're trying to do, is build a company with all of the resources we have. My God, do we have resources. Technology, assets, know-how, heritage, and now we're talking about the future. How good can we be in the future, not how good we've been in the past. The past doesn't make any difference anymore because industries, companies, competitors are disrupted every single day. That's what gives me hope. We have an aspiration. We're chasing extraordinary. We've come together as a group, and we're going to do really great things in America. What happens when we come together as a company? Roland, I think, talked about it.
Our dominance in South Korea is unbelievable. Zion pioneered that, along with the cooperation of the team here. The business that we have in China is head-to-head with our major competitor, and we're growing, and it's unbelievable what we've done there. The World Cup last summer, the way we dominated not only the tournament, but also all of the hype that goes around it. The things that we did at TaylorMade over the past 12 years. Those are extraordinary things. We know how to do, and we're going to use that formula in America, and we haven't done that in a consistent, holistic way. What's going to be different? I know I talked to a couple of people at the break. "Really, Mark, what's going to be different? Is there really going to be anything different?" Yeah. I'm different.
That's the only laugh you guys had today, that's kind of cool. We're going to do a lot of things different. It's going to start with thinking differently about how we cooperate, collaborate, come together, and be one company. We're definitely going to think about being disruptive. We're definitely going to think that if we don't win in America. We've never thought that way before. That's very different. Eric has moved, I don't know, Eric, 60, 70, 80 of his key people from here to Portland, so that as they design products and create products and create messages and create advertising, they're looking at it through the lens of the American consumer, the American athlete. That's different. I'll talk about our ad campaign that we have out right now.
It's a global campaign that's full of football players and basketball players and soccer players. It's through the lens of the American athletic culture. That's different. Tell you more about what's different. The one thing I want to really be clear on is this. The number one thing for our company is the athlete or the consumer. That's what we're after. What do we have to do to really get in the hearts and minds of our consumer? All of the other things, yes, we definitely have to execute better in America. Our stores need to look different. Our relationships with our retail partners need to look different. Our relationship with media needs to look different. At the end of the day, if we win the consumer, we will begin to grow our business.
The basis of what I'm going to show you is how do we start to win the hearts and minds of the consumer in America? Talk to you about six things. This being able to tell our story through a brand anthem. Talk to you a little bit about that. The locker room. Eric talked a lot about the locker room. We need to be inside the locker room. We need to have our gear, not only on the field of play, whatever field of play that is, but when that athlete leaves the locker room and walks out onto the street, we need to be able to take our Originals and our performance and put them together and own the hearts and minds of our athletes. City. It's our cities attack.
It's a strategic initiative that people that in these key cities are influencers to the rest of the athletic world. I'll talk to you a little bit about that. From the cities, how does that really translate to our retail partners in the U.S.? Really important part. I want to talk to you for a second about open source, because I come from a company where for the past few years, we've really talked about open source. We called it something different, but it's the same thing. Open source, to me, is about engaging the collective know-how, wisdom, experience, ideas from as many people who want to contribute to find new, creative, faster, better ways of doing things. That's what open source is.
Instead of a small group of people going away into a little room and saying, "Okay, how are we going to think outside the box," just this little group of people, "and come up with some new ideas?" I'll share something with you. It's confidential. It never happens. Same people, same room, different thoughts. It doesn't happen. The reason for this open source mentality is to find new ideas, find them faster than our competitors, because whoever moves the fastest will win, which is the sixth piece, which is speed. We talked a lot about it today. Speed of we're going to be faster in the marketplace. We need relentless newness at retail. We need to do things like we've never done before. Here's the reality of the world. It's never been this way before. Whoever moves at the same speed of the market will win.
The market is moving so fast. How do you move that fast? You have to reinvent your infrastructure. You have to reinvent how you think. You have to reinvent everything if you're really going to move fast. It's just not supply chain. It's decision-making. It's mindset. It's being open to new ideas. The reason we don't move fast is because we're stuck on the past. Can't be stuck on the past. We have to be focused on the future. We got to be focused on the consumer. Open source and speed to me, whether you believe it or not, whether you understand it at its real nuance, will be what separates any company from any others. How do you find new ideas? How do you experiment? How do you institutionalize open source within your organization? That will define the future of any company.
No company, any industry leadership position is safe from disruption. It's not possible anymore because of open source. Okay, I'm getting a little riled up here. We want to be the best sports brand in the world. We've got to be the best sports brand in the U.S. It's an imperative. That's the word Eric used. It's an imperative. The first thing we're going to do is we have a really clear-- Somebody mentioned this morning the question: What about Originals? Believe me, Originals is a big part of how we go forward. Really, we've got to really make a statement about we are a performance sports brand for athletes. All athletes, any level, that's who we are. It's in our DNA. We invented sports gear. We're the original sports brand. Let's take a claim to that, and let's really own that.
For the next 12 quarters, that's the next three years, we have committed to running campaigns in each quarter. That would be Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 in 2015, 2016, and 2017. That is an unparalleled decision in our industry in America. None of our competitors run brand campaigns four consecutive quarters, three consecutive years. What's new? That's very new. Do our competitors advertise? Of course, they do. Do they tell the story of who they are and try to touch all of the athletes? We will be running basketball campaigns in basketball season. We will be running football campaigns in the football season. We will run soccer campaigns in the soccer season. We will be touching athletes from the professional level to the youth level because we want to tell all athletes we're the brand for you. We understand the plight of an athlete. We understand it better than anyone.
It's the largest investment we've ever made in telling our story over an extended period of time. Right now, we have our first campaign running. Adweek rates it as the most connective ad in sport, and maybe even Eric being bigger than that in any campaign running right now in America. It's the most connective. They have a term called sticky. Never heard of it before, but it's a good term. Sticky. We're starting to resonate, and it's just beginning. What's different? Big investment. Big investment in telling the story of who adidas is in America through the lens of the U.S. athlete. This is my favorite. This first thing that I notice. I have two girls. They play softball, both in college. One's out, one's in.
It was just really heartbreaking to me to go to all these different activities, whether it was college or high school, and not see adidas show up at the kind of market share that we should have at all of these athletic activities in America. The first thing I said to Eric when I came is, "We have to get on the field of play. We have to get in the locker room." How do we do that? We have to have an infrastructure to service youth programs. We have to have an initiative to go out and sign high schools. They buy the stuff. You're wondering how we're going to pay for all this. Youth buys it. High schools buy it. You provide service. You provide opportunities for the best products we make, not the cheap ones, the best products we make.
We get in the locker room. Today, we have 1,500 high schools that buy our gear. We want to have by 2020, 3,000 high schools that buy our gear. We want kids to wear our stuff when they compete. Colleges. Today, we have 12 big universities licensed programs. We just signed the University of Miami, Arizona State, two really big, high-profile universities. We have 96 colleges that buy our equipment. We want to double that to 200 in the next few years. We have to get on the field of play. We have to be in professional sports, and we have to be in the NFL. One of the first things we did last summer, what's new, we're on the field of play in the NFL. We signed the on-field license agreement, so our athletes now can wear our cleats. We didn't have that before.
Whether we like it or not, American football in America is the number one sport. It's the number one fan base. If you're really not embedded in U.S. football, you're not going to be the best sports brand in America. We also need to be in baseball. We also need to be in basketball. Eric talked about the NBA deal. How are we going to fund all of these things? By making strategic decisions. If a league deal isn't going to drive our business, we're going to let that league deal go, and we're going to spend money on athletes because sport is aspirational. Every level wants to be like some other level above them.
By now starting to tell this story of who we are as a sports brand, starting to really penetrate all of the athletes in all of the categories, from youth to professional levels, we start to tell our story. We start to touch the hearts and minds of our athletes and our consumers. Now we start to touch them and get them excited, and we really have to pay it off. We have to be able to create opportunities for these athletes and these kids within our ecosystem to be able to go experience our brand. Yes, we're going to do a tremendous amount of business online. You know something? We have to create a real-life experience for consumers to touch and feel the DNA and the essence of the adidas brand.
We have two of the six global cities, Los Angeles and New York, but we're also adding Chicago, Miami, and Atlanta. Why are we doing that? I think both Roland and Eric talked about it. Those are influencer cities. They will make our brand cool. They will say to kids everywhere else, "adidas is really dominant in New York, L.A., Chicago, Atlanta, and Miami." We've never had that before. What's different? Look, we have stores out there right now that we're not that proud of. Over the course of the next three or four years, we will either upgrade those stores, close those stores down, and start to build experiences that when people walk through the door, it's not a buying experience, it's a brand experience. "I want to be a part of that brand. adidas is cool." That's what we're after.
We are going to open in the next 30 months, five big, what we call flagship stores. Big stores. Tell our brand story. Ones that you would walk into and say, "Oh my God. I've never seen adidas look like that before." Then we're going to have around that big flagship store in these five cities, is smaller stores that we can reach the community, so we can spread the word, and so athletes in the suburbs and outside of the city can touch adidas in the way we want them to. We'll have both Neighborhood stores, which are Originals, and we'll have HomeCourt stores, which is on 25 different formats, and we don't really tell a story about who we are. What's different? That's different. That's very different. 30 months from now, completely different experience in America.
Because of the size of the U.S., we can't open enough of our own stores. We have to use retail partners with us, and we're going to focus on two. We've got a lot of them. We've got a lot of customers, retail customers, and you know what they say to me the past year? Yeah, they don't buy as much stuff as they're going to buy, but every one of them wants to. Every single customer wants us to have more market share in theirs because they have too much with this brand, or they have too much with that brand. They want adidas to be stronger in their stores. The opportunity for us to sell our products is right in front of us. It's right in front of us.
We're going to focus on two strategic partners, Dick's Sporting Goods, which is the premier place for athletes, high school athletes to shop. 600 doors. Today, we have good representation on our pads at about 100 doors, but what you're going to see over the next 12 months is a transformation of what we look like at Dick's Sporting Goods, regardless of what that thing was in the paper when Mr. Stack said, "We're not going to have space for adidas." That's not true. We will dominate the soccer space in 400 doors by next fall. We're rolling out football, baseball, basketball, and we have a dedicated space for running in every store over the course of the next 12 months.
We will show up better in Dick's Sporting Goods as we go forward than ever before, and there's a major commitment from Dick's Sporting Goods to help us build our brand in the U.S. We'll be running co-op ads on basketball and soccer, the back half of the year, with Dick's Sporting Goods. They are all in on adidas. The other key retailer for us is Foot Locker. They've got their five or six banners. They do a tremendous job with us. We have our A-standard doors in Foot Locker. We have 125. We'll be expanding that over the course of the next year to 250. Massive retail space, showing up better with better products, better messaging than ever before. That's different than we've ever been before. That's in play right now. It's moving forward. We have all kinds of others. We have Sports Authority, Academy.
Finish Line has done an incredible job with us, and we've really kind of I'm not talking about Reebok today because Matt did, but Finish Line is really in with us on the Reebok brand and the Pump launch. We are building better relationships with our wholesale customers than ever before. That's new. I'm an aggressive guy, and this U.S. is so fertile for us to sell more products. We just have to go get it. What are we going to focus on in our categories? We got all these categories. I think Eric showed them today. We have nine categories. Well, they're all important. Honestly, every one of them is important. We have the same, this is what Eric had up there, lead, grow, amplify, authenticate. Let me start with authenticate. We need to have really great products in basketball, football, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse.
Those don't drive a lot of revenue, but they really get us in the hearts and minds of consumers. Where does that pay off? Training, running, hoodies, [blogging hoodies]. We will definitely upgrade what we look like, how we show up in retail in those categories. We have major commitments from Dick's Sporting Goods in those categories and Eastbay, and I'll talk about Eastbay in a few minutes. We really are going to focus on the products, not so much the marketing of those products, but having the right products for athletes. Let's go to the other side. We're not going to be any different than any other market in the world. We are going to dominate soccer. When you put footwear and apparel together today, we're still the biggest revenue in soccer. We'll continue to be that, and we're going to grow footwear.
We have approximately 37%, 38% footwear. We want to grow that footwear by 2020 to 50%, which would make us number one in footwear. That is definitely a goal of ours. I think our brand deserves to be the dominant number one brand in soccer, not only around the world, but in the U.S. Originals. Originals is what, for me, and this industry for me, I've had fresh eyes on it. A point of differentiation for us is how we bring Originals and performance together in the locker room for athletes. Because athletics used to stop in the locker room. Now it's when you go home, it's when you go to the movie, it's when you go to Starbucks, and we have better product assortment across the board to take care of the athlete on the field and off the field. Big opportunity for us there.
My passion over the next five years to grow a category is running. It's 50% of the footwear market in the U.S. is in running. Today, I'm not very proud to tell you, we have about 3.5% market share in running. Our goal over the next five years, by 2020, is to have 15% market share in running. Even 15%, to me, doesn't seem big enough, but there's one big guy that's got a lot, and it's very fragmented. It's wide open for somebody to come in with a technology like Boost, with platforms at the key price points, with enough investment over a five-year period to drive market share and start to own a big chunk of the running market. For me, it's the number one category that we need to focus on in America is running. Neo, it's our fastest-growing category.
It's the entry point to our brand for young people, and it's really exciting. It also takes us to a level of distribution that prior to me coming, we weren't very strong in. We have tremendous upside with volume at a distribution level that we weren't at nine months ago. That's different. When you start to look at how we're going to be different, and we're going to be different in almost every way you can imagine. What makes it all work is we're going to have to execute. We're going to have to stay on course. Somebody asked me at the break, "Hey, you've had these plans before, but you get off those." You're just going to have to believe me, or you're just going to have to stay tuned and watch. The key to success for us is to have a very simple plan.
It's about the athlete, it's about the consumer through the lens of the American society. We need to do that. We need to have our own retail store so that we can tell our story in these five cities to really be able to capture the imagination, the heart and soul of our athlete and consumer. We need really strong partnerships. There's all kinds of opportunities for volume where we haven't really looked before. Low-hanging fruit in a lot of categories. We need to really start to think about disruption, and disruption will come from open source. Disruption will come. We are now going through an educational process with every employee in North America to teach them how to be innovative thinkers and leaders.
To challenge the way we do things, to bring new ideas, Eric and his global team can give us messaging and products and services of things that no one's imagined before. Our competitors don't have it because it hasn't been imagined before. An innovative environment inside, open source cultivates that, asks people to come in. Collaboration. Big difference from where we were before. Things are happening right now. We did an incredible thing at the NFL Combine. One of our competitors sponsors the NFL Combine. We gave some promotions. We gave Porsches away that they wouldn't let us give to the people that ran the fastest in our shoes. We stole all the media attention around the NFL Combine. As a result of the NFL Combine, we signed 21 of the top prospects in the upcoming NFL Draft. Already signed 21 new NFL players.
I don't know if anyone knows about what happened at All-Star Weekend. We launched the Kanye West Yeezy Boost. It was unbelievable. The amount of energy. We used our newsrooms to be able to spread the word, and we dominated the social connectivity in New York City and around the All-Star Weekend. We had a Confirmed app where 175,000 people in a week signed up to look at and buy the Yeezy shoe. Unbelievable. Things that haven't been done before. The thing that I think is the biggest indication that things are changing. Eastbay is a mail-order catalog, and it is where every serious high school athlete looks and buys most of their gear. It's incredible. This is the benchmark for how your brand is doing. We took over the Eastbay catalog in February. I think we have a few copies.
If not, there's one, you can come up here and look at it. This is the way our brand is going to show up as we go forward. This is the first example of one company doing the right thing in America and making a difference. This was an entire collaboration between the brand communications people, our store people, our sales people, our customer. This was an example of open source. Since this catalog launched, the adidas football, U.S. football cleat, is the number one selling cleat at Eastbay. I can tell you that a year ago, our number one competitor was twice the size of market share in Eastbay catalog as we were. It was 40% and in the teens. We're the number one seller because of this catalog. Can we make a difference? Yes, we can. This is different than ever before.
These are the things that are going to happen when we look at the American consumer, we talk about the right message, we put the right product in front of them, and we execute well. Disruption is possible. Extraordinary is possible. What's the next five years going to look like? I'd like to tell you that we're going to start booming right away. We're going to grow in 2015. We're going to grow. We're not going to grow as fast as maybe some of our competitors, but we're going to grow in 2015. I think we're going to grow more in 2016. The most important thing is between 2016 and 2020, we fully expect to grow by 50%. That's double-digit growth over a five-year period. That's our expectation between now and 2020.
We're going to do that by deploying our assets into the U.S. We're going to do that by focusing. We're going to do that by understanding the insights of the U.S. consumer. I feel really good about it. I'll leave you with this. We have a long way to go. The thing that excites me the most is where we started. We started from a position of being honest with ourselves. We're not as good as we need to be in America. We're not even close to as good as we need to be in America. Then we put a plan together. It's not my plan, it's not the team of people that I work with, it's our plan as a company.
Every single person that works for Eric Liedtke or Roland or anywhere else understands those six things that I put on the board. We're making running footwear in the $70-$100 price points. We weren't doing that nine months ago. That's different. We are coming together as a group of people, we are looking at America as an imperative, because if we're going to be the best sports brand in the world, we have to be the best sports brand in America. Thanks.
Thank you, Mark. Thank you for your passionate energy and commitment to America. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I have the pleasure to walk you through now with our second-biggest market, Western Europe. Share with you with our ambitions and how we're going to run our plans between now and 2020 and Creating the New. I should start with, actually, we have started to Creating the New 15 months ago, because 15 months ago, there was no Western Europe organization, there was no one standing here in front of you to explain that. I want to start with giving an update on that, as I think it's relevant to our ambitions going forward. First, a statement of intent. As much as U.S. is clearly the largest sporting goods market in the world and our largest opportunity, Europe is home for us.
It's here that our founders were born, both brands. It's here from the HQ that we live and breathe our DNA every day. Europe matters for us. This is our biggest business in the group and one that we have over the history of our brands build significant strength. We have, in your language, assets. We have significant brand recognition for both our brands. We have iconic product. Who doesn't know the Stan Smiths, the Superstars, the Pump, some of our football shoes, our Classics? That our iconic products and a back catalog of product that we have on our back. We have probably the best reach across all markets in Europe with our organization built over time. We have built also a great customer relationship over time, and we have a strong portfolio of symbols.
All these assets, again, or key strengths, is what we have and we can leverage. We also know that we have to recognize the market has changed over the last five years, and the environment, both from a channel landscape and a competitive environment, has significantly changed. The big getting bigger, they're even cross borders, whether by acquisition or through their e-commerce operation. Our direct competitors have been significantly more aggressive. We've seen new competitors coming in with the own labels of our retailers, and even the verticals are coming into market. It's fair to say that our business model, the one that we had until 15 months ago, was not probably the most adapted to that environment and not maybe able to leverage these strengths in the best possible way. Hence, we've embarked into a significant transformation of Europe over the last 15 months.
I'm pleased today to say to you that Europe is now built as one organization. We have one leadership, and I have one team with whom I manage Europe as a team, not as five markets plus a boss. It's five markets into one market now and one team. We have one P&L, and therefore, the ability to manage our resource into one number. We have one strategy in which everybody abides to. We have now created one integrated organization. Let's say above countries, we've pulled brand teams that drive execution, that create the range for all Europe for both brands. Two teams, one for each brands. We have created one organization for all our key strategic accounts, and I'll come back to you with that manage across all these accounts a pan-European management.
We have created one direct-to-consumer organization, taking our e-commerce operations and our retail operations to one organization. Finally, we've created one back office for finance, for HR, for supply chain operations. We've created really one market organization. Last but not least, we've created one range. This is a foundation, a backbone of an organization which is much more efficient. Because with one range, you get one forecast, you get one buy, you get one stock, and you can start pulling a number of efficiencies across the organization. This is now established after 15 months. We obviously have a number of benefits in terms of alignment, in terms of leveraging our growth into the bottom line in a more efficient way.
What matters even more is the fact that we are much focused, much more focused, much more aligned in delivering what matters and where it matters the most. I'm also pleased, actually, after having built that, and we've worked hard to be where we are today. I'm very pleased to see that we have now first benefits. Read my lips, yes, we have double-digit backlog growth as we stand today for 2015. This is a first proof of our momentum. It's not party celebration yet, but it's a very strong momentum that I'm pleased to report. I could see also now in our major customers, and you have some numbers here. We can see sell-outs coming out, and we have strong performance in those key accounts, which matters.
Beyond these numbers, I'm quite pleased to see also that there are some differences now in those stores, in those cities, where I can see that we are sharper, we are better executors. All of that is a new foundation and a momentum that we have. That gives me confidence that as we look forward in the future, we have a much clearer skyline, a much brighter future. We will, in Europe, be the number one. That's our clear ambition. Our ambition beyond the size is certainly to be the best brand, the best sports brand of the world for adidas, and that fitness brand for the FitGen. It's all about being number one in those deliverables.
As we now walk into how we're going to do this and what are our plans and where we stand on this, clearly, we have a formula. We have also leveraging, and hopefully, through my presentation, you'll see that we leverage two things. One, and certainly Creating the New with speed, cities, and open source. Our deliverables are first and foremost the brand design. It starts there. It starts in the eye of the consumer. With that, we will be able to command market share, drive market leadership, and quality growth. We've been the biggest in the past, but not necessarily very often the most desirable. This is the very clear focus for the organization. It's about the quality of the execution. It's about the shine of our brands on the marketplace. I'm very acutely conscious that the size of Europe and the group is large.
I'm confident that with the organization, with this new foundation, we'll be able to leverage in a much more productive way and profitable way our growth going forward. Finally, as we talk about deliverables, I want to share with you what I'm hammering down in the organization because as much as I can list many deliverables and KPIs, the one thing that matters the most for me is that we are judged in the eye of the consumers. Growth, and I'm sure you won't challenge me on that, every day, consumer has to buy more product than yesterday. For that to happen, well, the consumer has to have a reason why he does this. For this, he needs to see it, he needs to like it. Therefore, for me, the ultimate judge is this consumer that needs to see what we need to do.
That's, for me, the culture change that I want to make sure the company and the organization in Europe is thinking over. Very much in line with what That's where we are. That's the foundation we've built. Moving forward, we have four key battlefields. One, our key categories, our key cities, the direct-to-consumer channel, and our key customers. I'm going to walk through with you in each of them, and hopefully, you'll understand not only we have clear plans, but we are now already into Creating the New as we speak. First, the key categories. We have four on adidas key categories. These represent 95% of our business. Let's start with the first one, football. Football is our history. This is the battlefield where share is happening. It's going to be innov launch versus product launch. It's going to be assets versus assets.
We have the history. We have the authority in this. You will see us connecting with consumers in a different way. Already, these products, which are introducing for Winter 2015, are seeing great tractions. When I was mentioning earlier double-digit growth, they are participating in that. Good momentum for the moment in football and one which is critical for us to lead. Second biggest category, Originals. The market is immense. The streetwear and sportswear market is immense and growing. Again, we have strong USP in our market. Again, it's iconic products, the Stan, the Superstars, and those Tubular and ZX Flux Eric presented to us this morning. To add onto it, and I'm taking the link with some of the questions this morning and from the presentation of Claire, it's in this sector that we leverage first and foremost our in-season creation.
As we speak, our key customers like JD and Foot Locker are already taking the benefit of this year of in-season creation. We intend to grow also by 50% that business, and this is part of the portfolio which is very strong because not only it drives growth, but it drives brand heat for us. Third big category, running. We are a challenger. It is challenging category for us, but I believe we're starting to be a credible challenger. Boost is a unique proprietary technology, and as we can also see some movement in our premium segments of share gains over the last six months, Boost is definitely a platform that we can leverage further in Europe as well as elsewhere in the world. Fourth category, training. Training is our bastion. It's where we have market leadership and apparel.
We intend to keep that leadership, certainly tapping further in the women potential that maybe in the past we haven't tapped enough on. That is a strong potential for us. Certainly, if you think about that the women part of our range is spearheaded by collaboration like Stella McCartney. This is the adidas priorities. We move also to Reebok. Reebok today, as Matt has explained to us this morning, is repositioned. We have rebased our business from a sports business and a casual business into a fitness business. Our range and our business today is very much rebalanced to that extent into fitness. Going forward, three key pillars. One of those, fitness collaboration that Matt talked about.
I invite you to look at this picture because today, the Reebok brand is able to attract thousands of people to be engaged into Le Grand Palais, in that case, here in Paris, but I've seen that in Prague, I've seen that in Oslo, I've seen that in Stockholm. We are able to pull people now in great engagement events like the one you see on the screen. We also will leverage very much what are our key iconic model again, like Pump and Classics. This, across the category today, if you look about it, we have a very balanced portfolio. We have participation and strong participation in every of these categories, and we have momentum in many of them, critical where we need to lead. Second key battlefields, key cities. I am not going to go back again on explaining why cities are important.
I think we've shared that with you across the day. As we speak about cities in Europe, we have these two global beacons, Paris and London. We also have Barcelona, Berlin, and Milan, which will be our key influential five key cities in Europe. What I want to say also is that today, we are having worked for the last 15 months already on this. We are ready. We have all city being screened. We have five city managers in place. We have newsroom in London already. We have everything that we need to have to continue to build our penetration to those cities. I can say, first sign positive on our brand scores in some of these cities because we have rebalanced our investments. We are strongly focusing our effort and investment on those key cities.
Our strategy in our key cities, three key priorities. One, using our brand centers as the pinnacle of the brand and investing in that. I will come to that in a second. Second, connect with key communities, those key communities that make a difference for us in those cities. Three, win the shopping destination, as it is critical in those cities. You will see that in a minute. First, our brand centers. We have five cities. We have, in every cities, one or two flagship today, one Originals, and one brand centers. We are in the process of remodeling them. Roland explained this morning that we have expanded Barcelona. We will, by the end of this year, reshape Paris. We will do the same in Berlin. We are having plan for Oxford Street in London, and we've just opened in Milan this month our Originals flagship.
You see, we are taking shape in those cities, and we want these brand centers to be the spot where we can land our innovation, we can present the width of our brand, the width of our range, and critically showcase what matters the most and where it matters the most. Moving from our brand centers, key communities. Again, those key communities are those consumers which amplify trends, which makes product and brand being formed into the cities. I want to give you an example here of what we are doing, because sometimes key communities is a bit of a buzzword, but I take the example in some images are here in running. Traditional investment in running a few years ago was you sponsor a marathon, you send a few tech reps in stores to make technical advice, you invest in vertical media about your technology.
That has moved on, we are now creating new ways of marketing our technologies. Here you have two examples. We've created in Berlin a loft where people hang out, they come and socialize, talk about running. Obviously, we make them try some pairs. They go out and run, and they have created a community from which they amplify, obviously online, the whole engagement that we can create. Paris, for those who are in Paris, we've created with the 20 arrondissements in Paris, Boost Tribes in each of these arrondissements. They compete every week overnight in the cities. That's the way of engaging those key communities. We have that in football, we create that in different sports. These are our new ways of connecting with these consumers into key cities. Key cities, I've said brand centers, key communities. Third priorities is those key destinations.
We have to conquer those location where people shop, where people look at brands, browse products. That goes beyond the simple five cities. We have 20 cities, again, they're all mapped. We have, and you see the numbers here, 230 target location for which we know exactly the square footage, how much square meters we want to have, what is the sport we want to land into the location. We have invested or are investing in the course of the end of this year and beginning of next year, EUR 40 million additional CapEx in these stores as well as into our franchise stores or some of our stores which are in the city. Again, to create in those key destination, a brand showcase, a destination for our brand and our innovation to be landed. That's our three key priorities into key cities.
Key cities also for us is a new way of living it internally, I mean. I want to share with you every single month, my first line, we have a meeting, we go in the cities, we walk the cities, we go into shops, we highlight opportunities, we discuss with consumers. Over the course of the last 12 months, I've taken twice the 200 top managers of Europe into Paris last year, Berlin this year, to meet consumers and walk the shops. That is also living the cities on an everyday basis. That's key cities. Second key battlefields, direct to consumer. Direct to consumer is the second place where we need to make sure that our brand is being showcased, but it's also where we have growth ambition.
Clearly, when we look at our channels that compose the consumer direct, it's our own retail, it's our e-commerce, but it's also our franchise business. Our ambition is clearly to grow this business up to 30% of our business. We are about 20% today. Now, going forward in those direct to consumers, we have five key priorities. First one, again, is to use our stores as showcase for the brand. We will either remodel, expand, sometimes relocating some of our key stores in those key cities. We don't intend to run and grow by just opening doors. We will potentially also close some doors whether they don't belong to our strategy or they don't meet our financial objectives. Clearly, we want to use brand centers and home of the brands in those key cities to develop our brand.
We use our own retail very much as a brand showcase. Addition to that, we intend to double our franchise business. We have today a number of stores, high number of stores across Europe. We want to double that in those locations where maybe we don't know enough the locations, or we don't want to take the risk of carry the liability or the risk where we might have choose the wrong location. Clearly, franchising is a significant growth driver for us going forward in our direct to consumer channel. Third priority is our e-com. We also want to grow our e-com. This is a significant growth opportunity. We believe that by 2020, about 25% of the market will be probably online, and we want to capture 30% of that business.
We have created, well, are in the process of creating all the enablers to make that happen, this is a significant growth driver going forward. We can't really do direct to consumers without having a best-in-class consumer service. When a consumer call, when he wants to return, when you have a complaint, we need to create the best-in-class consumer service. We are now in the process of integrated consumer service at European level and have a best-in-class consumer service foundation. Finally, Roland has mentioned earlier, it's clearly one ambition to deliver by 2016, 100% omnichannel between our e-commerce and our own stores. Consumers click and shop online, they collect in stores. Vice versa, they go in stores, they place an order, and they get at home. That's 100% omnichannel capabilities across all our portfolio of stores.
Going further away, actually, what we will do is export these omnichannel capabilities into our wholesale business to create an open source connection and collaboration with our retailers and exporting our omnichannel capabilities there. As you go in the future, you'll see borders between a customer and a brand more and more blurred because they will create traffic, we'll fulfill the demand. Vice versa, they will have direct access and visibility on our stock. This is the future of how we see collaboration and open source with our retailers. What does it mean in terms of benefit is not only will it have data transparency, we'll have speed between the consumer and us, we'll certainly also optimize, hopefully, the profit pool between the consumer and us and between the customers.
Clearly creating an open source collaboration for the benefit of our retailers as well as us. That's transferring our omnichannel and our capability from own stores and e-commerce into the world of our retailers. That bridges me to my last key battlefields, my fourth battlefields, which are our key customers. The world has changed over the last few years. There's been winners and losers. Clearly, as we move forward, we want to focus on the winners and win with those winners. We will, again, focus again here on those matters that makes a difference. These are those strategic accounts that Roland shared with us before. These are the big, those are the creator of the value in the market and the growth.
They are the pure players, those who went online and make a difference, and that's clearly driving growth. We also focus on creating an organization for focusing on those that drive trends, fashion as well as authority in the sports specialist. Again, we've created one organization above the countries to capture that, to deal with that, and to make sure that we are one, aligned, and we service them in the best possible way. As we go into these key customers, four key strategies here. One is segmentation. We were the pioneer 10 years ago in introducing segmentation. Clearly, we have different labels. We have a stretch of our brand between performance and streetwear. It's all about creating the right landscape, putting the product in the right place, in front of the consumer.
We will continue to evolve that segmentation to optimize our sales, optimize our brand presentation across the different players in the market, but also give a point of difference to all of these retailers. Second key priorities in our direct to consumer, it's controlled space. We've talked about a lot. It's our way to deploy our brand, showcase our brand, creating the space for the product that we want to present, and also create traffic for our retailers. It's in partnership with them and hopefully create commercial success with that. As I said, we have 230 locations in those top 20 cities. We have much more identified beyond these top 20 cities, and we're ready to roll out our controlled space from then on. That will drive brand desire. That will drive quality growth.
As we drive profitability, and we aim to drive profitability as well, two critical priorities for us. One is creating end-to-end business model. The trade is differentiated now. The big getting bigger, the small getting more specialized. They have different needs. They make their money in different ways. We have to create differentiated solutions to meet their needs. You'll see us adapting to what are really the value creation drivers of these different retailers. Will it be range? Will it be the financial transaction between them and us? Will it be supply chain, leveraging CapEx, and making sure that we have the best possible profit pool between the customers and ourselves? Finally, for those retailers which might not be part of the winners or the critical one from a strategic point of view, we want to bring them into the era of the digitalization.
These are the smaller customers, but we want to bring them into the new world and moving from maybe a traditional way of selling with one rep and one visit per month on an online platform, offering them what we offer to our consumers on our online platform. Clearly, they will be able to trade 100% with us, but even more, connect with us on everyday basis. Who knows, tomorrow, order online graphic materials, marketing materials, or build their own websites with downloads that they can take from us. That is creating a new world of servicing those small customers that will help us also focusing resources on different part of the trade and the account population. That's our key strategies for customers. With these four key priorities, hopefully you understand that we looked at two things here.
One is focusing on what matters the most and where it matters the most, key categories, key customers, our direct to consumer channels. It's about delivering execution and brilliant execution in the eyes of the consumer, making sure that our innovation creates impact and drive point of difference. It's about leveraging our new organization. Again, we've worked hard to be where we are. We're now ready with that organization. Also Creating the New, creating open source collaboration with retailers, being 100% enabled from an omnichannel point of view by 2016, focusing on these key cities and engaging with consumers in another way, community marketing here. That's really what I hope you've taken from the plan and from our priorities. We are on the roll. We have created that platform to enable us to look in the future in a much brighter way. We've started Creating the New.
We want to be the clear number one in this market. We will outgrow what is most likely a low single-digit market. We'll aim at being double-digit or high single-digit growth, in the next five years and take our place as number one in this market. I'm convinced we can do that because today we have created one foundation that enables that. We have one clear strategy going forward, and we have one mindset that everybody in the organization is sharing. That's our plan, that's our ambitions, and that's our roadmap going forward. Thank you.
Thank you, Gil. Thank you very much, Mark, for presenting us how you're going to Creating the New in your markets. This actually brings us to our second Q&A session. Given that those two markets actually make up around 50% of our sales, I could imagine that you have some questions. I would ask also Herbert, Roland, and Eric to join us here on the stage again.
We might need another one.
King, I think we probably need two more chairs. Excuse me.
Where do you want me to go?
In the middle I think we need mics first.
Mics are coming here.
Yeah. Julian.
You have a mic? You're mic'd up.
No. Oh, we all have. Good. Okay.
Yeah. Hi, sir. Julian Easthope. Once again, from Barclays. Coming back to the question in terms of your marketing. You've basically got out of the marketing of basketball and the NFL in the U.S. I just wondered whether or not you're going to change your approach to doing big marketing campaigns on things like FIFA World Cup and the Olympics, and actually going more towards the individual sports star. Whether this is something that's happening in the U.S. that you'd actually roll out globally. Thanks.
Do you want to take the NBA or Eric, do you want?
Sure.
Do you want to take the NBA, and I take the FIFA?
Sure.
Yeah. Okay.
From a marketing standpoint, it goes back to that one slide I presented earlier. We have four clear priorities. This first one is give people a reason to believe in our brand. We have to shout loud and proud on some of the sport campaigns that we're talking about, just from advertising standpoint. Mark talked about that from a take it today in the U.S. and get people to know that we're the best sports brand in the world. We haven't really done that before. We've talked about, "Hey, we do sport, and we do fashion, and we bring it all together," and that's kind of the approach we've had in the past. Now we're relentlessly building sports credentials with the sporting kid.
When it comes to sponsorship, I think then we have to always weigh the pros and the cons to how we evaluate each one of those things. We don't take any decision lightly, but you have to look at how is it going to help us sell our brand, how is it going to help us focus on our key franchises we talked about, and make a decision based on that. It's that simple. That's how we got to the NBA decision. That's how we evaluate every decision. Turn to you then.
Exactly right. I mean, as I said this morning, we have analyzed what has been doing very well in our Route 2015 plan, but hasn't worked so far. When I look to the American situation, and we had the NBA, then it didn't pay out as we wanted to have it. It has helped us to sell licensed shirt, but it hasn't helped us to sell any footwear and to get the connection to the player and to the kid. I think it's completely different to the FIFA World Cup, for example. This is by far the biggest sport event in the world, and you have seen in 2014, on the one end, what kind of successes has given to us as an exposure, but on the other hand, also the commercial success. We sold over 14 million balls and over seven million jerseys, et cetera.
There is an immediate return on investment, but also the exposure which we get around the world. As Eric said, hey, we are looking, we are putting everything on the table and looking what is working, what is the value which we get, then we decide yes or no. Welcome. Yep.
North America's a very big priority for the group now and for the next three years, at least with these investments going into marketing. How, from a group perspective, do you balance the level of investment going into North America? Is it a case that you revisit this when you get to 2017? Is it a case that there is a target market share you're trying to reach overall? Is it a case that it's about a growth run rate? How do you frame that in the context of the group about how much investments be putting into North America? Thank you.
You can take it.
Okay. Sure. First of all, I guess it starts from reflecting on what we've done in the past and what's been working and what hasn't been working. One of the key things I think Mark said, and I'll echo it, is that we haven't been investing enough in America to date. As we look at turning the corner, it's not a perfect science as far as when we start to see things happen. What we know we need to do is we need to be omnipresent as a sports brand. We know in our research today as our guide, as what comes back to the consumer, that we are not up in the conversation that we'd like to, let's put it that way, from a brand momentum in the States. What we do is we track brand momentum, Net Promoter Score, and purchase intent.
Those are things we track on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. We evaluate how we're penetrating that market from a consumer standpoint, because it comes down to consumer. We compare that to sell-through, and it starts to say when we're starting to hit the right level or not. We don't know the right level right now. We know we need to invest more, and when we start to find that level, we can start to back off, which is what our hope is, I think we said in 2017, 2018, in that area.
Yep. Fully. Yep. Next one.
Yes. Thank you. It's Christian from Hauck. I do have two questions relating to the big industry trends or general mega trends that you outlined. The first one is on individualization. I would be interested, to what extent are you willing to give also your retail partners individualization in terms of store formats? Would you be willing to give, once you launch and iterate these stores, given these Neighborhood and HomeCourt concepts also to retail partners? That would be question number one. Number two, on the female values, what would you say would be your key product or concept with regards to womenswear, and are you confident with the achievement that you've seen so far, bringing that sort of concept forward? Thank you.
The first question, I would say that we absolutely want to talk about controlled space. It's not about own space, it's about controlled space, which means it does cross over from our own retail to franchise, even to wholesale shop-in-shops. Controlled space allows us to tell our brand story the way we want to. We love the creativity we're bringing with the Neighborhood store or the HomeCourt store or the Neo format or even a women's boutique in the future where we can start to have a set footprint, and we want to bring that to life in a wholesale partner, whether that be a JD Sports or whether that be a Dick's Sporting Goods. I think we definitely want to start to drive our look and feel into those retailers more frequently than we have in the past.
That's, again, one of the reasons we put Michael Stanier and his team into the brand so that we could express that more holistically about how we not just show up from a fixtures and fittings and communications, but how the product packages go in, as Roland talked about earlier.
Just in addition to that, individualization does not mean that every retailer can have his own store and his own furniture, because we want to showcase the brand in the same holistic way around the world. We can make different formats. We can carve out a basketball corner, we can carve out a football corner, it has all to be within the corporate identity-
Absolutely
The design framework of our store.
There needs to be clear guardrails for consistency.
Yeah.
On the women's piece, I think we've got a clear focus on who we're talking about and what we're doing from a brand standpoint and how that works with the business units. I think the key will be how we can accelerate our business there. Like I said, we want to outgrow our men's business. We want to outgrow the overall business in women's. We definitely have room for improvement, and we are full speed ahead on making that happen organizationally, in product and marketing.
Anything? Anything else? Yep.
Chris Semenuk from TIAA-CREF. This is a question for Mark. You said during your presentation that there were a lot of things that the U.S. organization for adidas haven't done well enough. As a consumer of adidas products in the U.S., it seems like it couldn't get much worse. It leads me to think that the whole engagement, whatever Eric does at the marketing end, and whatever efforts he puts into product are for naught if your account executives were satisfied with how you fronted your product at wholesale and retail, which I have to wonder if they ever go into the stores, in the last couple of years. It's so shockingly terrible. It feels like it must actually present a case of a lot of low-hanging fruit in the U.S.
I'm wondering if you could shed some light on the level of change that you've put in place within the organization underneath you and, either in terms of account representatives that deal at the big account level or representatives that deal at the retail level. The sort of fundamental disregard for the customer engagement in the U.S. is nothing short of shocking.
Yeah. I'd say a few things. I think some of the way we show up in the U.S. is representative of the sell-through of products. As products don't sell through, we lose shelf space, we end up with not desirable space. Secondly, I think about 18 months ago, we put the two sales organizations, Reebok and adidas, together, thinking that we could use one to leverage, to sell in a stronger way. Didn't really work very well. We've just taken the sales forces since the beginning of the year so that we have a dedicated sales force against Reebok and a dedicated sales force against the adidas brand. The third thing is, I don't think we had enough money to go in because it's very expensive with the retail customers to really put the right facing on even just a small store.
It was probably a little bit of lack of money. Then I do think there was just a lack of intensity, which is we have to own this, around making it look as good as it could look. We've gone through a lot of work with Roland's team, just came over. We had a big workshop on how do we manage customers better, how do we do strategic planning better? That workshop just actually happened. Eric's team came over, under Michael Stanier with, "We need to give you more tools, to be able to go out there." To your point, it's pretty widespread, right? That's why we don't just have two important customers, but we're going to start with the biggest sporting goods, which is Dick's, and the most important mall customer, which is Foot Locker, and try to redo that.
I'd say it's a number 1 priority to show up better because it's not something we're proud of.
Thanks. Two questions also from my side. First, Mark, you mentioned that obviously in the U.S. you have zillions of different sports, lacrosse, field hockey, whatever. I'm not quite sure if adidas has already a full range of products in that category. Which brings us back to the fact that, I think, one of you mentioned that you want to reduce the number of models by 25%. Is that then again, offset by going deeper into new categories like lacrosse? Do you need an extension of product ranges, first of all? Secondly, Gil, in your presentation, I read something about productivity and profitability. I did not see anything in your presentation on that. Given that you put more money into marketing, maybe extension of models, how should we think about profitability in the U.S.?
Are you willing to maybe go down the first two years, negative territory maybe, and then have the big turnaround there? Thanks.
Yeah. I'll let Robin go with the profitability one. I've heard that one before, so I'll go with that. I would say this, one of the initiatives we have going on right now with Tim Janaway is what sports, not only in America, but in any country, authenticate the brand. To your point, we'd like to be in every sport on the training aspect of it, what they wear when they train. I'm not sure we're going to get into every category in terms of the equipment side of it. I do think it's important. All these athletes run. They all wear hoodies. They all wear training gear. We can definitely participate that way. One of the reasons some of these big universities prefer us over some of our competitors, there's really only two that a university can deal with.
The logical one and then us, because we're the only ones that have the breadth of the products and the expertise to service all these athletes. They call it American sports and then Olympic sports. I think we definitely have to look at which ones and then really do those well. We're in that process right now. Oh, I'll let Herbert take that.
Profitability, as you know, we do not yet report on profitability for the individual regions, Robin can give you definitely a little bit more flavor so that you get an idea what we are doing there. Correct, Robin? Yes, he's nodding. What else? Any further question? Yeah, here and here. Credit Suisse. Oh, no, sorry.
Hi, Suzanne from Bank of America. Coming back to the, you said your intention was to increase the market share from three and a half to 15%. How long do you think that's going to take? Then your comments on Dick's rolling out 400 doors for you. How many are you in for the moment, and is that like an exclusive agreement, or could they do the same for competitors? Obviously you need to outgrow the market to achieve your market share mission. Thank you.
Well, I think right now the major opportunity for market share, the major opportunity for growth, and the major opportunity for womens and to touch the most consumers is running. We also have incredible technology in running. I do think we have to focus more on these middle price points, EUR 70-EUR 120, which is underway right now. Adrian Leek is doing incredible work around that space. I expect running to really start to take off in the next by 2017. Certainly, it's going to grow next year. I would say by 2020. That's what we're talking about, 2016-2020. In the Dick's, it's really interesting. We've had kind of a rocky relationship with them over the years, not Herbert and Edward Stack, but in terms of the commercialization of our products. Last fall, they made a major commitment to us in a few areas.
One is soccer. They want us to be the dominant soccer brand in their stores. This fall, we'll be rolling out 400. There's about 10 just massive areas, then there's about 200 kind of dominating areas, then another 200 that we have really significant space. We will be the major soccer brand with Dick's, and we'll launch products there and also do some co-op advertising in the fall. We then asked for the authenticating sports to be represented in a much better way. Football, baseball, basketball, softball, volleyball, those sports. We're now looking at how to roll that out in the fall. Today, currently, we have 104 what we call pads, which what we'd really like is to have those pads in 400 doors. It's pure science.
We have to have so much dollars per square foot sell through, which increased significantly in the last six months, to be honest with you. As those ratios go up, we're going to see more. Our goal, by 2020, would be to be in as many doors as our competitors. That's a long-term commitment with them. They're very committed to building that with us.
What's the gap currently versus competitors?
They would have 400 doors with those pads. We would have 100.
Okay. Thank you.
Yes. Here and here.
Antoine, HSBC. Two questions, one on the U.S. and one on Western Europe. In the U.S., in the past, it was all about Nike, and I think it's the old enemy that you knew quite well. Now, there are also other players taking market share from you, especially Under Armour. Is it fighting against them? Is it part of a single strategy, or do you have actually different strategies targeting market share gains from different competitors and notably Under Armour? You mentioned Western Europe as your home, and I think Nike has big targets to making it a bit less your home. Do you expect that with the currency headwinds that now Nike is also facing, that it will be more difficult for them to grow market share? Do you think that you can continue to see a lot of pressure?
I would say this about America and competition. Yeah, of course, we look at who the competitors are and what they're doing, I don't think we build a strategy around blocking them. I think we're focused right now on the U.S. athlete, the U.S. consumer. We've got tremendous assets. I don't think we've been very good storytellers, embellishing what we do, connecting with athletes. I think if we do our job, I think market shares and growth will take care of itself. Regardless, there's always going to be competitors, and if it's not this one, it's that one. I think we really need to focus on a really tight focus on the consumer and the athlete. What are we going to do, and execute and be consistent over the next five-year period.
Good. Coming to your second question on Western Europe and the foreign exchange influence. Obviously, what we experienced last year, to a certain extent, the strong dollar is now hitting Nike to a certain extent, but we don't know what they will spend and what their plans are for Europe. We definitely can tell you what our plans are, and not only in Europe, around the world. As I said this morning, this is a head-to-head race everywhere in the world, besides of America, where the distance is bigger. In the rest of the world, we are all fighting, or we both fight for the number one spot. Especially in the last six months, we have made extremely good progress in Western Europe. I think in Germany, we have had the highest sales ever in our history.
Gil, you can tell a little bit more what has happened.
Yeah. The exchange rate will be what it is. I think clearly the starting base for us is refocusing on what matters and where it matters the most. We have clearly now aligned our organization to a brand leadership and creating a new foundation to actually be more focused and be more aggressive. Clearly, we have battlefields, which they have come in more aggressively over the last years. I've explained that in my presentation. I think today we have the momentum, which we are taking back some momentum that we've lost, clearly. It's not momentum which are in one product. It's momentum that we are now seeing across many markets, and certainly on those key categories that matters, again, where we need to lead. The battle is on. Let's put it that way. Home is home and will remain home.
Can I have a follow-up maybe on the U.S., because I remember five years ago when you announced the plan, I think one of the criticism from investors that you were aiming at gaining market share in the U.S. was also increasing the profitability. I see that there is not really any sports on which you're withdrawing or scaling down. How can you be sure that you can fund those categories which are your focus without actually maybe capitulating on one or two categories?
Good. When you say you don't see any sport we are scaling down, we just have taken the decision not to renew the NBA contract, as you might have heard. You have to have in mind, we have shown you the growth numbers today, in terms of revenues. If we spend 13% around that, then we have absolute year-by-year more money, which we can reinvest into drives the desirability of the brand. Obviously, I hope it came through during the whole day that we are focused much more on what we think drives brand desirability and drives to win the hearts and minds of our consumer. This is where we spend our money and where we focus our money. Okay?
Michael. Go ahead.
I'll just add one thing to that. One of the things we've done with go-to-market strategy across all these product categories is really say we'll spend less go-to-market on some of these categories and more on running and more on soccer and more on Originals. We definitely have downsized the investment, let's say, on going to market with tennis, as an example, to really focus on the things that will drive desirability and revenue.
If I could just jump in here. Just to add on, because we're all focused clearly on the stage. It's about focusing on fewer products. It's not about categories. It's about really going after those franchises. If we say it's the ZX Flux or we say it's the Energy Boost, or we say it's Damian Lillard's signature shoe, those three signature franchises will be invested in. It's not about the categories they represent and the width. It's about driving those singular silhouettes I talked about earlier.
Okay. Yep.
Hi. One question about Europe. You mentioned double-digit order increase in order backlog for the current year. Can you elaborate a bit what's behind it in terms of countries? Is it kind of a rebound of the peripheral countries, or what's behind that number?
No. It's really, as I just mentioned, it's spread across countries, across the board. It's positive in the sense that we anniversary a World Cup year in that sense. As I mentioned, some of our key categories are participating to that. We see strong business momentum in those football as well as Originals and some others of the categories. It's a well-spread growth at this stage.
Okay. I think there was one. Oh, you still have a question, yeah?
Okay.
Most of my question's been answered. Mark, you were quoted in the U.S. press as saying you wanted to go from, I think 40 athletes being sponsored in the U.S. to 500. You talked about, I think 21 draft picks that you'd recently signed. Can you give us a bit more flesh as to whether this is a target or an aspiration? Some idea of how much it would cost? Just a little bit more broadly from that, what was the thinking about deciding you needed to be big in three major sports rather than saying, "Well, we can perhaps give baseball a miss and absolutely make sure that we nail soccer," or, sorry, "U.S. football," for example?
Yeah. First of all, I would say it's definitely an aspiration. We don't have a piece of paper that says that many. Let's take baseball, for example. I remember arguing with Eric about baseball. We've just signed probably 40 Major League Baseball players. The issue is, we now have about 60 Major League Baseball players, and there's 3,000 in the United States. 60 is not very many. Secondly, it's not very expensive at all in baseball. Most of it's just equipment. Most of these contracts, even if you have to pay a player, it's very small dollars, $5,000, $10,000. Some of the bigger players are obviously more, but we're going after count and visibility on the field of play. The football, I think, is really important that we get. Again, there's about 1,800 NFL football players.
If we were to get to 200 over the next five years, it's still a small percentage of those. Again, most of those players are small dollars. It's equipment, it's service, it's using them in activations and things like that. Our idea is not to sign a bunch of high-priced icons in these sports. It's to be when you go to games, whether it's a football, baseball, basketball game. It's like, I think we said we'd like to go from 70 NBA players to 140. Those aren't expensive players, but when you go to a game, you see adidas on the feet of players. I think in terms of total investment, I don't exactly know what it is, but it's not as expensive as it seems.
Mark, if I can add. On the right players, the creators.
Yeah.
It's about getting those specific players and what they represent on the playing field. It's not just about
Yeah
every offensive lineman or just size and distance. We want to have the right guys that people will follow and aspire to be.
Just following up, given that obviously one of your more recent large competitors has come up effectively through one sport, what was the argument, in your case, for going for three major sports, plus running and women, et cetera, rather than something a bit more targeted on individual sports?
I think it's the aspiration of our brand, which is to be the best sports brand in the world, and I don't think you can do it with one.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Any further question? All right.
Hi.
Hello.
Eugenia from TIAA-CREF. I wanted to understand a little bit, what are the biggest opportunities for driving efficiencies through your respective regional P&Ls? Maybe one more for Mark. Do you think that acquiring big data companies can be disruptive?
Why don't you start and I will-
Yeah. I mentioned obviously we've changed significantly our organization from five market organization to one organization. Clearly we have seen and we've worked hard to make efficiency savings as we do that. Point one. That is leveraging future growth into a cost base, which is more effective and more efficient. Point one. Point two, I mentioned one range. As we do one range in Europe, we have decreased our range across the entire Europe by a bit more than 25%. Actually, we've increased the number of articles deployed locally simply because we have one range instead of five, so the overlap is much bigger. You understand therefore, the series of efficiency you can drive from working capital, from warehousing capacities, blah, blah. There is this, clearly making five into one create a number of levers of productivity for us.
Okay. I'll do the data one, if that's okay with you. From a digital sports standpoint, I presented a little bit earlier about all the data we have and we're collecting from our wearables. I think more importantly, the data's important, but the consumer is the one who generates the data, so it's how you get that. I think that's what you're referring to. Is that correct? Okay. It's about getting the loyalty of those consumers in those larger communities. As I talked about, we currently have 135 million. We want to deepen that relationship to get to 250 million in the next two years. That then gives us the opportunity to harness that, deepen that relationship, and basically turn them into consumers of the brand, not just fans of the brand.
That goes back to the same funnel, brand momentum, promoter score, purchase intent I spoke about earlier. When we talk about acquiring different places, that we're always open to acquisitions that can provide us a benefit to get more data or better yet, more communities that have access to us. It's just taking the choice of looking at the right ones. We're constantly fielding opportunities and looking at new opportunities to do that. It's just a matter of finding the right fit for what we're trying to achieve as well.
Let's see if we have a question from the webcast.
On a more big picture level, when you look at your peers in terms of marketing and brand-building processes, what have they done better than you in recent years?
Well, I guess we have spoken already a lot about that. This is brand desirability, et cetera. Once again, let's put it into perspective. Yeah, we have lost, in some markets, brand desirability in the last 12 months, but we still were growing 11% year adidas brand in the last 12 months. We have seen, especially in the fourth quarter, where we didn't have any related World Cup products, that we have been growing by another 11%, in Western Europe, 13%. There is definitely brand momentum there, and this is continuing to grow. I think the biggest change which we have made is our consumer-led organization, and this enables us now to really focus on the consumer. This drives consumer-centric decisions throughout the whole world.
By the way, Jürgen, when you asked me this morning what makes me confidence or asked if we achieve these objectives, I forgot to mention that this change of the organization, I think you said this morning that more than 1,000 people are sitting on different places, and we steer it from category to category, they have full responsibility. This is, I think, what we have started already nine months ago, and you see the first successes already. This is what I think brings us this strong momentum back, which we see in the moment. Okay, any further questions? If not-
That's not the case. Thank you very much, gentlemen. This brings us to the next coffee break. We will meet again here at a quarter past 4:00 P.M. to hear about TaylorMade and the often talked about presentation from Robin. See you in a bit.
We'll find out in a minute. Nice job.
What did you do?
Great job. We'll take from the top. You're down. Okay? It's always when it's good, everybody participated. When it's bad, I only be the one who get.
Gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, we want to continue. Please take your seats. It looks like that at every coffee break, we lose a few people. Some open chairs. Ladies and gentlemen, we will continue with TaylorMade, our third key brand, as I said this morning, and we are happy to give you now an outlook about the TaylorMade business until 2020 in a more challenged market, as we all know the golf market. Before we go into the presentation, let me also inform you about the management change. Ben Sharpe, our head of TaylorMade-adidas Golf, has decided to leave the company for personal reason. I want to thank Ben for all the dedication which he brought to the company within the last nine years.
I'm even more excited to inform you today that we have nominated David Abeles as the new president of TaylorMade-adidas Golf. David is a very well-known guy in the golf industry. He was 12 years with TaylorMade-adidas Golf in the years when we had the high rise. He left us, I think, two and a half years ago, became CEO of the competitor company, which is mainly dealing with running and marathon events, and we brought him back a few months ago. I'm quite happy that David is here today and give you an insight into what we do believe TaylorMade will be in the future, how we reenergize our business, and how we reenergize the whole golf business because there is no doubt that TaylorMade has shaped the golf business in the last 10 years, and this is what we obliged to do again.
Please welcome David.
Thank you, Herbert. Thank you. Afternoon, everybody. We're getting close to the finish line, aren't we? Herbert, thanks so much for the introduction. It's been a couple of years since I've been on campus, and when I walked into the meeting room and I saw "Creating the New," there's a new feeling on campus, which has been very inspiring for me for the short time that I've been here in Herzog. What I can assure you of is that there's also a new and exciting feeling going on in San Diego right now around TaylorMade, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of that with you over the course of the afternoon. That being said, we have a very simple mission in our company, that mission is to be the best golf company in the world.
To be the best golf company in the world, a couple of things have to happen in our minds. First of all, you have to make the best products, unequivocally the best products, because we are in a high-performance category. If you don't make the best products, we have a saying in our building that products don't lie. If we come out with a product that isn't better than the previous generation product, we don't win, nor does the industry. We have had a track record of relentlessly innovating technology through the TaylorMade brand to enable us to really drive our growth over the past decade. Secondly, those products have to be validated by what we call the pyramid of influence.
What we call the pyramid of influence specifically is having more of the world's best players playing our products than any other company in golf. The simple formula is make the best performing products, ensure that the best players in the world and most of the best players in the world play those products, and great things happen. Here's a little video to give you a look at what that feels like.
Oh, wow.
Give a little applause for that. That was really neat. The combination of great products. The combination of the world's greatest players equals a winning formula. By the numbers, when you look at what's happened to our business over the course of the last decade, it's pretty incredible. We've got leadership position, strong leadership position in metalwoods and irons, which are the two primary categories in equipment, and we've got a secondary position in apparel and footwear with our adidas Golf brand. We've got strength in the marketplace. We're north of 35% share in metalwoods, we're north of 20% in irons, and if you look at the worldwide tours in 2014, we have a dominant position on tour as well. We're off to a fast start in 2015 as well, winning six consecutive events.
TaylorMade staff players, six consecutive events on the PGA Tour over the past couple of months. We're executing very well. However, one might beg the question, where are we? I know there's been a lot of speculation around the golf industry, and I'd like to get into that for a moment. Where we are as a company is we have a strong portfolio of brands. I'm going to talk about how those brands are positioned in a bit as well. We've got a very strong pipeline of innovation, we're very proud of that. To be a performance brand, you have to have great innovation on a continuous basis to continue to come to market and inspire golfers to buy products. We're in a very good place.
I had a chance when I returned to the company to see the next three years of innovation, they're spectacular. Absolutely spectacular. One of our greatest strengths is our ability to distribute our products globally through the interface in our organization with the adidas Group. It's a major competitive advantage for our company and enables us to really manage our business around the world in a very efficient and very effective way. However, the last three years in the industry have been a bit challenging. The market's been down, specifically the equipment market's been down just over 20%. The challenge we face with that is the majority of that decline came in our core category of metalwoods. As the industry leader, we felt the greatest impact. What happens when that transition occurs in the field is we end up with a little bit extra inventory.
Our field inventories have been a bit higher than what we're accustomed to seeing. We've been working diligently throughout 2014 and into early 2015 to move those inventories out so that we can get back to full revenue product sales, high margin product sales, with great performing products like you just saw in the video. The good news is we're starting to see the business stabilize. We're starting to see the market stabilize, we're excited about the future. Golf is a great game. Golf will be around for a long time, the business will strengthen as we move forward. What have we done to manage this transition? I want to take you through a couple of real specific examples of what we've done in the organization to ensure that we can build a sustainable, long-term growth and profitable platform for our brands.
First of all, we resized the base of our revenue. We didn't do that purposely. We did that as a result of the size of the industry. After our revenue was short last year, we shut down our Plano facility, which is where the Adams Golf brand was positioned down in Texas. We moved that Adams Golf brand and all of the people, or the people in the Adams Golf brand, into Carlsbad to integrate with the TaylorMade team to ensure we had the right efficiency and the right horsepower on the brand to enable that brand to grow. The good news is that's working. We also went through a very thorough OpEx review to make sure that our OpEx was in line with our revenue.
We've done a good job managing our OpEx, I think we're going to be very well positioned in terms of what our P&L looks like going forward. We've also worked diligently on differentiating our brands. It's critically important in our business to ensure that every brand has a specific position so that it can carve out its place in the category and live. We had a series of situations where our brands were actually competing with each other as opposed to complementing each other, I'm going to take you through a couple of slides to show you that. Finally, we've been working very diligently on evolving our commercial model to ensure that we can affect the consumer directly and drive sell-through. You look at our brand portfolio, it's very strong. We've got two major brands in TaylorMade and adidas.
TaylorMade is a high-performance brand. We have the voice of the zero to four handicap, so we work right down the pyramid of influence. We are in a very aspirational category. The TaylorMade brand is the most aspirational brand in golf equipment. The adidas brand is steeped in sports innovation for the golfer. Those two brands work very well together. A few years back, we acquired a brand called Ashworth, which some of you may be familiar with. Ashworth is a California-based lifestyle brand that complements adidas very well. Golfers wear Ashworth on the golf course, but they can also wear Ashworth off the golf course, which will open up new markets for us over time. Several years back, we purchased the Adams brand, which enables us to get to places where the TaylorMade brand can't go. Ladies products and senior products, higher handicap products.
The Adams brand is a very inviting, very friendly brand. We're in a very fortunate situation to have four brands that are very clearly positioned that enable us to win in the marketplace. Here's where we were. When we acquired Adams, there was a lot of overlap. Over the course of the last couple of years, we've worked very hard to ensure that we address the competitive golfer with TaylorMade and the recreational or casual golfer with Adams. As I mentioned, those two together enable us to reach deeper into the marketplace, reach deeper into the consumer, to elevate our brands and elevate our business. We work the same way as it relates to adidas and Ashworth. When we first acquired Ashworth, the brand was positioned with performance fabrics. Not natural fabrics, performance fabrics. It laid right on top of where we were with adidas.
Over the course of the last several years, we've repositioned the Ashworth brand, it's very much lifestyle. You have natural fibers, cottons, and merinos, and products that golfers can wear on, and importantly, off the golf course, which we'll begin to exploit as we move forward with the Ashworth brand. We've done a lot of hard work ensuring that our brands are positioned the right way so that we can address the market in broader, deeper ways. However, we still have a lot to do. This is what we're focused on, and it starts with focus. Our organization, when we're at our best, has pronounced focus around the things that matter most, and I can assure you that's where we're directed right now. It starts with product. We are a product company in a product-driven industry. That's what we do.
We've got the world's best designers, the world's best engineers, building the world's best products that the world's best players play with, and that enables us to move our brand and our business forward. We have to focus on launching those products in the right way at the right time. During last year's downturn and softening of the business, we got out of cadence a little bit, which cost us the strength to come to market in the ways that we're accustomed to, bringing big energy through product launches that enable us to ultimately win. Please remember, we're in a seasonal business. For the United States, for example, if we're not in season in March and April with hot products, it's challenging to make up that momentum as we work downstream.
Getting the cadence right, bringing products to market, the right products to market at the right time, is critically important for us. I've heard a lot of discussion today about engaging the consumer. We are deeply engaging the consumer, not simply through direct consumer sales, but through the use of new technologies that enable us to interact with golfers. We have RFID tags in certain golf equipment that we can now identify which clubs are in play with different golfers. As you can imagine, golfers want a lot of data. There are 14 clubs in everybody's bag. They want to know how far they hit those 14 clubs, when they hit them, how frequently they hit them. New opportunities, new technologies will enable us to engage those consumers in ways that will allow us to build a database of golfers to utilize to commercialize going forward.
We're also modernizing our distribution strategy. Next month, we will launch the first two premium outlet stores in the U.S. One of the challenges the industry faces is when products are sold in at the end of the cycle, it's challenging for those products to be removed from retail and find a home. We're being very progressive in launching two outlet stores. We have a plan for more over the course of the year to ensure that we can take products back from existing retailers and place them in outlet stores so the brand experience is incredible and enables our retailers to stay in line with products, premium products that really drive our brand, drive our top line, and drive our margin. That's a very new initiative for our company and a leadership initiative for our industry.
We'll also continue to focus on leading technologies and enter new categories. We're working with wearable technology right now to interface with golfers so that we can communicate with them more frequently. We just saw a technology that is the size of a piece of Scotch tape that we can bring into the hosel of a golf club and register that golf club through an application online and identify specifically who's playing that product, where it's purchased, and how it's performing. We're looking at that in the future as well. We're using advanced technologies to really engage consumers and build a broader, more robust database to understand specifically consumer behavior and how we can bring those consumers into our brands. As I stated at the outset, number one on tour is the core strategy for our company.
We've got an incredible sports marketing function that ensures that we're looking after not only the U.S. PGA Tour players, but worldwide tour players around the world to ensure that our tour counts get stronger and stronger and continue to elevate our leadership in core categories. Why are we doing all this? In a relatively flat market, one that's been slightly down over the course of the past few years, we believe wallet share is critically important for our growth. How will we grow? How are we going to move our company forward in an industry that's been soft? Well, this is how we look at growth. First of all, through market share. We think within existing categories, and we have four core categories, metalwoods and irons and equipment, and apparel and footwear with adidas and Ashworth.
Those are four of the five largest categories in golf. Fortunately, we've got a leadership position in two out of the four and challenging leadership in the other two. We will continue to drive market share. We're focused on bringing more premium products to market, better technologies to market that provide greater value to consumers than ever before. We can do that. Secondly, we are starting to see channel mix. We are going to change our channel mix and improve our channel mix. Outlet stores is one piece of that. E-commerce is another component of that. Identifying distribution within the U.S. and around the world in terms of which products and how we segment those products into the market will enable us ultimately to shift our mix and grow our business. Finally, entering new categories. Smart technology is only one category.
We have categories in our business today, given our brand strength, given our leadership position in golf, that we can capitalize on. Golf balls, accessories, secondary categories that really will grow as we grow as an organization and as we build our brands. Additionally, brands like Ashworth that can expand beyond just golf shops, beyond just golfers, and into the lifestyle of golf to enable us to really pursue new markets. What we project over the course of the next five years is mid-single digit growth. We will be outpacing the marketplace, we'll be gaining market share, we'll be improving margin, we'll be improving the top line. We're confident for many reasons. Four, in particular. Number one, we've got industry-leading brands in our building. Number two, we've got more innovation than any other company in golf. We're very proud of that.
We've got incredible, passionate people. I would welcome, if any of you have the opportunity to come to San Diego, please come visit us. Come see the energy that's created on campus in Carlsbad with our four brands and our people. It's an incredible experience to see passionate golfers, passionate industry executives, loving the game, loving our business, and working diligently to grow our business. What's really always differentiated us is the attitude in which we bring to market. We're aggressive, we're progressive, and we're very in tune with the needs of our customers, and more in tune with the needs of golfers every day. Those four attributes will enable us to continue to grow and continue to drive leadership in the market. We're optimistic that on a go-forward basis, we will see growth in our brands. Last year was a challenging year.
We got through the year. We made good changes to our business, good fundamental changes to our business. We have our brands positioned better than they ever have been. We have better technologies coming to market this year and into next year and into 2017 and 2018, than we've ever had. The feedback early this year is that R15, AeroBurner, RSi irons, Boost shoes, and all the Clima products have been simply incredible. We're off to a good start, we're gaining strength in the business, and we're going to continue to lead. Thank you. Robin?
My man.
It's all yours.
Super. Thanks very much, David. Well done. You can have it.
You can have it.
Great. Thanks very much, David, a very good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for being so patient also. I have to say, I've really enjoyed this day so far. I enjoyed last night also, but I have enjoyed this day very much because first of all, it's been a great opportunity to catch up with all of you. What's made this day even more special for me was to see this plan that was developed over the last several months by a lot of people within this company come to life. It's been exciting to see how the different parts fit into each other, complement one another, and how all of this adds up to growth. That's both on a top as well as on a bottom line.
All of today's presenters have provided you with details how a focused approach to executing our key strategic choices is going to drive brand desirability, accelerate top-line momentum, and lead to higher profitability. I'd like to take a few minutes now to summarize the most important levers that will drive our financial performance over the next five years. Despite the challenges that we've faced over the last 18 months, we are very definitely a growth company. This will continue to be the case as reflected in also our financial ambition. We will, on average, deliver high single-digit currency-neutral sales growth per year, starting already in 2016, right through to 2020. We will substantially improve the profitability of this group, growing the bottom line by an average of around 15% per year, significantly faster than our top-line growth.
I'm sure you would've noticed that we haven't put out two iconic numbers like we did last time. While they definitely provided clear goals to go after, we have to probably admit that the targets were maybe too superficial as a guidance back then, didn't take into account any currency movements. In fact, as Herbert has already mentioned, adjusted for currency movements, we'll be indeed very close to achieving our targeted top-line growth for 2015. Clearly, falling short of your and our own expectations was not a top-line problem, but much more a profitability issue. One important reason why we haven't reached our bottom-line goal was perhaps the lack of clarity on trade-offs for the people who had to execute the plan on the ground, as we hadn't broken down the major Route 2015 drivers into measurable targets for certain markets and for certain categories.
As a result, we didn't execute decisively enough and didn't always take the right decisions for the long-term benefit of our group. That's definitely going to be different this time. We're operating in a fast-changing environment. Exchange rates are extremely volatile. The competitive landscape is different from what it used to be, because in addition to the traditional competition from sporting goods companies, more and more vertical retailers are trying to get their piece of the highly attractive, and I'd say prosperous industry that we are in. Trends come and go as digitalization drives constant change in consumer preferences. We are well aware that all of this changes the way we have to run our business. Since we're not talking about incremental changes, it's not going to be enough to adjust some of the details here and cut some of the costs elsewhere.
For the future success of this group all comes down to what Herbert mentioned at the beginning. We need to win the hearts and the minds of our consumers. Now some of you might be surprised to hear this from the CFO of the company, but I'm absolutely convinced that this new mindset that brands first needs to be reflected in the way we approach growth. Going forward, we will be even more disciplined when it comes to the quality of our top-line development. In the past, we were sometimes too aggressive in our efforts to capitalize on good selling product. This has helped our numbers, but it definitely diluted brand desire and long-term profitability. Going forward, we're not going to sacrifice long-term brand heat for short-term profits. Instead, we will always ask ourselves if what we are doing is for the long-term benefit of our brands.
This will be the most powerful and most sustainable growth driver. Now each market and each category has a clear role in this setup. While some need to go for market share, others will have to further leverage their current leading position. As a result of all that, there will be different phases in our business plan. While we have a clear action plan for the different stretches of this along the way, it is important to understand that, if necessary, we will make use of the increased agility level within our organization and be much faster in reacting to changes in the overall environment or competitive landscape. We will reallocate resources where our priorities are, between markets and categories, or to support certain franchises. We will, to a certain degree, increase investments into our brands if we deem this to be necessary to drive long-term brand desirability.
As a consequence, our performance over the next couple of years will not be linear. Let me make it very clear about one thing. We will definitely grow revenues and earnings in each of the five years. We will not only bring brand reputation to new levels, this strategic business plan will ultimately be a step change for both our top line and for the group's profitability. You know, we have a rich portfolio of brands, all of which will contribute to the targeted sales and earnings increase. Top line expansion will be driven by adidas and Reebok, which will both grow at a high single-digit rate on average over the next years. In a more or less stagnant market, TaylorMade-adidas Golf will increase sales by mid-single digits on average per year.
Now you've already heard about the various growth drivers from our previous speakers, let me now briefly highlight the most important ones for you again. We have defined key categories within our core brands that will spur our growth. At Brand adidas, the major growth categories are running, where we would double our business by 2020; football, where we will be the number 1 in every market by 2020; Originals, with sales expected to grow by 50% over the next five years; and the further expansion of adidas NEO. In addition, as Eric has elaborated on in detail, our women's business will be an important growth driver. At Reebok, the transformation to fitness has been successfully completed. We've already grown this part of our business by mid to high single digits over the last two years.
This growth was partly offset by the phasing out of the traditional sports business. Reebok's all about fitness, and from the end of 2015, this will also be reflected in Reebok's revenues, which will all come from fitness. This already was a very healthy business setup, and that, combined with increased focus on women and further initiatives to win the fitness generation, will help us to accelerate growth. At TaylorMade-adidas Golf, the cleaner inventory situation we are facing in the marketplace, together with a leaner organization, gives us a strong foundation for future growth. This will be supported by our relentless focus on product innovation, the development of the new categories within the industry, and a more attractive channel mix. All of this will enable us to outgrow the competition in the next five years. That's categories.
From a market perspective, you have heard today that North America and Western Europe will be the key priorities for our group and represent important growth drivers for our top-line improvements. In both markets, we expect to significantly increase revenues, with sales in North America even growing by more than 50% by 2020. In addition, we also expect the emerging markets, where we have outgrown our competitors for seven years in a row, to continue to do extremely well with growth rates above industry average. We have a clear ambition here. We want to be the clear market leader in each of the emerging markets. From a distribution perspective, e-commerce will be by far the fastest-growing channel. With e-com revenues growing to more than EUR 2 billion by 2020, this channel alone will represent around 10% of our overall business.
In addition, we will further continue to roll out our own retail store network. Our premium presentation and premium experience will drive double-digit sales growth per year in our own concept stores. In absolute terms, however, our wholesale business will be the biggest growth driver, since the majority of the group's revenues will continue to be generated via our important retail partners. We will spur this expansion by focusing on our global top 20 accounts and by developing customized partnerships and end-to-end supply models for and with them. Ladies and gentlemen, at the end of the day, the top-line growth, of course, needs to translate into strong earnings creation. Only then are we going to be able to continuously invest into our brands, into our infrastructure, and into our processes.
While Route 2015 may not have lived up to our high expectations on improving the group's profitability, it has sharpened our awareness of the importance of the strong bottom line. We haven't been able to deliver on that goal, but we will definitely not stop working towards our long-term aspiration of achieving double-digit margins. We're therefore committed to delivering significant improvements in profits over the next five years, while at the same time making proper investments into our brands, into our markets, and into our people, which will ultimately spur long-term sustainable success for our group. While we recognize the growth in profits may be higher or lower in any given quarter or financial year, we are targeting to deliver earnings growth of around 15% on average per year until 2020.
The key levers of this earnings improvement are mostly related to our three strategic choices and will be a combination of gross margin expansion as well as operating leverage. Starting with speed. As you've already heard from Claire today, this strategic choice will help us to not only increase our in-season creation and also improve our overall responsiveness, it also leads to significant cost savings, which will be a result of a number of operational improvements. The rollout of our speed initiative to 50% of our articles will not only lead to an additional 20% full price sell-through, it will also decrease the average markdown on our articles as we respond better to consumers' desires. In addition, this initiative will have a positive impact on inventory turnover, which will ultimately contribute to lower working capital requirements.
The reduction of models by another 25%, together with a much higher focus on key franchises at both adidas and Reebok, will furthermore significantly reduce complexity and increase our marketing efficiency. Lastly, we will continue to work on further improving our supply chain efficiencies by bringing factory automation to new levels, as you've seen in today's setup all around you. With our Cities Approach, we will continue to roll out our direct-to-consumer business in a much more impactful way. Our new controlled space target of over 60% will not only help us further drive customer engagement and improve consumer experience, it is also a clear statement that we will be focused on exactly those distribution channels that bring us the highest return. Our e-com business will grow significantly to over EUR 2 billion and thus gain significantly in terms of scale, leveraging its fixed cost base.
The reduction of our own retail store formats will not only streamline our store network, but also help us to increase our retail productivity by an average of about 7% each and every year. Let's now have a look at Open Source, our third strategic choice. As you've heard from Eric, our goal is to have 30% of shared content being created by consumers by 2017. This will not only deepen our relationship with consumers globally, it will also help us to become more efficient when it comes to our future marketing spend. From a brand perspective, we expect Reebok's gross margin to see strong improvements over the next five years, since the brand will benefit from its pure and unique fitness positioning and thus from a more favorable product mix.
At TaylorMade-adidas Golf, the increased direct-to-consumer business will result in a more favorable channel mix and also lead to a more efficient clearing process. Last but not least, we're committed to accelerate those initiatives that will ultimately lead to operating overhead leverage in our group. We have laid out the foundation for a cleaner and more efficient organization by reorganizing our sales and marketing teams, implementing the joint operating model in major markets such as North America and Western Europe, and restructuring TaylorMade-adidas Golf. As our business grows, this will lead to significant leverage in the years to come. Of course, we will not stop looking at those areas where we believe we can do things better or in a more simplified way.
For example, we will further centralize our organization and its decision-making over the next five years and also optimize group functions. Let me now turn to our balance sheet. We will continue to strictly manage our various balance sheet items as we have done in the past. We strongly believe that we'll be able to improve our operating working capital despite the significant improvements we've made over the last decade. Supported by the various speed initiatives, we're targeting to reduce operating working capital as a percentage of sales to a sustainable level of around 20%. This, I'd suggest, is even more impressive taking into account that operating working capital is and will be negatively impacted by our current vendor financing program. To support the group's growth and the growth trajectory, we will continue to invest into our infrastructure.
The focus over the next five years will, as mentioned by Roland, be mainly related to the continued retail store rollout as well as the expansion of our World of Sports campus to further consolidate our organization. As a result, we expect our CapEx over the next few years to remain between 3.5%-4.5% of group revenues. Due to our high focus on cash generation, the group's cash flow is anticipated to grow at a significantly faster rate compared to the operating profit during the five-year period. Our new Strategic Business Plan includes a strong commitment to returning cash to our shareholders, which will be a balance between both dividends and share buybacks. In this regard, our dividend payout ratio has seen steady improvements over the last years, reflecting our commitment to a reliable dividend policy aimed towards continuity.
While 2014 was clearly an exceptional year with regard to the dividend payout, we've clearly reached the upper end of our initial targeted corridor of between 20% and 40%. As a result, given our firm confidence in the strength of the group's financial position going forward, we will upgrade our dividend policy and increase the targeted payout ratio to a range between 30% and 50%. We will also return cash to our shareholders in the form of our share buyback program, where we've just started the second tranche. In total, we plan to return up to EUR 1.5 billion by the end of 2017. One of the key priorities within Route 2015 was to establish the foundations for future business practices that were expected to enable the adidas Group to grow successfully and sustainably.
We've definitely delivered on this one, will continue to benefit from this going forward. Please allow me to highlight a few of our major achievements in this respect. We have significantly improved the quality of distribution by opening new state-of-the-art warehouses such as the distribution center in Osnabrück, Germany, and we have consolidated the number of warehouses from around 90 in 2010 to below 70 already in 2014. We've harmonized systems and processes across the group, rolling out our group-wide planning and decision-making processes to all markets and all functions. We have consolidated, standardized, and automated above-market services such as the payment process and accounting services to maximize efficiencies and improve governance. Our organizational setup has seen extensive changes. That's both here at headquarters as well as at the market level.
The joint operating model, which has been rolled out to all major markets, allows us to drive a more profitable business in different territories by being more efficient in our operations and elevating the level of service to customers and consumers across all of our brands. While many of these investments have not been directly visible to the outside, I am convinced that they will help us in the future to get closer and become even more relevant to our customers and to our consumers worldwide. Over the last few months, and also today, you have heard us talk a lot about our new operating model, which we implemented during the second half of 2014, to become even more impactful in the marketplace.
This new operating model follows a clear brand leadership with our brands taking the lead in planning and creating while our markets focus on providing input as well as on execution. The new setup empowers our category business units to take responsibility for all marketing processes end to end. This will help us to bring our concepts to consumer in a more efficient and in a more effective way. I'm convinced that based on our clear business unit strategy and a consumer-focused organization across all marketing and sales functions, this will help drive engagement and provide a clearer framework for faster decision-making on all levels. We've used those changes to also review the overall assessment of the group performance going forward. From now on, we are monitoring and evaluating our business progress on a market level first, and secondly, through brand and category performance.
This, of course, means that our internal as well as our external reporting will see significant changes from 2015 onwards to adapt to the above-mentioned changes. Reporting our group and market performance will not only ensure we are reflecting the internal organization, but will also help to further add transparency to our external reporting. From the first quarter 2015 onwards, you will see us report the combined adidas and Reebok business for the following seven markets. That's Western Europe, North America, Greater China, Russia CIS, Latin America, Japan, and MEAA, which is Middle East, Africa, and other Asian markets. Other businesses, of course, which includes the businesses of TaylorMade, adidas Golf, Reebok-CCM Hockey, and other centrally managed brands, will continue to be reported separately.
In addition to the new focus on market performance, we will also start providing you with more information on operational and financial KPIs of our retail business, such as net sales per sq m, which Roland has discussed earlier today. As you've heard, one of the group's three strategic choices is open source, and Eric informed you in detail about what that means for our brands and for our consumers. The various digital newsrooms we've opened last year across the globe clearly shows we've already started to put this strategy into reality. As part of our investor relations activities, we also want to make our communication an open source for both investors and, of course, for analysts.
Therefore, from 2015 onwards, we will further increase our interaction with the financial markets with the intention to both listen to your feedback and also help you to get more insights into our group and into the drivers of our business. In order to do so, we will provide you with more frequent access to senior management of our group, so you get to meet and know the people who've not only been highly involved in preparing the strategic plan, but also in bringing it to life and executing on it constantly. We'll be doing this by being on the road even more frequently. By we, I don't only mean Herbert and myself and the IR team, but also other members of our senior management team.
Roland, for example, will already be with us on the road in the U.S. in April, Eric will join with us to meet with you in May. Something Herbert alluded to earlier, in addition, we want to launch the IR Tutorial Workshops, which we are planning to host at least twice a year. The purpose of these, what will be half-day workshops, which will be held either virtually or on-site at different locations, one of them might be Carlsbad now, if you listened to David a minute ago, is to further provide insights on key strategic areas, as well as topics with a high relevance due to specific circumstances. In fact, I'd like to use this opportunity to invite you to the premiere of these tutorials.
Later on June 24th this year, the general managers of our football, our running, and our Originals categories will provide you with more details on their specific strategies for the next five years, you're all very welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, before I come to an end, let me elaborate a little bit on something which will become increasingly important. Winning the consumer and being the best sports brand in the world goes far beyond the pure financials. Our new strategic business plan will therefore see a much more holistic management, monitoring, and reporting process than ever before. I'm absolutely convinced that the long-term success of our group is also based on certain non-financial metrics, such as the desirability of our brands, the sustainable footprint of our organization, or the engagement of our employees.
Based on this more holistic view of the economic, environmental, and social impacts of our group, we will be implementing our version of an integrated performance management system and will further enhance our integrated reporting efforts over the next five years. At the end of the day, it all comes down to value creation. This is exactly what our new business plan is all about. We will create the new adidas Group, known for the most innovative product, unparalleled consumer and customer service, unique retail experience, and creator of the largest sports community. We have made clear strategic choices which will drive brand desirability and significantly increase our footprint in the industry. With a firm focus on excellence and execution, we will drive profitability to much stronger levels and significantly increase shareholder returns.
The strategy presented today will create shareholder value by creating value for our customers, consumers, and for our employees. I have mentioned before that this process is going to be a journey. I'm calling out to all of you to become part of this journey, and to support us in creating the new adidas Group. Now, Herbert and I will be very happy to take your remaining questions.
Thank you, Robin. We would actually also ask David to join us on the stage to answer questions you might have on TaylorMade.
Well done, Robin.
Thank you. Not obsolete.
No.
No. Okay.
Okay.
Brian.
We will probably, Herbert, start, because we had three questions from the floor earlier, if you remember.
Oh, yeah. Very good.
One was about brand, because you deferred all of them. Yeah?
Yeah. Correct.
One was about the CapEx, and I think I addressed that in the presentation.
Yep.
We're going to be spending a bit more, but it's going to be around the 3.5%-4.5% of sales. Second one was about, okay, this is not sort of back ended any longer, they're going to be the same every year. Well, actually, yes, we are definitely going to grow our business and our profitability every year. We need that agility to react to whatever the circumstances are that ultimately lead us to invest in where we need to invest for the long-term health of our brands. That leads also to the question that came out for Mark in the last Q&A session about, well, could it be that you wouldn't be as profitable in some years as others? I think that's probably quite valid. That some years we're going to be more profitable than others. In Americas, we make these choices.
The key point is, overall and every year for our group, we grow our top line and we grow our bottom line. The third point was about.
I think it was profitability in America. You answered that.
Profit in America. There was one, too. Was it? Okay.
Yes. You answered that.
You're so-
Okay
fast.
There we go. Speed. It's all about speed.
Yep. Okay. Herbert Sturm.
I would like to have some clarification on one target that you mentioned concerning speed. Having 50% of your range under speed programs. What exactly does that mean? What falls under speed programs? Does it mean anything with lead times lower than six months, or what does it mean? Does 50% mean 50% of sales? Can just maybe make that a bit clearer for us?
I guess it's normally Eric whom we could let answer this question. When he's not here, then let me answer it.
He's here.
Good. I can do it as well. It does not mean that from 90 days to 45 days, everything is now 50% reduced, because all the products have different lead times. A T-shirt has nowadays a lead time of 18 days, and we can replenish this, whereas a new football boot, as you see there, the Ace and the X, has a much longer lead time. In general, our core concepts will be reduced by 50%. This, once again, goes into that what we try to tell you the whole day. It is focus, that we will put everything behind our key franchises, be it the distribution in the stores, be it the distribution in our own retail, be it the money which we spend behind, be it the operational performances, sourcing, replenishment, speed.
This we will put behind the big franchises to make the big franchises even bigger. You have heard a few of them, be it ZX Flux, be it Superstar, be it Stan Smith, and Tubular, just to name four of them.
It's all based on shipment, right? The lead time on shipments, not the whole process of developing it, and then it takes a year.
No, it is the whole process. It doesn't help us if we need 12 months still to create a product, then we can shorten the transportation by two weeks. No. This is why we reorganized the whole company to make, as Robin said, faster decision. Faster decision means also what is the final product, what is the final material, where do we produce it, how do we ship it, et cetera.
There's a lovely chart in Claire's presentation about the impact that has, because it's creation to shelf, and that has these levers about more full price sell-through, less clearance, better stock turns, that sort of stuff. Higher margins.
Yep.
What's the shortest creation to shelf?
Herbert Sturm, [Foreign language]. Please.
It's Antoine Belge from HSBC again. One question on golf. I think, looking at the chart, you're expecting to gain market share in a market which is going to continue to shrink. As the clear market leader, isn't your mission to actually try to revive the market and fight against the demographics, et cetera? I'm not a big expert on golf, maybe can you remind us why this market is doomed, and what could be your own actions in terms of your demographics on maybe looking at new markets like China, which seem to be a bit disappointing on that front?
Yeah, sure.
First of all, there are a lot of different initiatives in golf right now to generate more participation into the game. The governing bodies of golf, the United States Golf Association, the R&A out of Scotland, the PGA of America, who's expanded into China, certainly affiliates in Japan, they're all working on new and innovative ways to play golf. It's really the entry point. The core golfer, the avid golfer, hasn't been the one leaving the game, it's the periphery. 20% of the avid golfers in the United States and around the world make up roughly 80% of the consumption, which is why they want technology and innovation so fast. They keep coming back, and they want new products, better products. We're involved. We have certain initiatives. We support those organizations. Prior to my arrival at the organization, we launched a concept called HackGolf.
Not really for the name, it was more about the technology, which was an open source, crowdsourcing of ideas to bring new interest into the game. There are wonderful initiatives at the junior level called the PGA Junior League right now, which is team golf for kids, which is very exciting, and rates are improving quickly. First Tee, the First Tee Foundation designates money toward the growth of the game. The good news is there's a lot of energy around grow the game initiatives. A lot of energy. It's a great game. I really believe that the game will grow, once these initiatives really take traction. It just doesn't happen overnight. As it relates to our growth, one, I think we still have quality growth within our current market share. Actually, I know we do.
Secondly, there are secondary categories in which we have secondary or even tertiary positions in, as I talked about earlier, which, given the strength of our brand, the strength of our global distribution, and the resources we have to bring those products to market, I believe we can grow there as well. We remain very confident that the future of golf will get better. Participation rates will increase. There's wonderful initiatives, and investment capital against it, and I think the right thinking in place right now to move the game forward.
Yep.
Thank you. Chris Svezia, Susquehanna. Robin, I was just wondering if you could talk about sourcing costs, and the fact you source everything in dollars. I know you do hedge. Just maybe talk about that, what's going on from a sourcing perspective, input costs, labor costs, and how you think about that development over time.
Yep, super. This is an industry where the vast majority of the industry sources in a part of the world, pays in dollars, but sells outside of that area. Firstly, you have the dynamics of what's happening in those markets where we're producing, and also you have currency issues. What's happening in those markets is we're seeing that there's a strong increase in labor charges. That is likely to be a negative in the future years. The industry has, over the many years, sort of decamped from some of these higher labor ones into lower ones, and you're seeing also some of the initiatives that lead to automation that might address that in the future as well. The other thing is the raw materials.
There's a lot of speculation in the market that, particularly with the oil price at the moment, that, hey, the raw materials must be coming down. Yep, could do, but we're not seeing that at the moment. In fact, what we're seeing probably for the future is a bit more of whatever benefits you might get out of the raw materials declining in price, probably the labor portion's going to overweight that. That's one part of it. In terms of the currencies, obviously, we source in dollars, and we sell outside the dollar room also. We hedge on this rolling 12, 18-month basis. We have no exposure for 2015 because we're 100% hedged, so that's all good. Yep, there's exposure for 2016. We haven't finished hedging 2016.
We've got a lot of time also with this to address to whatever the developments are there in terms of the sort of levers that we've pulled in the past with where we source, how we re-engineer the product, maybe there's also opportunities in certain markets with certain categories also for price increases. That's an industry-wide issue, by the way.
Yep.
Simon Owen again. Three questions for each of you, actually. Just on golf, I'll do them separately. Obviously, TaylorMade took a lot of criticism in the past for introducing product too quickly, then it ended up being discounted too quickly. How can we be sure that you've learned that lesson and that product will be brought through at a sensible time? How long do you think it will be before customers actually trust you that you will be doing that and you're not going to see AeroBurners on discount in three months' time, et cetera? Obviously, you've given up quite a lot of market share in the past year or so. Presumably, your peers aren't going to give that up readily.
Yeah. I appreciate the question, and we're being very thoughtful about it. We're not just focused on revenue growth.
We're focused on the quality of the revenue as we move forward and how we can drive growth through quality revenue. There's been a lot of speculation that we've come to market with too many products too quickly. What I can look at now back in the organization is how we've come to market, and I think we've learned a lot over the course of the last year or so in terms of some of the fundamentals that really drive energy around products in golf. Candidly, the industry is very unique in the fact that a product is hot in golf before it even hits the shelf at retail.
When we do the work with our tour assets, with our marketing assets, our brand assets, internally and externally, given the technology that we have, which is a critical advantage for us, we typically do a very good job. I think we missed in a couple places over the course of the last year, and as a net result, we had some technology that we pulled forward and then ultimately got in a situation where we saw promotional activity in the marketplace. One thing we have seen, which is, in my mind, a very good sign for the game, is that there's price elasticity northward now at retail. We've seen 10% price increases at retail in like products year-on-year. That bodes well for us because we typically don't get as much credit for the technology and performance benefits we have in our product.
R15 is a very expensive product to make, as is AeroBurner. We're really pleased to see that consumers are willing to pay more for our products now, and we will work diligently to ensure that if we have lost trust, and based on the most recent NPS data I've seen in consumer engagement and attitudes and usage data I've seen, we've lost a fraction. I'd bet on us. We're in a much better position than most of our competitors at this point in time. I believe that with the right products, the right launch cycles, and the right messaging, we'll get back on track quickly.
Yep.
I'll just ask, going back on what Ross was saying about the sourcing. Is this new method that you're talking about with faster speed to market, bringing more of it back to Europe, going to lead you to smaller production runs? Because it's hard to see how bringing, say, manufacturing shoes back to Europe gives you anything like the efficiency of a Yue Yuen or something like that. Is this improved margin just going to come from lower markdown, or do you think you can actually get manufacturing efficiencies by bringing it back in itself?
I guess, what we tried to tell you during the day, this is a mixture of a lot of initiatives. Full price sales through, for example. Full price sales through definitely gives us the opportunity to have less clearance and therefore get better margin. Full price sales through, we get better planning, better ordering, faster replenishment. Speed is definitely one of the things we do. Better margin we get by a more holistic product assortment around the world. Not every country can pick and choose. It's clear brand leadership. We tell our countries what we want to see. It's bringing much more power behind the franchisees, as I said. I mean, since Superstar we sell millions of pairs every year, there is no reason why it should be discounted. These are so-called cash cows, which we will even further strengthen in the future.
Coming to production, don't get the wrong impression that we desperately want to bring production back to Europe. We want to bring production where the consumption is. If we have robots who can do the production, then you can put it into America, into Germany, into France, into U.K., wherever you need it. Today, we don't have production in Germany, France, or in America because it's too expensive. In the future, this will make us much more flexible. As we said, we do believe that in a few years, 2017, 2018, we will have the first prototypes here in Scheinfeld, where we have our factory here, where we'll try them. This gives us much more flexibility in the future. It's not primarily our desire to bring production back to Germany. We want to bring production where the consumption is.
Mark.
Hi, guys. This is Kelly from Telsey Advisory Group. My question would be for TaylorMade. In the presentation, you talked about how the equipment market has been down about 22% over the past couple of years. You talked about mid-single-digit growth for TaylorMade going forward. Could you just clarify what your expectation is for the golf market over the next couple of years in that embedded in your assumption? In the past, I think you've mentioned that you believe you can bring TaylorMade back to historical rates of profitability. Could you speak to your confidence about that now? Do you still think you can get back to peak margins? At what pace can we expect that recovery? Thank you.
Thanks, Kelly. Let me take the last one first, and let me see if I can remember the first one when I come back to it. The short answer is yes. I think on two fronts. One, I talked about pricing a bit, so that bodes well for us as we move forward. We're also looking at better opportunities to source our products more efficiently, which will enable us to enhance our margins, which will be strong. We're looking toward a mix shift, this gentleman's question here, about more inline products relative to transition products. Those three areas in themselves lead me to believe that we have a high level of confidence in our understanding of how to bring stronger margins back to our business. I think that's good. The first question was, again? I'm sorry.
The underlying assumptions for the golf market.
Sorry. The underlying assumptions is that we believe the market will be relatively flat now in the near term. What's interesting when you look at that chart, and I think this is worthy of noting. Even though over a three-year period, the equipment market, and that was a U.S. chart, was down 22%, the large majority of that was in metalwoods. If you look at 2011 and 2012, when we brought products like R11 or RocketBallz to market, we drove the market. Really, in 2013 and 2014, we had good products, great performing products, but they didn't perform in the market to the standard that we're accustomed to seeing, and for the reasons that we had discussed in terms of, I think, of how we launched those products and what our go-to-market strategies were.
As a market leader, we have a responsibility to drive the market, and that's how we really manage our business. I do believe that we're going to see the market not only steady, but with the right product introductions, and we've got a lot of great ones coming. I think you're going to see better momentum in the equipment markets as well. Thank you.
Thank you. It's Omar Saad from Evercore ISI. Appreciate all the information and disclosure today. It's very helpful. Two questions. My first one is about-
The organizational structure. I think the one thing that was clear today is the level of complexity in the adidas Group. Different brands, sub-brands, geographies, channels, categories. Help us understand from an organizational structure standpoint, how the businesses are being managed from an execution standpoint, and then maybe where the P&L responsibilities lie. Is it in the channel managers or the geography managers or the category managers? How that's changed from the last five years. What's different about how you're managing your company versus the last five years? I have a follow-up question.
Good. When you say complexity about geographies, distribution channels, and brands, I think even if you would have only one brand, we would have geographies, we would have distribution channels. I think the fundamental difference is what we said today, that we are consumer-obsessed and therefore brand-led in our organization. We have allowed to be too much around in the markets and not focused enough on our execution to drive our brand messages and our core concepts through the whole world. This has changed. I give an example, the football business unit manager in the future is completely responsible for his EUR 2 billion business and his margin and the profitability. He's also responsible for the advertising, for the go-to-market strategy, et cetera, which he hasn't had before.
He was responsible for products. We had somebody who was responsible for the go-to-market strategy. We had an advertising department. They made the advertising. Now every category head is fully responsible for his business and his incentive program, bonus, LTIP, et cetera, is clearly targeted on all these measurements, market share, full price, sell-through, all that we can measure, he has in his KPI. We really can make now, even in a complex world, we can make people accountable, measurable. I think Eric said what you can measure, you can
What gets measured gets done.
What gets measured get done. We also can people hold accountable and make them responsible for that. I think this you see already, maybe not today, but in our company, how people take the responsibility and unleash the complexity of the structure, which we had before. It gives them more freedom and obviously gives them more responsibility for that. Your second question.
Just one other question, different topic. I think you recently hired a new advertising agency. I'd love to hear some of the insights maybe that advertising agency brought to you in their proposal about your brand from an external point of view, what you learned from that, and that energized you enough to bring them on board.
I think he is the expert, 72andSunny.
That's right. Well, 72andSunny is a world-class agency. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, but they've done a lot of work, and Fast Company named them Creative Innovation Agency of the Year last year. The work that really compelled us to even start talking to them was the work they've been doing for Samsung, which has been very comparative based, especially going after an industry leader like Apple, really taking them on in a fun and creative way that lent us to have a conversation with them.
That was the start of a probably a five or six-month discussion about where we were going and what we were looking for from business solutions, what we needed out of an agency from a partnership standpoint, and one thing led to another, and we saw some preliminary work, some pitch work as we usually get, and we decided to hire them. They'll be working on right now a campaign that will break in the next three months. We're not taking our time with it. We went all in very quickly.
Okay.
Maybe we take some questions from the web.
David, thank you for your presentation. You mentioned an observed stabilization in the golf industry at the moment. Can you please elaborate on this for a moment? Secondly, do you expect industry dynamics, like new people taking up golf for the first time or number of rounds played to turn around and improve again in the foreseeable future?
Yeah. The data that we're starting to see at retail would indicate that we're seeing some stability in the markets, which is good. Just prior to my arrival here in Herzo, I was with one of the larger golf specialty retailers in the U.S., and they shared with me that their news is pretty good news. They're out of the gates in a meaningful fashion in what they're calling stability. They're cautiously optimistic, I think we've seen a good start, certainly in the U.S. I was in Asia last week, we're seeing solid progress there as well. It's a month-by-month scenario, we're starting to see good markers. What we are seeing is increases in ASPs. That's real good news, which means the consumers are willing to get into new technologies and pay more for new products.
As it relates to Grow the Game, I think, which was the second question, similar to the answer I think I provided earlier about the initiatives in market in the U.S., more importantly or equally as importantly, around the world. The things that are happening right now in Japan that are interesting around juniors playing golf as the population ages a little bit and how they manage that nuance is very interesting. Markets like China are fascinating to watch given some of the political environment in China right now and how golf is looked upon by the government. We're seeing stability in China right now. We've got growth markets around the world that are exciting for us.
The Olympics, having golf enter the Olympics next year is going to be wonderful for secondary markets, for young kids that aspire to get into this game and play like their country champion that will play as an Olympian. We think there's a lot of positive energy around golf, we'll continue to do our very best to promote that energy and be a big part of that.
One more question from the web.
Yes. That question goes to Robin, I guess. Robin, you talked about price increases as one of the mitigating initiatives to compensate for the current U.S. dollar strength. Do you see a risk that major competitors won't increase pricing in regions like Western Europe, for example?
That depends very much on the market and the situation there. Pricing is just one of the levers that we can react to. I suspect, as I mentioned earlier about the FOB situation, this is an industry-wide situation. This is not something that's just unique to adidas. I would be very surprised if others didn't also react in some way. We feel very comfortable in our track record in being able to react to FOB increases in the past. We've re-engineered product, and price increase has only been part of the answer.
Zuzanna Pusz from Berenberg. I just have two questions. Given the level of investment in the brands, expected especially at the beginning of the program, and some headwinds, such as the U.S. dollar and also the upcoming sporting events, is it reasonable to assume that in the initial stage, your operating profit will grow at a much slower pace than net sales? Second question is regarding your administrative costs. I think you've implemented significant cuts in 2014. Has the reorganization been finished, or can we expect some incremental benefits from there to come?
May I ask that by starting with the Route 2015 and the organization, was one of the areas of focus in our drive to fundamentally improve also the profitability of our group. We've worked on a lot of initiatives, some of which I summarized in my prepared comments, that have helped us reduce the cost of running our organization. It wasn't that we turned around last year to cut costs. That wasn't the case. As Herbert mentioned, our restructuring has an impact of also making us more efficient. The becoming more efficient in our cost side has been something we've been working on for the last several years, and that doesn't go away. We're a major company. We continue to try and optimize our processes and our cost base. In terms of profit guidance, I've given you the guidance.
The guidance is we're going to grow our bottom line every year. The rate of that growth, however, won't be linear. I think that this is a big statement to say we're going to average 15% per year. Yes, over this period, top-line growth. What it is in each individual quarter, each individual year, we'll have to wait and see. What do we have to invest in? What do we have to treat as our priorities for that particular year? Our focus on improving our profitability as a group every year remains.
Let me just add one point to that, what Robin said on the organization, because you said when the program starts. Don't get the wrong impression that we wait now till the 1st of January 2016 and then the new organization starts. This has already started. We're operating already. Of course, as we have, how should I say? Was it fall of.
Yeah.
As we look in the future already, we are working already on full winter 2016. Not everything what you see in 2015 is already done by the new organization, but the new organization is already working, and we see already the first results, as I said this morning, going into 2015. Don't get the impression we will start then in 2016. None of this goes. This is a fast-changing industry, as we said.
Right.
Hi. It's Fred Speirs from UBS. A couple of questions. First for David on golf. Obviously, over the last decade, the TaylorMade sponsorship approach has been very effective. As you look ahead over the next decade, are you envisioning any significant changes to that? And specifically within that, do you think you need any more high-profile U.S. assets to appeal to the U.S. consumer? Or perhaps could you scale back the number of golfers that you're sponsoring within the PGA? The second question, as we see the level of CapEx going up as we move ahead and a lot of investments being made, just thinking about R&D within all of this. R&D at the moment is maybe about a 15th of what you spend on marketing. Are we seeing that balance shift at all as you look to move towards more franchise innovations?
Are we going to see that sort of stay at a similar level as it is now?
I can't give you any specific guidance on R&D other than re-emphasize what Eric particularly has said today. We are investing, and Claire also, not just Eric. We are investing in doing what we have to do to make our product the most attractive product for the consumers. We don't believe that there's anything more that we need to be doing. We're spending what we need to spend. We're doing it with partners. We're doing it here also in this environment and other locations around the world. There isn't a restriction on it, but I don't expect it to significantly change over the next five years.
I'll take the sponsorship piece. We look at our tour staff almost monthly to ensure that we have not only great players but players that are really aligned with the values of our company. I think about players like Justin Rose out of the U.K. I think about Jason Day out of Australia. Dustin happens to be one of the hottest players on the planet right now, who just won WGC down in Miami, and can't seem to miss a fairway or miss a putt. Hopefully, that momentum will continue as we move toward Augusta here, which would be fantastic for us. Sergio, who arguably has been our most consistent player for the last six, seven, or even eight years right now. The good news is they're all relatively young, they're in a good place. We are looking at U.S. athletes.
There's a couple of good U.S. athletes that are currently on tour that aren't under contract with TaylorMade, that we're always discussing and having meaningful dialogue with. There's the junior level. We just signed a partnership with the AJGA, which is American Junior Golf Association, which is a partnership that was locked up with one of our competitors for really the better part of the last decade. This is really the breeding ground for American golf, and young and very talented golfers. The good news there is we can build those relationships over time. At that point in time when they turn professional, if they have the skill to do so, we'll be in certainly right in the middle of that discussion. As it relates to the overall value in the strategy, we still believe implicitly that having most of the best is the right strategy.
There are different brands that compete with us that think an icon strategy is more effective. When you really look at the golf markets, take every major category. The leader on tour with the most products in play is the leader in the marketplace. Whether it's metalwoods, irons, putters, wedges, golf ball, that formula works very well. As it relates to the valuation of the endorsement deals, that will be interesting to watch, and we're obviously actively negotiating those as we move forward. Yeah, we'd like to find an American player or two that we think could really bring energy in and around U.S. golf as well.
As you said, David, as important for us is to be the number 1 driver on the PGA because this has created the market leadership for TaylorMade by a big extent. Okay.
Okay. Since I know that many of you have to head to the airport to catch a flight home, I would actually like to conclude this Q&A session and conclude this Investor Day. I would like to thank all the presenters, Eric, Roland, Gil, David, Herbert, Robin, Mark, Claire. Thank you for taking the time, and also thank you for taking the time and coming here and listening to us and how we explained to you that we're going to Creating the New over the next five years. As Robin said, we're going to be on the road quite frequently over the next couple of weeks, and the entire IR team is very much looking forward to catching up with you there. If you have any questions in the next couple of days, you have our numbers, and we look forward to talking to you.
With that being said, I wish you a safe trip home, and I would like to hand over to Herbert for his closing remarks.
Thank you very much, Sebastian. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope after a long day, you are as excited about Creating the New as we are. Let me now wrap it all up for you. Creating the New is an ambitious but yet realistic plan that provides the layout for our accelerated growth until 2020. Its primary goal is to ensure the long-term success of our group for the benefit of all our stakeholders, be it you, our investors, be it our consumers, or be it our employees. With Creating the New, we are moving away from a static and reactive planning process to one that is iterative, agile, and proactive. This puts us in a position where we can and will constantly evolve, improve, and sharpen our plan as we listen to our consumers, to our partners, to you, and to our employees.
Of course, as Robin and Sebastian said, we will keep you constantly updated about the progress we are making. Our new strategic plan is based on three choices. Speed, Cities, Open Source. Speed, we will become the first true fast sports company, fast in satisfying consumer needs, fast in internal decision-making. Cities, we have identified six key cities in which we want to grow share of mind, share of trend, and share of market. Open source, we will be the first sports company that invites athletes, consumers, and partners to be part of our brands. In our execution, we will stay rigorously focused on these strategic choices. As you have seen, there are clear commitments and clear KPIs behind each of these choices.
We will at all time have visibility on our progress through a combination of both financial and strategic short-term targets to which we will hold our management accountable and to which you can hold us accountable. We have reoriented our entire organization to create clarity on roles and responsibilities across the whole value chain. Going forward, every adidas Group employee will be judged by our consumers because we have included brand KPIs into our internal performance management metrics. Our relentless focus on the consumer and our three strategic choices will drive brand desire and brand advocacy for all the brands of our group. This in turn, will allow us to accelerate our growth until 2020.
As a result, for the next five years, we are committed to outperform the sports and the fitness sector to significantly gain market share in key geographies and key categories to generate attractive margin expansion and operating leverage and to deliver superior returns to our shareholders. I'm absolutely excited about the future prospects of the adidas Group. I will do everything I can to bring Creating the New off to a great start. The complete management that you saw today on stage here will do everything possible to bring it off to a great start as well. Don't get it wrong, ladies and gentlemen, we have the best people in the industry working for the adidas Group. We are bound by a shared passion for sport, and we compete every day as a team.
By harnessing the power of sport, we will resonate with more consumers than ever before, and I'm sure better than ever before. We have not wasted any time. Let's take a look at how we have created the new adidas Group already in the first few months of 2015. Thank you very much for spending a productive day with us together. We are very pleased that you all made it here, that you spent the long day with us, and I'm sure this will have been giving you a lot of insights about what the new adidas Group will be. Thanks very much, and enjoy the video.