Morning, everyone, both here in the room in Annecy, France, and those joining on the webcast as well. My name is Omar Saad. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2026 Salomon Amer Sports Investor Day. People listening on the webcast here in person, we are in our Salomon headquarters in Annecy. We appreciate you making the journey. I know some of you came from very far to learn more about the Salomon brand here in the French Alps, where Salomon was founded 79 years ago. All right. First, the safe harbor statement. During today's Investor Day presentations, you will hear forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements reflect our current expectations and beliefs only. They are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.
Please see the safe harbor statement in last night's press release and SEC filing. We will also discuss certain non-IFRS measures. Our morning agenda is going to focus on product and brand, as well as the CEO introductions from James and Guillaume. In the afternoon, our agenda is going to be more about the regions, the financials, and Q&A at the end. As you can see, we have a lot of key leaders lined up to present today. You guys have the agenda and the bios in front of you. A couple points of order to mention. First, please hold your questions until the Q&A session at the end of the day, especially the financial and guidance-related and algorithm-related questions. We are going to have Andrew Page, the group CFO, and Antonio, the Salomon CFO, at the end of the day, as well as a Q&A immediately following.
For those of you online, email us at ir@amersports.com with your questions, and we will try to incorporate as many of those as we have time for. Before I turn it over to James, our CEO, I want to share a personal observation about Salomon. The more I have come to know the brand since joining Amer Sports, the more I have come to appreciate how unique it is. It really is different from any other brand that I have studied in my career. It has many facets, they are all authentic, and they are all rooted in performance and function. For me, as a New Yorker, I think one of the best ways to show you what I mean is with a map of Manhattan. This is just a sampling of the different places and different ways Salomon shows up in New York retail.
We have the five owned Salomon shops that we have opened recently, including Brooklyn, Upper West Side, Flatiron, which is the newest, Woodbury Commons, and of course, our first store in SoHo, which still today, there is almost always a line to get into that one. Then you can find Salomon trail shoes, hiking footwear, hydration packs, other gear at Paragon Sports in Flatiron. You can also find Salomon skis, snowboards, boots, bindings, helmets, and other winter sports equipment gear at Paragon or at the various local ski retailers like Panda Sport in Brooklyn. You can also buy our running and gravel lines at running specialty shops throughout the city, including Fleet Feet. Now you can find Salomon Sportstyle shoes at the top sneaker destinations in New York, including the Foot Locker flagship on 34th Street or the JD Sports across Brooklyn.
Then last but not least, Salomon's showing up in a big way in some of the coolest places to shop in New York, like the Kith shop in SoHo or the Nordstrom flagship on 57th Street. Now I'm going to turn it over to our CEO, James Zheng. As many of you know, James has a great track record from Adidas to Anta to Amer Sports. I would characterize him as one of the most experienced and successful executives in the global sports and outdoor industry over the last 20 years. James?
Hello, good morning, everybody. [Non-English content] . I hope Guillaume can correct my pronunciation, which means many of you may not understand. Bonjour, of course you know. [Non-English content] , pleased to meet you here. Okay. Welcome. Welcome to Annecy, our headquarter of Salomon. I think many of you, probably the first time to be here. I call Annecy the paradise in the world. You guys maybe already spent a couple hours running on the road, running aside the lake, and maybe somebody also got chance yesterday or the day before yesterday also went to the mountain. It's such great place to exercise, to have outdoor activities here. Salomon was born here 1947. Today it's Salomon's 79th anniversary. Actually, we brought all you here, and obviously people also sitting at the virtual meetings.
You guys will have great experience with our brand, Salomon, in these two days. First of all, I still like to say, Amer Sports is a new list public company in our industry. Okay? We list our company on February 1, 2024. In the past 10 quarters, I really appreciate all you guys support and trust, make Amer Sports, AS, become top five sporting goods company in terms of market cap. Okay? Thank you very much. Thank you for your trust. Before that time, we literally were invisible in the market, okay, as a private company. You give us such great credits just for the 10 quarters, make us become the top five sporting goods company in terms of the market cap. Okay, so I think it's a great complementary for us. This is our second Investor Day since our public, okay?
I think some of you also attend our first one, which was held in Vancouver, mainly focused on Arc'teryx. In the past 10 quarters, I attend almost all the road shows after quarterly earning calls. In the first six road shows, people always got questions and also try to understand what Amer Sports stands for, okay? You guys put a lot of weight on Arc'teryx, which obviously it's our first flagship brand to make successful story in the market. Six quarter later, okay, starting from second half of last year, you guys start to pay attention on Salomon. Today, Salomon represents the fastest growing brand in our portfolio in the past four quarters. I think it's kind of a journey. You guys really got a level of curiosity to see how did Amer Sports Amer Sports, obviously, we own the portfolio brands.
We got the main five brands in the portfolio. They all position at the premium technical kind of sectors. We made a very successful story for Arc'teryx first. Then, you see great runway for Salomon afterwards. The last quarter, we also report our another big brands, Wilson, also grow more than 24%. The third brand is also evolving. This is a kind of a road map we build up our portfolio brand in our company. We really made great successful track record in the past 10 quarters to really try to convince the industry, the Street, the public market. We as a company really got very unique proposition in the market. It is a highly competitive market. It is also saturated. How we win the market share?
From our unique proposition on the brands and by creating the most innovative, high technical products to address the needs in the market, and create a unique angle to unlock the potential for the brands to bring our consumers great attention for the brands, Arc'teryx, Salomon, and Wilson onwards in the future. I think that we have a pretty nice setup inside Amer Sports, which give us a very solid foundation to grow our business in the future. For today, the Investor Day. We got literally obviously two topics. One is obvious. You guys already look at our release last night for our Q3 guidance. We continue to outperform our initial guidance. The whole management team got a very high level of confidence to deliver. We only got two weeks left for Q3.
We think we can continue to our track record on beat and raise patterns for Q3. We also give the Street about our guidance for our long term, five-year plus long term aggro, and to see how our development patterns will come out, for the future. I think, Andrew will give you guys more detail elaboration in the overall company financial session. More importantly, obviously, the second purpose, we will dive in on Salomon, today and tomorrow. Salomon today is the fastest growing brand in our portfolio. Our brand CEO, Guillaume, and his team, will give you guys full introduction about who Salomon is, what Salomon stands for, how Salomon today to unlock the potential for the market. What is the key competitive edge we own for Salomon brand, so that Salomon today can really stand out in the overall outdoor sporting goods markets.
More importantly, Guillaume and his team also will share you guys the vision of Salomon for the future. What is the roadmap for us, for Salomon, for coming five years? Also give you guys very detailed introductions about our key strategic pillars. We would like to develop as a setup to fulfill our roadmap for coming five years. This is the most important conference today. I think Guillaume and his team will share a full perspective about how we would like to develop Salomon from today, and then make Salomon become truly leading global sporting goods brand in near future. I think it is a very important conference, and you guys will listen and experience the brand in our ABC. You guys also got the opportunity to interact with all our Salomon executives here in this building.
Also, obviously, tonight we have also got a very good event on the lake. So you guys have a chance to have interaction with all our Salomon executives to understand their thoughts about how we build up the Salomon brand in the future. So pretty much, before I hand over to Guillaume, I still like to say something because I used to be interim CEO for Salomon for eight months in 2024. So I like to share my certain perspective about my understanding of Salomon, and how the experience I got, really, this unique experience I have here in Annecy in 2024. So this interim role really give me a very deep insight into what makes Salomon so special. I think a root in the French mountains since 1947, Salomon carries genuine technical heritage.
Our products really deliver outstanding performance and functionality, shaped by mountain sports culture. Besides the brand owns pretty high market share in both Outdoor Performance and winter sports equipment, we also create very unique division we call modern outdoor sneakers. Led by our XT-6 franchises. I think all of you already experience these products. So that segment, new segment, we are, Salomon today, still the only outdoor brand sitting in that segment, which give us permission to compete in $200 billion sneak market besides the normal outdoor segments. It is a big unlock for Salomon brands. So I literally spend more than half of my time in 2024 in Annecy and working closely with the team. I still remember on April 16, 2024, when I had the first, we call the Salomon sales meetings in Annecy. I shared my vision to the whole audience.
At that time, I talked to the team, by 2028, from 2024 to 2028, five years journey, we would like to make Salomon become $3 billion brand. By 2028, we will sell more than 30 million pairs of shoes to the market. 2024, we sell more or less 40 million pairs. So that is the very clear vision for the brand and for coming five years. So how we get that? I also give the kind of work with Guillaume and the team, and we come out with a clear five important strategic pillars to achieve this goal. One, obviously, we need to amplify our Sportstyle business, which I just called modern outdoor sneak market. This is very unique angle. The market not have any shortage on one piece of garment and one pair of shoe. How you really We are new players, literally, in sneak market.
How we find the unique angle to make the consumers, especially for our younger female consumers, know us, like us? So I think that the Sportstyle really give us a weapon to unlock the big potential. The second, we need to win in Europe, which is our home base. The third, we got to really accelerate our business in Greater China and APAC. Fourth, I think we also make it very clear, we want to make a great breakthrough in North America, which is the largest sneak market in the world. The fifth, the last one, but not least, we need to really elevate our organization to fulfill, to realize strategic pillars as a quality wise. So these are five major strategic pillars we share to the audience in 2024, and everybody on the same page. The goal is very clear.
3 billion by 2028, 30 million pairs of shoes by 2028. It is not an end goal. It is a vision by 2028. How we translate into our daily operation starting from April 2024. All the teams working on that specific initiatives afterwards. We made a great success in the past two years. It is just, yeah, two and a half years ago. In Europe, we are fixing our distribution as we restore the strong growth, leading by our epicenter strategy, including Paris and London. In China and APAC, as you guys also are aware, we have delivered excellent results. Salomon in China right now, we got 350 stores. Starting from 2024, we got less than 100. In the past two years, we opened more than 200 shops, Salomon dedicated stores. All these stores are profitable and they give very high productivities.
We are really crushing the markets. We create a new segment. We gain the market shares. Salomon in China, quickly will become a $1 billion market. North America, just coming from Omar's statement, you guys also see a great movement. We are still on the early stage, but we opened seven stores in North America, in the United States. All these shops perform extremely well. We also start to cooperate the most distinguished retail partners like Nordstrom, JD Sports, Foot Locker, Dick's Sporting Goods, beside REI, as our always the largest outdoor retailers. We really opened our distribution channel in North America, but it is still on the early stage we explore. Our Sportstyle business is thriving. People, you guys also can experience not only in Asia Pacific, but more importantly in North America, in the United States, and in Europe.
Sportstyle XT series franchise already become one of the most popular sneakers in the market. I think Guillaume and his team will give you more elaboration why we can make such great success for our Sportstyle business. What are the key attributes sitting in the Sportstyle business to drive us to be distinguished from such, I will say, such competitive, saturated sneaker market. It is a great progress. Before I pass to the Salomon team, I also want to really recognize our exceptional talents across all the functions sitting here. Also, I want to take this opportunity to send my deepest gratitude to all of our Salomon staff, executives sitting here. Thank you for your great efforts, dedication, and commitment in this unique journey to make our brand a $3 billion brand, I think the most likely before 2028. Thank you very much.
I also want to say some words on Guillaume Meyzenq, our CEO, President and CEO of Salomon. Guillaume started to take on the role at the beginning of 2025. The board and myself eventually choose Guillaume as the permanent CEO for the brand. Why? Three major reasons. Guillaume, 2026 is 30 years anniversary for Guillaume in Salomon. Actually, his 30-year journey with Salomon began back in 1995 as an intern. In his blood, Salomon is a whole life. He knows Salomon inside out. Growing up a sportsman in Alps, Guillaume is a true outdoor enthusiast, deeply committed to Salomon's brand, products, and the community. Over three decades, Guillaume got a chance to hold many leadership roles in Salomon, including the recent role as Chief Product Officer before he was assigned to the CEO role.
He really created the great product engines for Salomon to secure long-term sustainable sales growth. On the other side, he knows the people, he knows the markets very well, and he is also very open-minded for the global how we would like to build Salomon from Annecy to be truly global sporting goods brand. He is also a quick learner and working extremely hard, and he is also a truly team player, okay? He is working around very well, not only for the internal Salomon colleagues but also the colleagues from Amer Sports, so that he can really have very strong kind of organization to support him to fulfill the role he can take. I think it is a very right choice for us to make Guillaume on the position.
I am also, obviously, very proud of the transformation this team has delivered for Salomon in the past three years. We are also very much still at an early chapter of this brand story, and the best lies ahead under the strong leadership of Guillaume Meyzenq. With that, it is my pleasure to hand over the stage to Guillaume Meyzenq. Guillaume.
Good morning. I am honored and thrilled to welcome you at Salomon ADC. ADC means Annecy Design Center. My name is Guillaume Meyzenq. I am the CEO of Salomon. I have been working here for more than three decades, as James mentioned. I am a passionate alpine skier, and during the 1990s, this is where Salomon was dominating the market, designing amazing gear. It was kind of teenager dream to join the company, and this is what I did as an intern. In my career, I have few key stage. The first one is being an intern. I have been meeting in this corridor at the entrance of the building, Georges Salomon, a few times, and listening a little bit his passion and story about the brand when he was the chairman of Salomon.
Salomon joined also a big athletic brand in many years, and I was a big sales role at Salomon at the time, and I learned about the discipline in commercial merchandising, but also the business of footwear at scale. Finally, I did several role in R&D business unit, leader of cross-country ski, which is one of the strongest DNA sport of Salomon in the history. My last two assignment was leading the commercial part of footwear when we started to move from this outdoor niche in Europe to a broader trail running, and this is where we already tripled the sales at the time and starting to be more global. My last assignment was the Chief Product Officer of footwear, where we decide, we made few decisions, so it was seven years ago.
It takes a time of building technology knowledge, but we were making two strategic moves. The first one is moving from trail running to all-terrain running, and I think the signal you see at the entrance, having this Ironman partnership that we discussed last week, is a good example of how Salomon is transitioning from trail running, which remains our core sport, to all terrain, road, gravel. The second one was building Salomon in the cultural movement of modern outdoor sports and having this modern sneaker segment starting to develop at Salomon. This is 80 years of history. We are going to celebrate it next year. We have a very unique platform. Sometimes you look at sports brands and you wonder, okay, where the brand is coming from, which type of sport.
I would define Salomon much more as a kind of engineering platform, and this engineering platform connected with community. Because today we are so diverse sports, and when we speak about the sport, sometimes you have even subculture. You will hear about winter sport, for example. In alpine ski, it is not one sport, it is several subcultures, from racing to freestyle to free ride and so on. What Salomon is good at is having this design center as engineering platform and having passionate people being able to connect with community and understanding what is needed from this community in the sport, but also what is going to be the inspiration for the future. A good example of that is footwear. We launched footwear 35 years ago. We had already a long journey before we started footwear.
It was born from a cross-country boots, and we have few generations of development which give a good example of what Salomon is able to do. The first one is during the 1990s. For the one who remember outdoor at the time, it was very heavy, rugged outdoor, mid-cut to protect the ankle, and it was the way that people were thinking, like, "If I go outside, I have to have this type of level of protection and gear." Salomon was the first brand coming with a very light, low-cut shoe with a full protection, but amazingly versatile, where you were able to do mountain bike, walking, already walking quite fast. It was the first disruption that we created in the market.
If you go now to the market and you go to any wall of outdoor in the world with all the competition, of course now, mid-cut is really a small part of the range, and of course, the inspiration was about agility, lightness, versatility. The second big one was endurance in the outdoor, and we started with adventure racing, but then quickly we moved to trail running. When I speak about trail running, what you have as an image now is this type of very big events, like the one happening two weeks ago in Chamonix, driving a lot of people, thousands of people running, 10,000 or even 20,000 people going and following and so on. In 2003, trail running was a small sport, a small inspiration on issue races, very limited community. Some of them close to Lake Tahoe in California, for example.
It was also in Chamonix, and in different areas in the world. Salomon decided that this inspiration could be a much bigger opportunity than it was at the time. This is why when we are coming, and the innovation of Salomon was not only bringing a pair of footwear and say, "Okay, this is what you have to use." is partnering with event organizer, starting to build a team, so where we identify young athletes which have the potential really to change the world and elevate the game and create this inspiration for the rest of the world. Of course, developing gear, and this is what Salomon did. If you look at 25 years ago, you see also it's a good example of the vision we can bring and the contribution we are bringing to the sport and the industry.
When we are coming now with gravel running, which is a new multi-surface running, so you don't know where you're going to run, but you know already that you have this type of multi-surface, versatile running shoe and so on. This is what we are currently doing. Or if we are doing the modern sneaker shoe, this is also a new space where we don't want to compromise between function and style when you are going to the city. Salomon has a big engineer platform connected with communities, consumer, and creating the future gear of the market. This is exactly what we are looking for, and this is why sometimes, today you're going to visit a space where you will see a lot of products, but think about the purpose of the product and think about the purpose of what people are doing in this building.
It's why the connection with insights, consumer insight, identifying the next solution to solve and moving forward. This is why we call it innovation, but innovation 360, innovation to the consumer, and of course, product excellence. We started from ski bindings, which is certainly one of the most complicated sports gear to develop in the world because you have some component of safety. You have a lot of norm to. Of course, you let go people skiing more than 60 miles, 70 miles an hour on slope, and you have to bring the safety. This is where the engineers are today formative in Salomon.
When we are moving to the next gear, footwear, apparel, bags, we have this obsession of durability, product excellence, quality, because this is the DNA of the brand, and this is where we are coming from when we are starting to think forward and developing some product. This is today what's happening in term of category. I was using a few slides like that because at the end of the day, we are quite diverse. I know that when I meet you sometimes in some meeting, sometimes I feel that you never know where you should start with Salomon, because we have so many different products. I wanted to clarify that and make it as transparent as possible, like today, winter sport equipment, and then I will have specific slides for each of the segment. But winter sport is 15% of the business.
Looks small, but today this is the largest winter sports company in sales in the world. Salomon is number one. Then we have performance footwear, 30% of the sales. Sportstyle footwear, 40%, which is really the rising star, and this is what starts to connect us with a new population, new consumer. Finally, we have this head to toe apparel and bags, which is, I would say, only 15% today. It has never been tackled as a priority. It was more kind of opportunity for us. Today it is already 15%, as big as winter sport, but you could imagine that the potential opportunity, the wear to pay is much larger than it is. If I come back to winter sport, and you will have a specific presentation from Xavier Le Guen, our VP of winter sport. We are in all terrain.
We are leader because we are covering, anytime you go on slope or you go on snow in the winter and you want to have an equipment, a gear, you will find Salomon. This is what is unique. Everywhere you are going in the world, if you go to Japan, U.S., Europe, wherever, you will find Salomon, and we are covering all the distribution with premium distribution, with strong partner, with our B2B partner. This is what makes us very unique as well in the industry. The second one is our core performance category in footwear. We are born in outdoor, and you will see that we are still amazing proposition in outdoor. This is where we are coming from. It is a niche. Of course, this is also a place where we can express the best. This is where we know the best, the consumer.
Then we have trail running, which is we consider as well as our core business. As I explain you, we were shaping the trail running culture. We have, again, a very large proposition in trail running because we match all the needs in the world in different mountain terrain durability. Sometimes you have even different stone, when you are going to different mountain and so on, and we are able to match. These two, outdoor and trail running, are places where we have a strong authority, where we have a strong investment, connection with the community, a pipeline of innovation, and this is where we continue to have a very strong Salomon narrative. But if you look at them, you will see later, they are still quite small market opportunity.
Then we are moving to running all terrain, where we identify gravel and road running as a big opportunity. Why gravel? Because it is small. Once again, you can come back to me, say, "Okay, what is the size of the price?" Today it is not market as it is, but we believe that Salomon can really come with a very unique narrative, unique point of view, and we hear about the signal of multi-surface versatility shoe, where sometimes road running are very specific, super light, a little bit slippery, and maybe not always matching the consumer needs. This is where we can grow, and we have the ambition to grow in performance. The second part of footwear is, of course, Sportstyle footwear. What you have to understand, this is a much larger market than performance footwear.
Sometimes, you are looking at the number, you may think, "Okay, Salomon started to be bigger in this space compared to the performance." But the size of the price, the opportunity is much bigger. Today, we are still quite a small player in this area. Despite the fact that maybe in the place you are living, you start to see the cool kid wearing Salomon. This is only the place you are living, and this is only the place where the cool kids are living. We have a lot more opportunity. What Salomon has been able to do, and I feel very proud of that, and I feel proud for the team because when it started to happen and we were selling only a few pairs in some Tier 0 place, we had this vision of Salomon could be bigger.
If you look at the sneaker market, sneaker is always with a cultural proxy. You have the sneaker, tennis is a big inspiration. You think about tennis, and you may think about the brand, and you may think about a model, which is leading the pack. You have that same for basketball, maybe two brands. But you may think about, okay, this is a big cultural movement, and it started to translate into this place in the city where people start to endorse this culture for their daily routine. Skateboard is another one. Sometimes you have workwear as well. Salomon has been able to shape the Outdoor segments in the sneaker environment. The XT-6 is the iconic product of this segment. The segment is still very small.
Despite the fact that it started to be visible, this is still very small if you compare to other segments, and you will see later in term of how the market is developing. Of course, inspiration is very big behind outdoor, and this is why we have a lot of confidence on what we are doing. The last one is head to toe. We are playing in the sport. We start to have more retail, so we have to have consumer base. You will see also how we are moving our consumer base with people more inspiring, younger. Of course, this is a big opportunity. Today we are kind of, I would call it as a baby step for Salomon. We have engaging investment. We have developments.
We start to consider maybe having in some area in the world a bit larger store, so that we can fit apparel together with footwear. This is in motion. But today it remain quite small category. While you will see later with hydration vest, for example, we believe that we could have a very strong point of view and very strong innovation in this segment. When we have been doing that and where we are standing now and the movements, of course, we get some result already. Today, these are the few KPIs that I wanted to share with you about Salomon, and some of them are really strong KPI for the sporting goods industry. The first one is you hear about gems of what we decide to invest behind footwear.
Because the diversity sometimes creates a tension of a little bit seeding investment, a little bit everywhere, and then you are a bit losing the track with the consumer, how you deployed in the market. So we decided to go full speed on footwear and over-index our investment in footwear. It is happening, so it is making like we are growing fast, and this is 70% of the Salomon sales today. The second one is we accelerate in Sportstyle. Of course, you can see this type of 30 index, which looks like amazingly big. We started from very small. Post-COVID, just going outside of COVID and starting to go to the store, I would challenge you to find any Salomon shoe in the store. You could see it in some e-com, in our e-com, in our Salomon store, some Tier 0, Tier 1.
Maybe Kith was already a partner in New York, for example, but it was only one store in Manhattan. Of course, we have this big acceleration. Another one we did, and it was very intentional, is how much we were able to grow the price. So we increased the price by 1.4 in the category. So it is a massive work, and it is not just you reprice the current product, it is you are going intentionally, say, "Okay, we become premium." So how you curate your distribution, how you are playing the game of merchandising, where you will decide to go on the best product and the best proposition for the consumer, but the one which has better value, and of course, how you are moving forward in different scope, and retail was also supporting this development. But this is a massive shift for Salomon.
It also put us to rethink the way we are structuring the range, the way we address the market, because now we have a different positioning in the market. Finally, ultimately, after all this very good KPI, of course, we improved the profitability. We doubled the profitability, which is a very good place to be. So as a conclusion, we have this CAGR of 23% for the last five years, and our revenue at the end of 2026 will be above $2.5 billion. So this is where we are standing now, and this is why hopefully we started to raise your attention to Salomon. Okay, what is next? How Salomon from this European niche brand, small category, started to become visible in the market, and how Salomon will become a big player in the market. I think we have several very good assets.
The third one is a consumer sentiment. If when we are going and we are going to the consumer and we ask them, what about Salomon? What are the key word which is popping up? Premium and high quality. I remind you, we are starting from ski bindings, which was very complex. We are obsessed by quality and so on. Guess what? The consumer can look at it. We reposition the brand, we have a better experience, and we look like premium brand. Innovative, which is a big responsibility as well, because innovation is kind of blur word, and you understand that the challenge of this building and all this team is always coming with new idea, but compelling new idea and engaging the consumer for the future development. But this is what they perceive from Salomon. The last one is adventurous.
I think that we are not a still standing type of brand. We are a brand where innovation is not coming, like we have done one product and we redo the same and we do it better. We do differently. We are coming in new way. I wish that, once again, for the one following the industry, we were in Nice, we disclose a partnership with Ironman, and we claim our endurance positioning, starting from cross-country ski, adventure racing, trail running, and now moving to triathlon. This is about adventure, and this is about unexpected, very legitimate, authentic, but also a new adventure for Salomon. This is about Salomon, and this is very strong asset for the consumer.
We were also looking at the big societal trend, and we have start to understand how the future is moving forward, what people are thinking, and what they expect. We identified four driving force which look like tailwind for Salomon. Or five driving force looking like tailwinds for Salomon. The first one is outdoor. Outdoor is a big inspiration today. We are connected all day long. People are living in large city, and the city are becoming bigger and bigger and so on. Of course, going outside, just connecting with the nature, is becoming a big, big part of the inspiration for consumer. It is even starting to come like kind of luxury. If you are able, ready to take your holiday, having free time and going outside is becoming more and more expensive in the good quality.
This is also kind of inspiration of how you spend the time. The second one is fitness, but fitness in community. All the sport and image you could have during the 1990s, 2000, people starting to do running in the morning, running alone. The people want to share now their experiences, and community is becoming a big part of it. As I am used to say is, certainly at the age when I was 20 years old, certainly connecting with friends, even having a date, was certainly much more going to the bar or going to the nightclub and so on. I would recommend a 20 years old girl or boy to start running and start to connect with the local community, and there is certainly a lot more opportunity to connect and having social relationship with people. The next one is health.
We know how much health, mental and physical health, is becoming a big topic. If you listen the news, this is thing that you hear very often about how people are looking at that, how we can improve the quality of health for everyone, and how individually people understand that this is certainly our biggest capital in life, is about health. The next one is long life engagement. If you look at the sports industry, you have two type of sport. You have some of the team sport where, as kids, you dream of becoming a star. When you are going to the college, you may practice this sport for a few years. Then, when you leave the college, finally you go back, watch on TV or in the stadium, and you still get this inspiration.
And you have a different sport where you start at seven years old with a pair of ski, with a pair of hiking, and you may continue to practice the sport till the end of your life. This is where Salomon is playing. We are playing with a sport where your lifelong, you can enjoy practicing our sports, running, skiing, hiking everywhere in the world, in family, in community. This is about Salomon, and this is where we feel that we have also a lot to bring to this movement. The last one is function meets style. One of the biggest transformation, and why modern outdoor sneaker was starting to have a big impact in the market, is because suddenly, consumer don't want to choose. The world was a little bit kind of black and white.
You choose your style or you choose a function, but unfortunately, if you choose a function, maybe you have to trade-off. Nobody want to trade-off anymore. When you are coming from an outdoor gear or footwear, and you are moving to the city and you are able to speak with a new energy, new environments, kind of influence in the way we are addressing the world, of course, you have this type of, you don't choose anymore. You know that your product will have an amazing function, rain protection, warmth, workability, especially for a traveling shoe who is able to do 100 mi, and you have the style at the same time. These are the five forces where we believe that we could take advantage of that, and we can move forward in the market.
This is our positioning today, and this is how we are starting to describe our strategy for the future. I wanted to start from this slide because this is what will drive our consumer experience, our product development. The way we will articulate our campaign is about the modern mountain sports future. I think you understand the point where we are mountain sports, clearly. We were more mountain sports linked to performance for many years, so it's becoming a culture because it's like you practice or you don't practice, but you go to the movement and you endorse the movement, and the modernity of Salomon, where we challenge always the status quo, having this engineering platform and finding new solution to the world every time we're coming and there is a new trend popping up in the market.
Now we are moving to the next step and the next chapter on how we are moving forward. The first one, and I start to disclose this information, is we started from a very core market. If you look at winter sport equipment, outdoor footwear, trail running, we calculate $25 billion addressable market. You just think about what we are currently moving forward, and we start to move from trail running to all-terrain running, so going to road running, gravel, and adding sport style, already the market is five time bigger than the previous one. We are growing very fast, but we are still very small in this market. So our market share are very small. We have still a kind of low brand awareness, and we can have this opportunity to continue to nurture the opportunity we have in front of us.
If you think even forward for the coming years, and you think about, we start to address head to toe and not in the fashion area. It is like head to toe is just linked to what the sports we are practicing, running silhouettes, outdoor silhouettes, sometimes a little bit more versatile, but still in this type of where to play. The market is $ 300 billion, and of course, we have a massive opportunity. If we want to address this new market, of course, we need to have a very compelling and very distinct strategy, and this is what I will start to disclose. It starts with a category management. What are the function and the mission of each of the category in this strategy? We first have to protect the core.
Of course, people believe in Salomon because we have this core, authentic point of view in the sports, in the mountain, and we have to protect the core. We have to accelerate in running. We have several very good success and signal that we can really make it happen and transform, but of course, we need to go bigger scale, investing in events, investing in outlets, coming still with new pipeline of innovation. I am pretty sure you will be impressed with what you will see tomorrow for 2027. Then we have to build on Sportstyle. The market is big. We have a small market share, but of course, now we are becoming visible. How? It is continue to nurture and we continue to take a bigger space.
Of course, it will deal with new projects, it will deal with new type of story in order to move forward and continue to grow this space as modern outdoor sneaker. The last one is how we can expand in head to toe. How much we can benefit from this energy, connection with the consumer, better touch point, better quality touch point, and suddenly we have a little bit more addressable category. The category game plan. The next big one is how we are going to develop in the world. Today we have a unique opportunity, is today Salomon has success in every region. We are not in the case where we are good in Europe and then we are challenged in other places. We are growing in every space.
We have different type of maturity and life cycle maturity, different type of challenge and game plan, but we are winning everywhere. Today, EMEA is our largest region, and this is where we are coming from. This is our domestic market, and we continue to grow in EMEA. We continue to create the opportunity. The second largest one is Greater China, and you hear about, James, how much we have been intentional behind China, how much we have been able to connect with the consumer, creating amazing experience in sports category, but Sportstyle as well, and how we continue to nurture and grow the market in China. APAC is also developing very fast. We have a long-lasting history in APAC. We were this type of niche brand in winter sports in Japan, a little bit in Korea.
People know the brands and know the brand from this type of premium, super authentic part. We now are able to leverage with a new product category and new connection with the consumer. The last one is America. North America is today our smallest region, where you have the biggest market. Guess what? This is really where we have the biggest challenge, and this is why also people start to be really focused. All the teams start to focus behind North America and make sure that the early trend we get and the positive momentum we are currently building, transform at scale in North America. Category BM plan, regional one. The next level is the channel.
You know you have a lot of discussion in the sporting goods industry between how brand has to display in channels, between D2C and between B2B. I think that we have a very solid plan and vision of how we have to drive omnichannel at Salomon. First of all, we have one omnichannel concept, and then we tailor the strategy according to the region, because you have region which are D2C, like China, where it's retail and e-com, so we absolutely need to play this game. We have other region where if you have a strong and large footwear brands, you absolutely need to work with our B2B partner. They are very instrumental by being able to nurture your innovation, connecting with the consumer, driving a large traffic. We are also long-term partnership with them.
This is why we have this retail strategy, where we are looking for premium location, what is the best experience for Salomon in the premium location. E-commerce, you look at the sales mix of 15%, which does not mean a lot, because depending on the region, you have large e-com business or small e-com business, so it's more kind of average of a very big stretch number. For sure, this is where you have your digital flagship. This is where you can monitor what you are doing. This is where also when you are starting to invest in media, and you will see also how much we are focusing on investing in quality media. Of course, you translate into business, and you translate with your e-com business. Then our B2B partner, and of course, premium partner, long-lasting partner.
You have some of them, we are working for them with many years, and of course, we continue to develop the business. You see also, you see quite a lot of, U.S. banners where we start to engage, last year and this year, new development. Category, region development, omnichannel, and then we have to articulate our strategy in order to invest and make sure that we have clear investment behind our marketing, media, and communities. The first thing we have been doing is we are focusing on epicenter. We have seven epicenter in the world where we are focusing it. You will see the details, but of course, Paris is our lab, because Paris is where we are coming from, and this is where we over-index in term of retail investment. We have several store.
Sometimes the store are in different location with different type of product proposition. We are partnering with our B2B partner to make sure that all touch point is very well covered, and we are over-indexing in marketing, either in media or also in community. The second one is we build the brand heat through sport and cultural proximity. You will see what does it mean, but definitely we are becoming very accurate and sharp on the choice we are making. Only few campaigns are here linked to product innovation, and we are really trying to build this cultural element where we have a strong legitimacy with the consumer. Of course, the part of authenticity is really the name of the game in this area, so that people connect with Salomon for style, and they can get the full Salomon story.
The last one is about community, for two reason. First of all, community is a source of inspiration, of insight. You understand it. We innovate because we have this connection with the people, and we listen to them, we get close to them, we are doing sport with them. Of course, this is also a big relay in term of marketing, how much people start to endorse your brand and start to communicate across the market. The more you go in different cities, the more you need to have this connection with community. Growing very fast also give us a big responsibility, or at least give us as a leadership team a big responsibility. We have a lot more means, and we have to sustain big growth. We need to invest, and we have to build this company.
You understand that the company was below $1 billion five years ago. Now we are in the journey of being above $2.5 billion. Of course, we need to invest the money we have additionally, and where we have to invest and how we have to prioritize. I wanted to disclose also where we have full commitment and where we want to build this type of Salomon at scale for a multi-billion company, global one. The first one is product innovation. No surprise, we have to continue to have this narrative of unique innovation. What is next? What is the next technology? What are the next inspiration from the consumer, and how much we can find solution for them? I wish you will be impressed about what you will see this afternoon. The second one is brand awareness.
We are coming from this core small outdoor brand in Europe, and now we are everywhere. We absolutely need to continue to tell the Salomon story across the globe on the relevant way and also with the right channel. The next one is D2C at scale. You understand that it is not one size fit all, so we are not a retail company. We are a product company, and we are trying to find the best way to distribute our products in omnichannel. Of course, continue to create these amazing touch points, creating a Salomon experience, having the best location in the world remain one of the biggest focus. We are going to open the store, for example, in Rodeo Street in L.A. in a month. It is a good example where we are looking for the best location to create this connection with consumer.
Digital, IT, AI is also a big part because on one hand, we are growing very fast, which is creating some challenge, but we have also a lot of opportunities how we are shaping the new Salomon and how much, when we are starting to have new system, IT system, platform, we are able to shape and create the platform updated to the next ambition we have for Salomon. AI is also a big topic. We start very early to think forward about how much we are able to create new products, design, testing, using a lot of data in order to understand what is the pattern of the consumer and so on. Of course, we are looking for. We have a lot of small project around in a lot of different expertise in order to leverage this big opportunity. The last one is about talent.
A company could not sustain and develop and be successful without a very strong culture, which is also and we have a strong culture, but how much we are able to scale and continue to enrich this culture, and it has to be done with two different type of opportunity. The first one is continue to develop the people in the company and giving them the big opportunity. You can understand with my profile, I am very passionate by when someone is taking advantage of moving forward, having new initiatives, showing leadership, how much we can train them and stuff, continue to develop them. This is a big part of the future of Salomon, and also choosing carefully the best talent of the industry, the one who understand the Salomon story and the Salomon opportunity, coming with amazing expertise and being able to bring additional asset expertise in the market.
This is becoming one of the biggest focus at Salomon, is how we are really building a Salomon team across the world with a very strong culture. As an example, this is the Salomon leadership team. We call it CEC, Salomon Executive Committee, where you will be exposed to these people. Some of them will do presentations, some of them you will meet at the break. Some of them are in the pattern of internal development at Salomon, catching opportunity, developing themselves. Of course, we have also very seasoned people coming from outside of the organization, different brands, not only on the usual suspect. You will see that we have people coming also from parallel industry like fashion or luxury, because we believe that we have a lot to learn from this type of mature industry as well.
A good example of that, which is kind of description, is Heikki Salonen, that you will be also. He will do a presentation about some idea we have in the direction, coming from Maison Margiela MM6, where we had a long-term collab, but also a passionate outdoor geek, doing a lot of trail running and skiing during the year. What is very unique for that is, usually sporting goods brand have creative direction in product and creative direction in brands. We are trying to unify the two, and we think that this is also kind of next generation of brands. If you want to create a very unified proposition between products, retail experience, campaign, you need to have this type of unification where it makes sense for the consumer.
It is also a best expression of how we emerge, we can move forward and continue to speak the authenticity of Salomon. This is a strategy. It gives us a very strong conviction about the business case we have in front of us. Being authentic, continue to nurture innovation, having amazing team, having a very disciplined strategy, how we want to develop in the world with our channel, with our partner, connecting with consumer. We have the conviction that a mid-teen CAGR for the next five years is the future of Salomon. We will rally the companies in motion behind this strategy and this ambition. Of course, if you are moving forward and growing the business, of course, you are improving the operating margin. This is really a very strong conviction, and you will see how much people dedicate energy behind this project.
The last word is, "What fascinates me is what I will do tomorrow." It was a quote of Georges Salomon, and among all the legacy left to us, I think this is one of the biggest one, is this inspiration of what's next, how we are moving forward. Celebrating the past, being proud of our authenticity, legacy of what we have been doing, but how much we can move forward. We will move forward with the right product with win with the consumer.
We are going to move forward with a strong global omnichannel developments, making sure that we have strong partnership with our B2B partner. We will succeed as well when we will have a clear game plan, how we address with the consumer coming from epicenter, having very strong authentic campaign, but also moving and connecting with the community. Of course, having the right team to grow. I wish that you will enjoy the day, be exposed to our leadership team, and understand what it means having a very strong team dedicated for the brand. I thank you very much.
[Break].
[Non-English content] Good morning, everyone, and welcome back. Welcome to Annecy. I'm Xavier. I'm in charge of the winter sports equipment business for Salomon, the origin of the brand. In fact, it all started in 1947 in Annecy. I discussed with some of you this morning. Some of you enjoyed a walk last night in the old city. This is exactly where everything started, in the old city of Annecy, where François Salomon had a small workshop manufacturing saw blades. And his son, Georges, saw an opportunity with the emerging of a new industry, the manufacturing of Alpine ski. He thought, "Okay, we are making saw blades. Why not make metal edges for skis?" This is how the Salomon family entered the winter sports equipment world.
And for now, more than just a product category, more than just our roots, more than a solid business, winter sports equipment is for Salomon the DNA and a powerful driver of our brand equity. Yes, we are at the forefront of winter sports equipment since 1947. Ski edges, and then the first automatic binding for more safety. Then the revolution, the rear country alpine boots that combine both performance and comfort. We are at the forefront of winter sports since 1947 with a relentless stable recipe. It is all about product excellence rooted in innovation. That is putting us today in the leading seat. We are the global leader of the winter sports equipment business. We have roughly 13% market share in the mature, fragmented, and competitive markets. This leadership position is remarkable.
It is unique in a sense that we are extremely well-balanced across the three regions, North America, EMEA, Asia. This is unique. No other brand has such a nice balance of business. This unique position comes as well from the fact that we are covering all the disciplines of winter sports, alpine and piste, alpine freeride, snowboard, cross-country. Why is that important? It does two things at once. It is cushioning us from cyclical downturn from a region or a sport, and also it allows to touch a vast diversity of consumers across the globe. Whatever your age, your style, your nationality, Salomon can speak to you. Indeed, we are reaching the cool kids, core freestylers, snowboarders from the West Coast in North America.
We touch the active adults in the Nordics, for instance, who wants to train in wintertime in cross-country skiing, perfect complement of their active sport in cycling or running during summer. We touch the premium families who safeguard a weekend or week of holidays in the resorts as a premium family quality time. We touch urban youths who are learning how to ski or snowboard in a dome next door in Shanghai. So that is how Salomon has offered a nice segue, a nice entry gate to a broad type of consumers. As in the past, as with Georges Salomon, the recipe always starts with product excellence. With our heritage of engineering, we are making products really superior in function. Aligned with our positioning of modern mountain sports that Guillaume introduced to you, we are radical in design.
Aligned with our heritage of craftsmanship, we pay a lot of attention to detail. This product excellence is also visible in the way that we transform our industry towards sustainability. On this picture here, you can see the Brigade helmet, the first helmet fully recyclable, and unique helmet fully recyclable of the market. Product excellence is also showcased in the way our engineers have developed incredible processes to allow everyone to enjoy the glide on snow, even after a tragic life accident. This product excellence is revealed through sports, through the performance of our athletes. We are winning on the biggest stage. Take, for example, Milano Cortina last winter, Olympic Games in Italy. The Salomon athletes won 36 medals. In Paralympics, nine medals, showing the commitment of the brand to reveal the greatest of everyone.
Every year, we are present on more than 200 podiums on World Cup, World Tour, et cetera. The interesting thing is that our athletes are giving back to us. Most of our products are developed with their experience, their input. Winning on the bigger stage is great to qualify the superiority of our products. It is also a fantastic amplification effect. Scenic landscape, incredible image on snow, deep emotions of the athletes. This is a great way to connect emotionally with consumers. This is visible on TV, on our own media, on our athletes' social media, in the press. Every year, we are reaching more than 1 billion people. In an Olympic year, it goes double. It is more than 2 billion through winter sports. To recap, we are making great products.
We qualify the superiority of our products through sports and winning on stage, and we connect emotionally with the consumers. Next question is how do we go to market? Our primary focus is to connect with consumers where they are ready to purchase, when their mind is connected to the sport. To be honest, for most of us, winter sport is a hobby, and we do not necessarily think about it all year long. Therefore, 60% of our business happen in resorts, through retail specialty or rental operator. For the one of you, most avid, who like to prepare in advance their equipment and so on, you can find us at key accounts like Paragon in New York or with retailer like evo. You may think 10% direct to consumer is really, really small.
I do not know if some of you have bought recently a pair of Alpine boots, for instance. Not sure you want to purchase that online. Not sure that you are absolutely sure that this is what you need, and you do not want to try different type of product. In fact, more than 50% of our direct-to-consumer business is addressing professional. People who know exactly what they need, ski lift operator, clubs, teachers, and so on. A very, very important point now for Salomon Winter Sport Equipment, the massive competitive advantage we have is our operations excellence. Specificity of this industry, we own most of our production facilities. This has enabled us to develop best-in-class processes and tools along the years. This has enabled us to develop very strong engineering and R&D capabilities and expertise. More importantly, this is offering us a massive scale.
Through its Outdoor Performance segment, Amer Sports own the global leader, Salomon, and the number two, Atomic. We also have some other brands like Armada. All in all, when you produce all of that, it is more or less 30% of the market that is being produced by the industrial setup of Amer Sports. It is a massive advantage in term of scale. We talk a lot of the current status, the past, what we do now. Looking forward, you may think, yeah, it is a bit of changing business. We all know about climate change. We all know about global warming. We all know that resorts below 2,000 will struggle to operate in some case. It is absolutely true, and it is fully embedded and acknowledged in our strategic plan. In the same time, we can see a very, very positive dynamic on the market.
One very important KPI for us today, we have 400 million ski days per year. What does that mean? Imagine that everyone going to ski one day is purchasing one ticket. We are selling today 400 million tickets per year in the world. It is an all-time high. It is a bit counterintuitive. Think that 10 years ago, it was 350. You can see that there is a dynamic, very positive, which we can explain two ways. First one, the magic of winter sports. In the stressful world that we all live, connected world that we all live, urban world that most of us live, escaping in the resort, in the mountain for a couple of days or a week remains a great luxury. Second aspect, you can see it here, we have new markets emerging fast. Biggest example is China.
15 years ago, there was roughly nobody skiing or snowboarding. Then the Olympic arrived to Beijing. The government decided to invest in infrastructure, in clubs, in ski school. There is today 35 million skiers and snowboarders in China. This is the biggest number of participants in a country. They are not skiing as much as American, but there is a lot of them, which is preparing the next generation. What is happening in China, we can clearly see it happening. Indian people who want to come skiing, Middle East people, and so on. The very interesting thing with China that is showing the way to a lot of markets is the way they build it. You learn how to ski next door in a dome.
Then when you are getting better, you go outdoor in a resort in your own country, and then you are becoming more of an expert, you can travel the world to enjoy different conditions. This is something you can really see in different places. The last thing is that consumer wants premium. Our consumer are used to premium experience where they live, are used to premium experience when they travel, and they want premium products as well. Our average selling price went up 30% in the last five years. This is how we explain all the dynamic, explain our growth, 8% CAGR in the last five years, which is clearly above the market growth. We are taking market share. When we are looking ahead, we are confident that we will keep growing, low to mid-single digits, with one goal, again, always the same, outperform the market and take market share.
To conclude, Salomon is the only winter sports equipment brand that has been able to diversify successfully in softgoods. The only one. This is a virtuous circle for us. Winter sports equipment is clearly benefiting from the brand heat, from the coolness of the brand, and the connection with urban consumers. The other way around, as we hyper-accelerate in softgoods, the strength of winter sports equipment is a very strong asset to nurture the brand authenticity. I think my key message, a bit like what Guillaume said this morning, we want to bring the mountain sports culture to the city. No other sneaker brands have such an asset. No other sneaker brand play in such an inspiring playground with the same passion and the same commitment as it did on day one in 1947. Thank you very much.
I know, wearing a red T-shirt during Investor Day is a risky choice. But don't worry, all the numbers that I will show you green. My name is Kristof Cavazzana . I have been born in the world of sports, especially cycling. What animates me in the world of cycling is to push the boundary of myself, but mainly to create adventure, adventure to explore new terrains. With Salomon, there is one of the beautiful adventure I had the chance to be part of, the Sportstyle adventure. I led Sportstyle since 2015, and with a collective, it has been an amazing journey. An amazing journey to bring the mountain sports culture from the mountains to the city, and I think we can be very proud of that. But guess what? It is just the beginning.
Today, I am Vice President of Product and Experience, leading all the product offers in the softgoods area. Today, I have two mission. One, make it clear our pattern of innovation, and the second one, clarify our product strategy. Let's start by this one. Guillaume already shared with you the Salomon DNA, innovation, product excellence. But what do you see on the screen? Some of you will see just a shoe, some of you will see the shoe that you are wearing, the XT-6. But what I see is a technology, SensiFit for foothold, Chassis for support, Contagrip for the grip, Quicklace.
All this is function, is innovation to solve a problem from an athlete or our communities. And many years later, those function meet the styles. And you guess what? We created the outdoor sneakers. But we will come back to this because XT-6 is a big elephant in the room. Innovation. How we approach innovation. Three pillars, pretty simple. The third one, for those guys who are here physically in Annecy, you will discover S/LAB. S/LAB stands for Salomon Laboratory. It is our public laboratory to express our innovation, to push the boundary of engineer, to push the boundary of design, and see what we build as a pinnacle. This is our pinnacle line.
The second one, we are very lucky to have more than 60 athletes across trail running, road running, triathlon, and even handicapped athletes. By adding those athletes, we are able to prove those innovation across different terrain, different culture, on the mountain, on the street, and so on and so forth. By doing that, we have feedback that we inject in the product of our creation. You will tell me, "Kristof, it is good to have innovation, but it is better to scale innovation." That is the soft sphere. Every innovation that it is happened in the S/LAB, we try to inject that in our core offer for a wider base of consumer. This is a pattern of innovation at Salomon. Product is one thing.
Product is one piece of the ecosystem. Guillaume already shared with you that we have what we call a creative direction. If we want to make impact, we need to build consistency and coherency between the product, the brand identity, and the consumer. Okay for innovation, okay for the consistency, but we are missing one piece. Consumer. We need to connect to the consumer. You will see in my presentation that I forget to speak about consumer, because for the team here in Annecy, it is a no-brainer.
It is part of our daily life. Bear in mind that every piece of product, there is a promise behind, there is a consumer, whether it is the top athlete or a wider consumer. Consumer and also from mountain to the city. It is a strategic choice that we bridge this modern sports culture from the mountain to the city. By doing that, we address a wider base of consumer, so a wider base, sizable price. Now it is time to concretely enter into product, and it is what I like. Let us go. This is our portfolio.
The softgoods category portfolio. Each of the segments has a clear role, a clear mandate in our portfolio. From the left to the right, from the left, which is our more comfort zone, our authenticity, authority in outdoor, to you have seen apparel and bags, where we have more market share to gain on the right. I will start with outdoor. By the way, footwear is more 80%, 85% of softgoods revenue. Footwear is our priority. 85% of revenue is footwear. Let us move to outdoor first. 15% in 2026 of our sales mix. I will start by the end, not the beginning. I think today, if you go in the mountains, you know this shoe. Modern outdoor shoe, light, breathable, perfect shoe for going in the mountains, very comfy.
Where we come from, where we come from 35 years ago in outdoor, we come from this. We come from another adventure. The name of the shoe is Adventure 7, in 1992. First hiking boots. I think if you look at the far left, you recognize some things. In 1980, we had the Nordic ski boots with all innovation as well, all innovation property of Salomon. From this, we created the first hiking boots. From this, we went further to create with new innovation, new technology, the modern outdoor shoe. 35 years of authority in outdoor, 35 years of innovation bring us to here. Today, it is what we call undisputed authority. Top three leader player in hiking footwear in Europe, key markets, Germany, France, but as well above 15% market share in Alpine countries. This is really what we call authority.
If we move to the product, this is our franchise portfolio. You will tell me, but it is not a lot. Yes, it is not a lot by choice. Three key franchise, XA series, Quest, and Oxygen. Simple, better, bigger. This is a choice, and I will repeat that in different segments. Simple, better, bigger. Three franchise with different proposition counts for 80% of the outdoor revenue in 2026. If you do not know, we got seven awards from U.S., Europe, or China. Awards from consumer, award from media, and so on and so forth. This is a recipe. It is a piece of the recipe to build and scale a franchise. Let us take the example of X series. How we target different type of consumer, how we target different type of genders by playing with different trigger. The first one, top left, top, is a colorway.
By playing the colorway, you can allow different, wider audience. Material, material iteration, and also different ankle cuts. Part of this model group, same shoe, different iteration. It allows to maximize and to reach a maximum consumer needs. This is what we do in outdoor. If you look forwards, we will apply this recipe. We will reinforce our leadership in outdoor by outpacing the market of outdoor with single-digit growth, right? By expanding the existing franchise, like I share with this CMF, color, material, finishing, and also by launching new franchises. Every two, three years, we come in outdoor with a new proposition, new franchise. We put in the market new innovation, and we apply this recipe, color, material, finishing. Let's run. We move or we stay in the mountains, but we run. This is our biggest market and opportunity we have in performance, 20% nowadays for the running performance.
This is a picture, and this is what we call internally running all terrain at Salomon, covering trail, gravel, and road. Trail, our comfort zone, where we come from, but the size of the price of the market, EUR 3 billion-EUR 5 billion, quite small. But if you look at the right, where the biggest opportunity open and the total run market, EUR 40 billion-EUR 45 billion. We have one, gravel in the middle, biggest untapped terrain in the running world. This is where Salomon started to enter a few years ago or a few seasons ago, and this is our current big bet. But we will take one by one, and we will dig one by one. One important piece. Back in the time, it was very siloed. One consumer was only doing trail running. The road runner were doing only road running.
Nowadays, what we see and what we see the trend is that if you are running, basically, you run on the street, you can run on gravel, and you can run on trail. There is no more silo, which is important for Salomon because we have the equipment to address those needs. Let's start by the trail. I think you can picture the trails. This is a trail. Mountain, technical trail, beautiful landscape, and sometimes very tough condition. Trail, you understand from Guillaume, it is where Salomon were even before we speak about sports, even before a lot of competitor enter. It is where we were part of the first mover. It is where we bring innovation.
It is where we shape the silhouette of the trail runner. It is where we shape the sports and the races. Nowadays, that trail is becoming a global phenomenon. We are one of the established leaders. If we look at product, back in the times, we had one product from the Red Wing specialty for the red adventure races where you do multiple sports, XA series, XT-Wings. To nowadays, we have a range, a quiver of technical products from S/LAB as the top of the product to a wider range to address different needs.
We have this quiver of products. Like I said, behind each shoe, there is a story. There is innovation. There is a need. There is a problem to solve. I encourage you to go in the showroom, to touch the product, to feel the product, and try to see that. This is the DNA of Salomon. As a result, today, trail is 10% of the global market share in 2026. Same for outdoor. We won global awards from magazine, media, based on consumer feedback.
We continue to run, but we are going a bit down on the mountain to do gravel. I think some of you are coming from the U.S., and in U.S., the gravel road are a bit everywhere. It is a no-brainer. This is gravel, where you can escape from the city, play with the terrain, be comfortable in the street, but also be comfortable on the light trail, gravel road. This is our recent success and our next big bet. We see a space like trail running, and we enter in this space. Today, we are shaping this space, and we want to own this space and to lead this space like trail running. It is where we can express all the technology that we bring at Salomon, either through trail or road running.
If you take the outsole of our shoe, basically, this is our product. You can recognize a very trail shoe. You can recognize a clear road shoe. But if you put and merge the best of the two world, you have in the middle the gravel shoe. Enough grip, comfort, and cushioning to play with the terrain wherever you are. It is my go-to shoe when I am business trip because I know that I can run in concrete, I can know I can go on a trail without compromising things and so on. It is really the go-to shoe, and it is the feedback we have the consumer wherever they are in L.A., in Paris, or in Asia. It is working, and we were right to take this space. This is the figures, 3x growth in 2025, 15% in 2026 of the sales.
In U.S., three awards with the Aero Glide Gravel in 2025. Best comfort shoe, best gravel shoe, and so on and so forth. Now, we went to the mountain, we went to the gravel. It is time to go on the road. We are here to speak about innovation. Look at the shoe, the S/Lab Phantasm 3, or the Phantasm 3 that I am wearing, which is made in France. Why the current world champion of Ironman, Casper Stornes, choose Salomon and choose this shoe the 3rd January of 2026? Why amongst competitors? Because it bring all technology, all marginal gains to win second during decisive moments. You can understand that after swimming, biking 150,000, and you need to run a 42,000 marathon, you need to have the shoe that helps you to perform and to win second and to marginal gain. This is where we are in road running.
I speak a lot about top athletes, but we bring innovation as well for a wider base, for every consumer, where we are bringing this technology to make win every second for every consumer. At Salomon, we have this positioning called dynamic comfort. Dynamic comfort, it is cushioning for your long run. It is also dynamic and comfort for your ultra-marathon or your jog. It is okay. We extend that across the range. This is one portfolio of products. From trail top to more inclusive, or road from top to training, and in between the gravel, the go-to shoe. If you look at this picture, for sure we have many other shoes, but if you look at this picture, you have all the products that you need to do a marathon, an ultra, or just a simple jog in Central Park.
With gravel now, we have this portfolio, and we have this versatility of shoe to provide to reach a new consumer. How we continue to grow in running? Push gravel running. It's our big bet. It's a space. We enter a space, we need to own this space. Second, continue to bring innovation, continue to bring key franchise, animate key franchise. As an example, I spoke about Aero Glide, 100,000 pair three years ago, almost 1 million pair next year. In three years, you can see the progress and also the success that we have. You can imagine as well, and you will see that later with Larry, but by partnering with athletes or events, it will help to bring this awareness to a broader consumer. Let's stop running. We move to Sportstyle.
Sportstyle, the most recent and biggest growth driver, and I guess this is where you have the most question. Sportstyle is a category that has grown from a double-digit million business in 2021 to almost EUR 1 billion. I remember with the team to celebrate our first EUR 50 million business, and for us, it was amazing. If you look at today, it looks far ago, but it's not so far ago, only a few years ago. Invented in performance, reinvented in the city, invented in the toughest terrain on the mountain. The XT-6 here, worn by an athlete in 1993, has been invented to perform in 100 mi around Mont Blanc. 10 years later, reinvented in the city. It's an iconic product of what we call now the outdoor sneaker.
Like I said, at the beginning, it brings all the technology, the SensiFit, the Chassis, the Contagrip, the Quicklace, even what we call OrthoLite to make sure that the rock are not going inside. All this bring now comfort in a different usage. Reinvented for urban, reinvented for diverse communities. The adoption has been organically. We didn't come here and push it. The community, the culture of sneaker adopted first. Later today, I will share with you, the first shoe because it's not the XT-6, the first shoe of Sportstyle. You will see. I'll keep the secret for later.
The XT-6 is just the icon. In a few years, it has been a success story, but it's just the beginning. We didn't even put marketing budget behind at the beginning. Initially, I wanted to share with you all the opinion leader, all the staff, all the VIP that are wearing Salomon, or Formula One top model, but for use age right, I was not able to do that. Here it's a perfect example of the committees wearing Salomon, understanding the DNA of Salomon, understanding the mountain sports culture of Salomon, and playing with that. Nobody has a small video of it. Sportstyle. Driving the growth, 30x Sportstyle sales between 2021 and 2026. The most interesting part with Sportstyle, it's a huge catalyst to target new consumer. Today, 80% of consumers of Sportstyle are new to Salomon.
You will see the details with Valerie later on the age and everything. For us, it's amazing. We target 80 new consumer that we can also transform into the world of performance, whatever outdoor, running, and so on and so forth. Sportstyle grew another 90% CAGR over the last five years. Now it's becoming our largest footwear category. Let's talk about the big elephant in the room, the XT-6. I keep hearing the question every time I go, "Yeah, but you are dependent on the XT-6. Yeah, but your XT-6 is your only shoe." No. Today, for sure, we are very young in the world of sneaker. We are new. That's why the XT-6 is the most visible shoe today, and it's only for since three to four years that we are putting investment behind the XT-6. 100% CAGR between 2021 and 2026 on the XT-6.
The most interesting piece is only 15% of the born sales are XT-6. We have other babies such as the XT Whisper. For me, it's a bigger success story than the XT-6, and you will see why. 15% of Sportstyle sales are Whisper, and I spotted that some of you are wearing Whisper. In a year and a half, we moved from 0% of sales to 170% sales growth. We moved to zero pair to almost a million pair in a year and a half. How we did that? This is our recipe. For sure, I will not disclose all the recipe. It's like my grandmother when she was cooking, I keep some secret. Basically, in a year and a half, it's the principle. We have in-range launches. We start by a very weird color, December 2024. Then we bring an innovation.
Some of you living in New York may know Sandy Liang, to target different type of consumer, more women, New York. Then we bring energy on the inline products with some energy pack. We move to, let's say, a different model iteration with the XT Whisper Void. In between, we do another collaboration with London communities, Amalu, and we move on and move on. For sure, it's not all the color of the XT Whisper. We have many other colors in between to target men and women, different communities, and so on and so forth. Basically, we have in-range project, but also we have collaboration, limited edition to bring energy, to bring an awareness, and to reach different communities.
Sometimes, such as the last piece, Carpet Company, we partner with local retailer or local brands to do a special makeup to target a specific community which will have a clear influence in the sneaker world. One year and a half to build the XT Whisper. Once again, it is just the beginning. If you look at the quiver of store style from where we started with the XT-6, the only shoe that we have in the quiver, where we are going, you may recognize the XT Whisper. We also have another franchise, XT Quest, and the new one, the next one will be the XT franchise. We will start this year to animate the XT franchise. All this is above 1 million pair. I will not also disclose all the new franchise that we are cooking for 2028, 2029 and 2030.
Today, we have a strong pipeline, and we have a master plan of all franchise that we will bring until 2030. I was very encouraged, you will see in the showroom, a few of them. How we continue to grow. We will continue to curate the franchise, having a clear merchandising and franchise management, and also bringing newness, collaboration, and capsule. Discipline on the franchise, energy. You will see later this afternoon with the regions, we are also making sure that we are curating the go-to market to be very sharp on the growth and to have a sustainable growth. Last, apparel, accessories, bag, and iteration. Apparel and accessories, 13% softgoods sales mix today, and bags and iteration, 7% sales mix of softgoods.
Those two category, you understand in the introduction, are here to expand our head-to-toe offer, how to expand the silhouette of the footwear, and to be the next building block for Salomon. Let us start by apparel. Extension of footwear silhouettes. We bring additional piece, and the strategy on apparel will be to have an offer from top performance to a more lifestyle usage. This will come in a couple next year. Big building block coming next with apparel. Bags, you will see later, I have a statistic slide. We need to reinforce our leadership, and you will see the very interesting story that we have on bags. This is a sneak peek of our head-to-toe across all the sports. Yes, it is not exhaustive. From sport style head-to-toe, to outdoor, to the running, which in running, we have different sports, gravel, trail, and road.
Also, like you have seen with Xavier, supporting the winter sports equipment. If we move to bags, you will look at me and say, "But Kristof, why you are speaking in bags? We are in store days in NC, this is bags." What you see here from 2010 to 2026, you have one word which is coming back every time when we speak about bag, is skin. Internally, we call that the second skin. From 2010 to 2026 Salomon bring innovation, material, problem-solving, reaching different consumer, men, woman, for different problem-solving. All the competitors today are following us, and sometimes, unfortunately, copy us. This technology starts with the problem-solving. We are back to innovation. One athlete, one day, came in and see here and say, "I want to start this race, but I do not want to carry my hand, my jacket, my shoe, and so on.
What we can do? I think we can do some pocket on my T-shirt, and I can carry my stuff on my T-shirt." We started to enhance a T-shirt to carry all the mandatory stuff. From there, all our engineers, all our product geek, were starting to say, "But we have a problem to solve. Let's do a second skin. Let's do a bag that will feel like a second skin." This is a success stories. The success stories is this number. If you go to UTMB, Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, it's the biggest race happening end of August in Chamonix, one hour away. It's kind of the fashion week of trail running. 60% of the runner are wearing Salomon bag. It's what we call leadership. We got four global awards for the ADV Skin, for the second skin. How we continue to grow?
Bring technology, I think, as an example, heat management is one of the problem to solve with the weather increasing, the climate, and so on. How we bring technology, evolutions, and also how we can accelerate in apparel with focusing performance but not only how we can bring performance to our lifestyle. To recap for softgoods, we have a CAGR of 26%, between 2021 and 2026. If you look ahead, we'll be mid to high teens. Softgoods, footwear 80% today. Looking at the future, mid to high teens. Apparel accessories, the next building block, 20% today to low 20%s. To wrap up, we have this premium growth engine in softgoods, anchoring performance, expanding across categories, and reaching a new consumer. You know now the innovation DNA and the pattern of innovation.
You know the product strategy and how can we continue to build the mountain sports culture from the mountain to the city. We are the brands that continue to diversify and accelerate the softgoods and in urban environment. Salomon is a game changer to win towards the consumer. I will finish by some things. Why I put the red color today. Some of you, if you look at your shoe, you have what we call the race flag, blue, red, and yellow. Each color has a meaning. I will only tell one on stage, and we can discuss for the other two. The red mean hard work, mean brand energy, and brand ambition. For this, I will leave Valérie Loh to speak about this brand energy and brand ambition. Thank you very much.
Good morning. My name is Valérie Loh , and I'm Salomon's SVP of brand and marketing. I joined Salomon a few months ago after a career, across mostly legacy luxury brands, the last of which, Moncler. I joined Salomon because it's a brand with unmatched heritage, credibility in sport, and which is enjoying a momentum in culture that a lot of brands would dream of. I saw a brand with huge equity and relatively low awareness and a tremendous potential for growth, which is why I'm so happy to be here this morning. This morning, I'll walk you through our marketing strategy and how we aim at further developing the brand equity and amplifying the amazing product portfolio you just discovered, with Kristof and Xavier's presentation before. We have defined five pillars, to help us reach our strategic objectives.
The first one, epicenters, a word that you've already heard this morning. The second, impactful campaigns. The third, strategic collaborations and partnerships. Fourth, community, globally and locally. And fifth, unique consumer journey and excellence, at retail. By the end of this presentation, I hope to demonstrate that this approach works. Let's start with our first pillar, epicenters, a word you're probably getting familiar with by now. Our development strategy aims at efficiency. We don't want to spread everywhere. We have defined seven global epicenters where we focus our means and efforts. They are the cities that define global culture, whether we talk about fashion, lifestyle, or sport.
And when we win there, it gives us outsized brand halo. That's why we focus our investments in those cities. For example, over-investing in London, +90% versus the rest of the U.K., and the same goes for Paris and for a lot of the other epicenters. And this works. The concentration and over-investment in epicenters is paying off, and you can see that we are making great strides in terms of increasing brand awareness year on year. Each region sits at a different maturity level, and this shows also in where they stood and where they stand today in terms of awareness.
In EMEA, which is our heritage region, Paris leads the way with already 50% brand awareness. In the U.S., New York City, only two years ago, stood below 10% awareness. It was our smallest awareness base. But in the course of two years, we have already doubled the awareness level, and it's continuing to accelerate. The same is true for APAC and Greater China, where we have considerably increased our presence over the past five years. And now we have Tokyo and Shanghai both standing at 20% brand awareness. We are making progress.
We have considerably increased our awareness levels, but as you can see with the numbers on the screen, we still have big opportunities ahead. Equity and awareness at a broader scale are key transformation drivers that will enable us to reach our growth targets. To achieve this, we are evolving how we invest, investing more, but also investing better. In the last two years, not only have we doubled the investment in marketing, but we are also shifting the way we invest, focusing more on awareness building and long-term brand demand construction, and depending much less on paid search and short-term decision phase tactics. And this works. Our strategic and intentional concentration on epicenters is efficient in terms of building awareness, but it's most importantly efficient among the consumer targets we are aiming to conquer.
As we grow awareness, we reach new audiences, and we aim at conquering younger and more gender-balanced audiences. And over the past two years, we see that this is working. We have made significant shifts in our consumer base. Looking at D2C, we see that over the past two years, we went from 35% of our D2C clients below 35 years old to around 60% of clients below 35 years old today. And the same goes for women. We went from around 35% of women in our D2C base to around 45%, a +10 percentage points over the course of two years. Now, onto our second pillar, campaigns. What's a high-impact campaign? We create integrated global campaigns that combine and concentrate product, marketing, and commercial priorities behind a single idea and a unified 360 plan. It is orchestrated so the brand shows up as one big coordinated story.
You will see how this comes to life this afternoon in the regional presentations. This works. A perfect example is the Gravel campaign, which we ran in spring/summer, and you can see on this screen, which was deployed as a fully coordinated offense across different touchpoints, whether that is from out of home to store windows or community events. This campaign achieved excellent results with a brand lift in the U.S. of +15% and a search lift of +15% as well in France, for example. Another good example, in Sportstyle this time, is the XT-Whisper launch, which also took place in spring/summer, and again, was a fully coordinated offense with PR, media, in-store events, all coordinated, making it a very efficient campaign. XT-Whisper campaign generated a +15% brand lift in the U.S. and a +51% search lift in the U.S. as well. A very impactful campaign.
On to our third pillar, strategic partnerships, and these span across brand ambassadors, athletes, product collaborations, or events. Starting with brand ambassadors. Maybe you are familiar with the face on the screen now. Brand ambassadors amplify the brand heat and help us reach a broad audience. This year, we are proud to announce Jisoo as our first global brand ambassador. With a young and loyal fan base and over 90 million followers on Instagram and TikTok alone, Jisoo elevates our Sportstyle presence and will be the face of an upcoming campaign this October. We do not stop at global mega stars. We also collaborate with regional superstars, like for example, the Colombian star, Feid, in North and Latin America. Feid, who has over 35 million monthly listeners on Spotify, started off as a fan of the brand, only to become an ambassador in 2024.
He brings his own DNA to the collaboration, building a collection that looks like he could be wearing it. The current XT-4 collaboration, which is in-store now, sold out actually from the pre-sale phase already in the U.S. Completely sold out. Product collaborations do not stop at Sportstyle. They also can be expressed in the performance side of the brand. The Dawn to Dusk collection is a good example. It was designed and tested with trail running legend Courtney Dauwalter. Who does not love Courtney? Courtney is one of the most outstanding athletes in trail running. Her capsule is inspired by her 2023 season, during which she won the three most iconic races of trail, Hardrock, Western States, and UTMB, and she is the first athlete ever, male or female, to achieve this. She approved every product in the collection, which was built with comfort over long distance in mind.
Courtney is part of the Salomon athletes roster. You have already heard from Kristof how we collaborate with a lot of athletes, and from Xavier as well. Staying true to our performance DNA, we proudly sponsor over 200 professional athletes across all our key performance categories, from alpine ski racers to snowboarders, to biathlon Olympic champions, all the way to ultra trail runners and para athletes. As part of our commitment to performance and to sports, we also sponsor a number of races and events in sports.
Besides the Milano Cortina Olympic Games partnership Xavier talked about, we also have the Golden Trail World Series, which was created by Salomon in 2018, and which has since grown to become the leading short distance trail running series globally. Most recently, it was already mentioned, we have just announced as we become a global partner for Ironman starting in 2027, strengthening our connection to running across triathlon and over 150 races from next year. Let's see how is this going to play out.
We began where endurance is hardest. From day one, we have never stopped pushing the limits of endurance. Faster, longer, elsewhere. Because endurance was never about the terrain. It has always been about what it takes to keep going. So we go where endurance goes next.
Partnerships do not stop at sports events. They also cross into culture. Since 2026, we are, Salomon, the proud partner of the Paris Opera Ballet, the Opéra National de Paris, as equipment partner. The ballet's 154 dancers benefit from equipment that was designed to support every stage of their training, from warm-up to recovery or travel. Beyond equipment, this partnership brings together two institutions that share a common value of discipline, dedication, and daily practice. We are extremely proud of this partnership. On to our fourth pillar, which is the animation of our communities through experiences and events that deepen the emotional connection and with our sports and culture communities. Local events, first, allow us to connect with local communities in a tailored way.
When it comes to Sportstyle, those events can take the shape of an in-store activation, organized with our S/PLUS loyalty program members, for example. Or they can come as a standalone event with local tastemakers, which is the case with the launch of the XT-Whisper Void, you can see on the screen, which was held with an event in L.A., our epicenter in L.A., with Jahlil Nzinga, who is an artist locally in L.A. The event was held to celebrate self-expression through art with the objective of creating buzz around the brand on the local community. When it comes to performance community events, Salomon truly has grassroots legitimacy. All regions engage actively with their respective sports communities, whether they are run clubs or gravel tours. Salomon is, for example, the third community globally on Strava with over 100,000 members.
We also activate our communities at a broader level through initiatives like Gravelanza, for example, a weekend-long festival-like event combining gravel running, of course, product testing, and live music concerts. The first Gravelanza pilot took place in Paris in June, gathering over 3,000 participants, 40% of which were women with an average age of 34 years old. This was a success, achieving also outstanding feedback from all the participants. We are going to hold the second pilot in Los Angeles this October.
Finally, our fifth pillar is on retail experience. We engineer an elevated, cohesive, and distinctive Salomon brand experience for our consumers, whichever channel they choose to interact with us. First, our retail stores. They are designed to offer the best expression of the brand. From design concept to sensory experience to the training of our store teams, every element is built to immerse the consumer in the Salomon universe.
Salomon stores are a central element of the consumer journey as our retail footprint grows. We have heard from Guillaume this morning how those stores are becoming more and more important. We have, for example, opened over 100 own stores in 2025. We are not forgetting our online flagship with our salomon.com open 24/7, of course. With our selected multi-brand partners, we also deploy premium installations that capture brand DNA, be it on a single footwear wall or through full shop-in-shop installations. Our goal here is consistency, providing an experience that captures the essence of our brand and allows us to win at the point of sale. I am now coming to the end of my presentation. We are expanding beyond the realms of our core segments into broader markets, but without compromising or losing what made the brand authentic and credible in the first place.
Everything we went through is part of a coordinated strategy to achieve this goal. In my introduction, I said when I joined Salomon, I had the intuition that this brand had great potential for growth. Now, after seven months, I am certain, and I hope I was able to convey a bit of that certainty over to you. I thank you for your attention, and I will leave you with an illustration to a short video of what it means for Salomon to be the modern mountain sports culture brand. Thank you.
What fascinates us most is not what we have achieved. It is what we will create next. Born from performance, built through endurance. Mountains are where we began. They are not where we stop. Bringing mountain sports culture to the city. We create for all terrains, every condition, every challenge. We are Salomon, the modern mountain sport culture brand.
Okay, everybody. We are running about 15, 20 minutes ahead. We are going to start lunch a little bit early. For people on the webcast, we are going to take about 2.5 hours for lunch and the in-person product tours. That means we are going to resume the presentations from management at 2:15 P.M. Central European Time, which is 8:15 A.M. in New York or 8:15 P.M. in Shanghai. Again, for people online, we are going to resume the afternoon management presentations at 2:15 P.M. Central European Time. For everybody here in the room, we are going to adjourn to lunch, start lunch a little bit early, take an hour for that, and then we are going to spend about 1.5 hours on the product tours.
You each got a name tag today. There should be a number on your name tag. There are four groups for the four product stations, and then we are just going to rotate between, and there will be signs and people to help you find your starting station based on your group number. Okay, see you at lunch. Thanks everybody for a great morning.
[Break]
Okay, thanks everyone. Thanks everybody in person. Welcome back to the afternoon session. Thanks everybody online, the webcast. We are starting the afternoon session, which will be focused on the regions, as well as the financial presentations, and finish with Q&A. Our first speaker is Bertrand Gachon, who leads our EMEA business. Bertrand?
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to the plenary session. My name is Bertrand Gachon, and I lead the region EMEA for Salomon. I joined Salomon 30 years ago for a six-month internship only, not like Guillaume. Interestingly enough, I was focusing on product diversification in the strategy team, and I was actually working on running probably 8, 10 years before we even launched our first running shoe, which tells you a lot about how Salomon has been obsessed with product since day one. Eventually, I started a real job in SNGC in sales and marketing, but I spent most of my journey at Nike across different functions, different roles, different countries. I went back to Salomon 32 years ago in my current role. You guess you will find out why I came back to Salomon in the last 15 minutes or so.
EMEA, as you know, stands for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, but today, for the sake of the presentation, I will focus on Europe only, which represents the vast majority of the business and where we will find most of the growth in EMEA. Europe is the birthplace of the brand. This is where most of the iconic products that you saw this morning and during the lunchtime were developed, launched, even in this building even. The region where we are, Europe, is also very unique. Mountain sport heartland, culture defining global epicenters, sportive and affluent consumer base. In Europe, the Salomon heritage is super strong, and our consumer is very loyal to the brand, making it super critical for us to keep this authentic positioning.
Therefore, in Europe, the first question we have to ask ourselves is, how do you protect the core while entering into new spaces, right? Staying authentic for us means protecting the communities that made Salomon very unique, the skiers, the mountaineers, the trailers. This is our core. Opening new spaces means new cities, new consumer, new moments, new partners without diluting what makes us very, very unique. Over the years, we started to make some bets, make some choices, where to bring us where we stand today, and we start to see some significant shifts in the region. From a winter sport, trail, and outdoor-only brand, we are now a broader performance brand. Really recently, we have added Sportstyle into the category portfolio. Sportstyle is now 30% of our business.
From a male-predominant brand, we are now at parity, male and female, 50/50, and we are engaging with a much more younger consumer audience. 60% are below 35 years old. Only two years ago, it was 45%, massive improvement. From a B2B-driven business, we are now way more balanced between B2B and B2C, and B2C has been leading the growth. That brings me to a quick state of play. Over the last five years, we grew by 10 points, 10%. We outpaced the market. To make it simple, we grew two times faster than the market. We are still B2B-driven. We have come from a long way, but B2C is already 25% of our business. As you saw from the last slide, we are growing fastest. Now let me take you through the channel strategy, starting with B2B before shifting to retail and e-com.
In B2B, we are starting to make some choices and focus on the retailers that are really following and supporting our strategies. Starting from the core or brand builders, they are really anchored in the culture of sport, and they play a key role for us to engage with the sportiest community. We started to invest with them through dedicated sales, dedicated marketing to engage meaningfully with their communities. We also present at the point of sale. As a matter of fact, over the last couple of years, we have built more than 200 footwear walls directly in the stores, facing the consumer to elevate the brand. Accelerate international trading partners. Think about the JD, the Foot Locker, the Snipes of the world. As we naturally expand our reach, those partners play a very key role for us to talk to a different audience.
Younger, more urban, often more feminine. We have reinforced the partnership with those guys. We are working hand in hand. They really see us as a strong partner for their house, for their growth. We have opened 300 doors over the last couple of years with them, always focusing on TCTs, always on key locations. Last, we rationalize some other accounts, meaning we rationalize accounts that do not play as central for us in the marketplace. The choice we have made in B2B by picking the right partners are paying off to drive a category ascent and to drive the quality growth. If you recall that the last year our growth was 10%. With any of the partners you see here, we are growing way faster, and we see them as a really big growth driver for the next five years. Now shifting into D2C.
Our different store types play a very distinct role in each neighborhood they are located. They are not just an additional retail footprint, they are really a manifestation of the brand. Starting from left to right, flagship store, like the one we have in Champs-Élysées, this is really the best expression of our brand, the pinnacle expression for any consumer. You can go to a brand store like the one in Covent Garden, London. This is our full price of good offering that we find in original key cities. Signature store, our Sportstyle focused location that you will see in areas that like culture. Typically, you will see a store like this in Paris Le Marais or in London, so again, global epicenters. Then factory outlets, which actually for us play a dual role.
They allow us to get in contact with a new consumer that get access to the brand for the first time, and it is also helping us in term of inventory liquidation. At the end of 2026, we will operate more than 50 stores, largely dominated by outlet stores. But by 2031, we should operate approximately 75 stores, with two-third of the stores being full price. Here again, another big shift. In addition to our retail, our own website is a key driver of our D2C acceleration and consumer connection. The last five years, e-com grew two times faster than any other channel in our portfolio. Looking ahead, there is a lot of room to grow as we continue to bring high quality traffic, elevate consumer experience, elevate the order value, bring new business models like connective inventory, and you can name a few more.
We also continue to build on our membership program that we call S/PLUS. Only last year, we grew 40%. We now are at 2.5 million members only in Europe. As we discussed this morning with Valerie, we also made deliberate bets in key cities. As you have learned, we started with Paris, our first epicenter that give us a blueprint for any other activation, any other epicenters globally. So here the stores are more than any store. They become really the showcasing for our brands. We partner with our B2B store, elevate our presentation, working on pop-up, work on the POP permanently. We organize gravel races in the city to engage meaningfully with the communities. We also partner with music festivals to engage with influencers that we could not have reached through the conventional channels. The progress we have made in Paris are really phenomenal.
We reached 50% of awareness in one year. In terms of revenue, we grew 2 x faster than total France. While we are expanding Paris, we are also taking to the next wave of epicenters, using this proven playbook and open up this strategy in London, Berlin, Munich, Milan or Barcelona. We actually started in Milan during the Milan Olympics with activations stores, and we saw awareness rising dramatically. Our big focus in Europe is London. London is our second global epicenter, is Paris, and this is where we invest the most. We talked about the marketing investment this morning with Valerie, but only in the last 18 months we have opened three stores. Next spring, we are going to open a dedicated U.K. warehouse to serve our U.K. consumer even faster. Now enough of me. I think the images speak louder than any of my words.
Let us see a nice video on what we have activated in Paris over the last few months. To wrap it up. Business grew 10% from 2021 to 2026. We expect a lot of budget growth over the next five years. We will grow strategically in Sportstyle and running. Those are our two biggest growth drivers for the region. We will maintain leadership in outdoor and trail, again, to protect our core. From a channel standpoint, we will grow across all channels. In B2B, we will focus on premium partners. In D2C, we will focus on full price stores and e-com. That was, in a nutshell, the EMEA plan. Thanks for your attention, and let me introduce you to Jeffery Ma for China. Thank you.
Hello. [Non-English content] I am Jeffery Ma. I am the president of Amer China. [Non-English content] is Chinese. Whenever you go to Shanghai, it is highly welcome when you speak [Non-English content] to all the Chinese. This actually speaking is one of our last augurs. Our culturally relevant activation happened in Shanghai. It is a keyword on the social media. Salomon entered China in 2008, and the new chapter really kicked off in 2019 since the change in ownership. The retail and the Sportstyle have accelerated in the past years. Today, Greater China, including mainland China and Hong Kong and Macau. Greater China is Salomon's biggest and fastest-growing D2C market. Greater China is attractive sportswear market with a very positive trend. One of the largest and most dynamic market with large and affluent population. High share of the premium-oriented consumer who really value European brands with authentic heritage.
Rising participation in outdoor sports, particular among the young consumer, like the hiking, trail running and road running. This created a lot of the opportunity for Salomon across both Sportstyle and performance business. This is proven in our results on the last years. We built a very extensive retail premium network, and so far we have 330 stores end of this year. On the past five years, we opened 300 stores. Significantly outpacing the market with triple digit CAGR growth. We also established Salomon as a premium challenge brand in Asia continent. We have grown strongly in our main categories. We are driven by the Sportstyle. On the past five years, 120% CAGR growth and amplified by our performance, 70% last five years CAGR growth. This has led to a significant momentum. Our business grew 30 times.
We started from less than $30 million, till now is high triple digit millions business. Our growth has led by the retail. Our majority part is the retail, 85% our retail business. B2B business is very small. I can say it is tiny in China. Digital amplified by digital, 15%. We have a very clear strategy from the start. We maintain the European heritage but tailor to our local Chinese consumer fit and preference. This is how we have grown and how we will continue grow. Very important to make successful in China. For the product side, we localize all our global products and across all categories, tailoring to consumer fit and design preference. We will accelerate apparel anchoring on performance DNA.
For the channel part, we have very strong connection to how consumer shops and focusing on the premium location, and also amplified by the digital platform. For the marketing, just as I mentioned, the culturally relevant activation that we speak to the local consumer, and we engaging local celebrities and athletes. Each time we connecting our activation strongly with our product and the retail excellence. Our product strategy is key to success in China. Chinese consumer, of course, that is different. As common, we have the different fit and also design preference. So we will leverage our brand heritage and the product acknowledge adapting to these needs. So we have our China limited edition all developed in Annecy, but tailored to our fit and the design preference. That is very key for us. I use one example here.
This is our lunar year capsule, beginning of this year. The year of the horse. The XT-Whisper. We use the XT-Whisper model, but redesign to match the total package. Use a different color and different upper. So in the future, we will continue offer the mix of the global range and China limited edition. Today, I wear one of the new XT-6 Ridge model here. Every two to three years, in China, we need to have one icon model for the sport style, which is very important for us. Apparel definitely will be the key building block in the future. Our strategy is clear. We want to accelerate the business through local design and production for those performance-inspired apparel category. We will use premium engineering, premium fabric, and technology.
Local design and production allow us to efficiently fulfill the local customer demand, and also complement our global apparel offer. Here, I give example, like the Lady Wear. This is the first running apparel line we called Falcon Fly. This is inspired through our legendary Salomon ski boot, Falcon. We achieve a very good result. For the running apparel for this first half year, we achieved 300% year-on-year growth. We raised our average selling price, and we improve our gender mix. From a channel standpoint, we will continue growing through retail. Over the past years, we focused on the premium retail network. End of this year, we have 330 stores, and we scale it by speed and booming the business on the past years. In the future, we still have three objectives. First one, keep increasing our productivity.
For this year, our productivity is more than $2.5 million per store per year. We do believe end of 2031, we will achieve more than $4 million per store per year. Secondly, we were broadening our multi-category in store, especially the performance footwear and apparel. Third, we will continue country expansion. End of 2031, we will have 400 stores. From this year to 2031, we will have another 17 new store opening. For epicenter, very important for us, Beijing and Shanghai, because of our D2C model in China, totally we have top 10 key city covered by our D2C, including Beijing, Shanghai, and also Hangzhou, Nanjing, Chengdu, total top 10. Besides of that, we will cover through our outlet and partnership store. Of course, we will accelerate our business through diversify the retail format.
I list here, like the Shanghai, the Anfu Road, which is the street, a lot of the young fashion consumer there. End of this year, we will open our new big store in Shanghai, Jing'an, the Taikoo project. The Shenyang MixC city, this is the top productivity of Salomon China store. The annual productivity will achieve $15 million per store per year. Digital. The digital channel is very key for us to connect with our consumer base. China, the overall, the e-commerce environment is a little bit different. Normally, we will have three kinds of the e-commerce. The first one is we call the traditional e-commerce platform, like the Tmall and Jingdong. The second one, which I listed here, the content e-commerce, like the RedNote and TikTok, with a lot of the product seeding, product marketing.
Third one is like, normally in Europe, North America, the .com. We're using the Tencent Mini Program. Not only do the transaction, but also we connect with all of our members. The community, application, everything happen, we use the Tencent Mini Program. Our focus will be the premium trend-setting e-commerce digital platforms. Of course, we build a brand heat through the cultural relevant activations. Here I listed three key campaign on the first half year. Beginning of the year, we do the Chinese Lunar New Year pop-up store in the Chengdu Taikoo. The middle one, we do the influential program in the Shanghai Anfu Road. It's more like the We call the Road to the Future. The third one just happened on the past August, we have a grand store opening in Beijing, the big store. Our global ambassador, Jisoo, was there.
Also of course our Vian, Kristof all there. We achieve a very good exposure on the media, and also a very good transaction result, sales result back. Also Gravel. Gravel is very important, like Barry mentioned about. This year is the second year for China we handle the Gravel activations. Last weekend, we just did the first stop in Chengdu City, this weekend we will do it in Shanghai. Gravel community run.
We also reinforce our positioning in performance through the events and athletes. The Golden Trail World Series race is very key for us. We sponsored five of GTNS in China, which is out of the top 13 Trail Running Series race in China. We achieve a very good result. Also, we think it is very critical for us to keep investment on the performance part. I cover a lot of the strategy. Then let's look at how it comes in life. [Non-English content]
The brand momentum is real, and we have confidence for the growth plan in China. Driven by performance footwear and apparel, acceleration, as well as sustained Sportstyle momentum. Looking back, we delivered strong acceleration as we scale from a small business to triple digit millions. Looking ahead, we will continue outpacing the market at a strong, sustainable level. We see a clear opportunity ahead. Growth will be retail-led and amplified by digital. We will focus on key cities, increasing productivity of our existing fleet, and expanding selectively. We are excited about what we have built in China in the past years, and we are looking forward to the new journey in the future. Thanks for your attention, and welcome Cynthia, our head of the APAC, Amer.
Good afternoon, everyone. I am Cynthia. I am leading the Salomon for the region. I have been in Amer Sports for 13 years, and all my career is focused on the region. This experience really gives me the appreciation how we have evolved in the region, and how much opportunity is ahead of us. So APAC. APAC is the most diverse region. APAC is the region with 2.5 billion people. APAC is the region with 4,000 language and over 50 countries. With this one, when we look closely with this region through the Salomon eyes, it presents a huge opportunity for Salomon in three elements. First of all, when you look into the market size, APAC is the market for $50 billion, and it has a unique combination of affluent consumers and young consumers, and Salomon can speak to both.
When you are looking into the outdoor landscapes, from the Japan legendary powder snow, Himalaya Mountains, Southeast Asia rainforest, Salomon produce product for all of them. When you are looking into the culture influence, APAC does not just follow the global trends. APAC creates the trend for the global. Japan craftsmanship attracts a lot of global brands to collaborating with the local artists. K-pop change the young consumer globally how to behave, and Salomon rides on it. The typical example is Jisoo, our newly global ambassadors. How are we going to do and what we have achieved so far. In the diverse regions, we are accelerating. We are accelerating in the strong B2B strongholds with 30% CAGR in the past five years. We accelerating B2C with 30 times bigger than before. We accelerating the market coverage from very handful five years ago, now we cover 15 markets.
We accelerating softgoods. From winter sports equipment dominate a decade ago, now it is 90% with softgoods. That just shows the Salomon potential to win in a such bigger sector in softgoods. The numbers speaks clearly, 50% CAGR across multiple regions. Very importantly, we also achieve much more balanced channel growth. 40% from B2B and 60% from B2C. That is a significant transformation in this scale and also omnichannel play in APAC. How do we do that? APAC is not one market. APAC is multiple markets. In this region, we have clearly two sectors. One is the developed markets, like Japan and Australia. The other is emerging markets in Korea and Southeast Asia. Two different markets, one global playbook, but we do take different approach. Let us start with Japan and Australia.
It is a developed market where the wholesale channels or wholesale partners are widely distributed. Our consumer know our brands mainly from those multiple brand stores. We continue to deepen our relationship with the B2B partners. We continue to investing with better product offering and also better in-store experience. At the same time, we accelerate D2C. Retail is the place for us to present the full brand experience. E-commerce helping us to reach the new consumers wherever they are and whatever they want. As a result, in those developed markets, our D2C business is 50% and wholesale business is 50%. At the same time, those two markets, mature markets, grow at 45% and 35% separately. This is a truly multi omnichannel success. That also shows how the global playbook can win in the developed markets if it is fully working.
Working into our emerging markets like Korea and Southeast Asia. This is very different market. Those markets are mono-brand led. Our consumers learn our brands through the retail stores. That is why our quality and the pace of retail expansion is critical. In those markets, we work with the local team who has a strong, deeply local know-how. They are the team of the retail experts, knows the best location, the best format to run the store, at the best way. With the expertise, they allow us to move faster. In the last five years, we are able to build close to 100 stores across those markets, and the momentum continues. Korea is grow 120% and Southeast Asia is 45% CAGR in the past few years. Then let us look at our omnichannel play, retail, eCom, and B2B. Retail is our most important consumer touch point.
Retail is the one, again, really brings the full experience, I mean, to the markets. In the last five years, we start with eight store in 2021, and quickly we scale up to 120. Looking to next five years, we do have the ambition to double number of stores. At the same time, we also have the plan to double our store size and also productivity per store. We build consistency across all those markets. When the consumer walk into the store in Seoul, in Singapore, in Australia, in Sydney, they will see the consistent look and feel, consistent format and consistent presentation. They too have the same confidence into the brand. When we think those consistency, we do strategically to build on the signature store format.
Signature store is the one that we are able to build much deeper engagement with a unique group of consumer with elevating experience. Let me share with you a few examples. Let's start with this one in Seoul in Seongsu-dong. Seongsu-dong is also known as Brooklyn in Seoul, where you get all those like trendsetters gathering together. Our store location, our design, our energy is designed for, to amplify the global campaigns at the local level. Soon after we opened the store June last year, it become the brand destination of the city and also become number one productivity store of the city. We're moving from the Brooklyn in Seoul to Shinjuku Nishiguchi in Tokyo, [Non-English content]. That is the area we have upscale consumers. We have the trendsetters. We build a store there with the experience, exclusive product, one-on-one services, the culture moment.
Consumer in the store, they spend four times longer in the store. They spend 25% more per purchase, and the conversion rate is 45% higher than other stores. That is how we build the Salomon Sportstyle's credibility. We take the same approach to trail running. Trail running is our brand DNA, and we also build up a signature store only for trail running in Jeongneung-dong, Seoul, where it's in the city center surrounding by the mountains. A perfect place for the urban trail running consumers. In this store, we offer footwear, apparel, hydration bags, poles, and other accessories. Look at the product we sold. 44% footwear and 56% apparels and others. Consumer are buying the whole solution, not just the footwear. That's what we want to see, and that's also what we want to build for the brand in the future.
Moving to e Com. E-commerce is another critical touch point for us. Brand.com remain at the heart of the execution. We provide the widest product range, the richest stories, and also the best experience online. However, in APAC, particularly for the young consumers, they live on their own platforms. You got MUSINSA in Korea, Rakuten in Japan, Lazada across Southeast Asia. We show up Salomon with the same quality and execution. This is not cutting the corner to build up volumes. This is the way that we show Salomon in the new digital place to reach consumer in the right way. Take up for e-commerce 80% and the momentum continues. The last but not the least, B2B remain our backbone, continue to drive our reach as scales. On the performance side, we are the leading premium outdoor brands. Our partners like Kathmandu, CBO, Alpine, they carry our product with authority.
In the running specialty, we establish Salomon as a running brand from all terrains. With the result, sellout in all those performance customers is high 20s in 2026, way ahead of the market. When you move to the Sportstyle side, that is why we partner, we scale up our business with Foot Locker, JD, Kith, and Atmos. Four times more distribution point, three times the store productivity per store. This is the quality growth we look after. When you are putting everything together, all the channels together into a city, that is what we call the epicenter strategies. Tokyo is one of the example that we execute the epicenter strategy. When we do that in Tokyo, we do not isolate it performance or Sportstyle. We do not isolate it B2B, retail, or communities.
We do it all together because this is the brand how generally show up to the consumer in the city. A consumer, when they walk into the store at Atmos in Shibuya, he might discover XT-6. Turning the corner, he might try on our gravel shoes in the same deal for the performance products. One consumer, two products, two purposes, but one brand. At the same time, we strengthen our ecosystem with 16 retail stores across the cities. Creating a huge brand presence in the city that is new, not too much consumer knowing about the brands. Beyond the point of sales, the retail store significantly transforms Salomon as a single product offering to a modern mountain brand experience. That is how we build that. We also show up ourself in all those local communities. The mountain events, the running races, and also the culture moments.
We engage the performance consumer and the sports consumer at the same time. Wherever we encounter with the consumers, we always want to bring them back to the sports, and that is what the brand DNA is. We need to have the pacers in the city that are doing that every day. Zola is one of the most famous running station. Next to the Imperial Palace and on the most iconic running route in Tokyo. We occupy the whole running station, and we occupy all the product display in the store and every single conversation in the store. Runners come into the store, they can try on our products, they can get advice from the shop staff, and also they connect with the community. This is not an advertisement, and this is the authentic services as a brand that we provide to the runners.
Mount Takao, 30 minutes train ride from Zola . It is a mountain with 3 million hikers and trekkers a year. We have a Salomon Experience Center at the gate of the mountains. We provide the same services to the consumers. When they come in, they try on our gears, they rent our equipment, they chat with the staff who are on the trails every day. That is the nature connection with the brand, the possible. One mountain, on the mountains, in the cities, two halves, one brand. Again, that is what we do. Salomon is really the brand connects the past to the future, the mountain to the city, the performance to the style, the French Alps to the world. It happens in Tokyo. Salomon as the exclusive partner with Mount Fuji, the iconic Fuji globally, and we established multiple years collaboration.
One of the most remarkable projects we are working on is called Mount Fuji Reforestation Project. This is a project we partner with the local government to rebuild 100 years old historical rest house. Then we bring the story, we bring the product to the city center, Shibuya, to invite more urban consumers to the mountains. This is like the Salomon spirits. Modern mountain sports in action. Please enjoy the film. We have the formulas of the epicenter in Tokyo, and we are going to expand it to all other epicenters in the region, Sapporo, Seoul, Sydney, Melbourne, and Singapore. One table, local adaptation, one ambition. Looking forward, the diversity is our growth engine. We have the winning formula. We have the track record. We continue the momentum with the high teen growth across all the markets in the next five years.
A strong, sustainable, profitable growth, and that is what we aim for. We continue to commit the omnichannel approach, and that gives us the biggest and the best services to the consumers. B2B, we are aiming for mid high teens growth in the next five years. B2C, low 20s. We aim to add approximately 110 stores in the region. A business built on the authentic connection with the consumers, and this is how to win in APAC. Thank you very much. Let us welcome Steve.
Thanks, Cynthia. Salomon has been a dominant force in the mountains for decades. Today, it is being discovered and adopted across America's streets. My name is Steve Doolan. I lead Salomon's Americas business. I am an American who actually grew up about an hour from here. The Americas is North America plus Latin America, and Latin America itself is a compelling story, growing 30%+ . We have about 55 retail stores and a healthy and growing wholesale business, and we are outperforming our main competitors in Mexico City. However, North America is 85% of the business. Therefore, it is where I am going to spend the majority of the next 14 minutes. The whole opportunity sits in one fact that you have heard talked about a little bit today. North America is the largest global footwear market.
Unmatched potential across every one of the segments we play in, which makes it the biggest opportunity in front of this company today. We come at it from a position of real strength. The geography maps perfectly to our portfolio. Mountain heartlands for winter sports and outdoor. Running hubs like Boston and Chicago, and culturally relevant cities like New York City and Los Angeles for Sportstyle. We are relatively new to softgoods, but the brand is already very well positioned. Brand perception is strong. We have authentic DNA, as you have heard today. There is technical leadership, which you have seen over the course of the last couple of hours, and we have premium positioning in all the channels we play in. Let me show you how far that move has already taken us. Over the last three years, we have changed the shape of Salomon. We have accelerated softgoods.
We've transitioned from a winter sports company to a softgoods brand. Historically, our softgoods was outdoor centric. Today, we're a balanced mix across run and Sportstyle. We've renewed and premiumized legacy wholesalers out. Strategic partners are now the focus. Two years ago, we had no stores. At year-end, we'll have eight in the U.S. We've outperformed the market 20% CAGR across softgoods and a 12% CAGR inclusive of our winter sports equipment over the last five years. Today, we are still wholesale driven, but we have robust e-com capabilities and in the early stages of retail, but clearly seeing it accelerate quickly in 2026. We fundamentally reset the organization in the last three years in order to tap into Salomon's immense potential. We restructured for scale from a WSC-heavy business to one that is a clear softgoods operating model.
We cleaned and curated the entire B2B marketplace, closing close to 400 accounts. Scaled retail from zero over the last two years, and importantly, have resourced buying and planning and the site merchandising behind Salomon.com. We invest, in fact, we overinvest in epicenters with always-on and community-first activations. The result is an organization today that is fit for the growth that we're planning. Here is what that growth looks like. Our largest revenue component and our largest, and importantly, consumer acquisition tool remains B2B, the wholesale environment. Sportstyle is driven from heat from smaller, culturally relevant accounts such as Kith. Scale will come from Nordstrom, JD Sports, and the recently launched Foot Locker. Run specialty retailers have carried our trail footwear and hydration vests for years. We're using that foundation to establish Salomon as the all-surfaces running brand.
Outdoor is where we've always lived. We're doubling down on dominant accounts such as REI, and locally connected, such as Paragon Sports. Going deep rather than broad as we build new categories like gravel. We're focused on fewer, better partners, full price sell-through, protecting what we've built, and alongside it, our own front door. With our market reset, today, Salomon is in less than 1,000 carefully curated run and sports outdoors. Over the next five years, we have a clear roadmap that grows our door count to leverage our retail partners' footprints in order to grow our consumer base. Salomon's B2B leadership is focused on door productivity as a key component of our commercial strategy. Wherever the consumer meets us, the experience is premium in our D2C environment and always full price.
Our own stores are the best representation of the brand, handpicked premium locations in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago today. This validates our model and gives us the confidence to scale to between 30 and 40 by 2031. We've elevated the e-com experience. Focused on driving quality traffic, converting at full price, and deepening the consumer loyalty, backed by a growing set of digital investments and capabilities. We're delivering premium experiences across all channels, strengthening brand equity and converting consumers into Salomon advocates. We're epicenter led. We're concentrating our investment where brand heat exists, New York City and Los Angeles, and sequencing outwards as momentum builds. Always on, full funnel activations from high impact out of home and creative partnerships to in-store placements and experiences. Community first, bringing the brand to life where consumers already are, run clubs, trail races, and community events.
The brand is being noticed and the numbers are moving with it. Brand awareness grew two times in New York City since 2023. Search share grew 150% year-on-year in Los Angeles, which is why we're confident about what comes next. We've tested this approach in New York City and Los Angeles with tremendous success. As we grow, we'll amplify our city focus to four additional geographies, Boston, Washington, D.C., Miami, and San Francisco. As we grow, we will amplify our city focus. Selected cities will all play a key role as we accelerate run and Sportstyle and connect with new consumers. From that hot reel, I hope you get a sense of the buzz, the energy that we're consistently building, whether it's at store openings, at launches, in new retail environments or partners or community-focused events. We spent the last 3 years building the foundation.
The acceleration starts from here. A roughly 12% CAGR from 2021 to 2026. That number was the cost of the reset. It's certainly not the ceiling. Low 20s from this point forward. Growth will be led both by B2B, the wholesale environment, and our own D2C channels. Led by premium wholesale partnerships where door productivity is the go-to KPI. Accelerating retail as we build out our full-priced retail fleet. Thank you so much. And with that, I'll turn it over to Omar.
Okay, everybody. Last break coming up. We're a little bit ahead of schedule, so why don't we take a 20-minute break, come back at 10 of. For people on the webcast, maybe you guys can help us organizing the webcast, let them know we're going to restart at 3:50 with the financial section and Q&A. Thanks, everybody. See you in 20.
[Break]
Welcome back. I am jealous. You have seen my colleagues this afternoon. Nice products, nice films, nice pictures. Probably next time I have to dance my numbers just to give you a little bit emotions back. Good afternoon. I am Antonio Arrigoni. I joined Salomon in September 2022. Next week, I will celebrate four years. You see it on the pictures, look a little bit different, but it was a great journey. After spending much of my career leading global premium brands and driving financial transformation, it has been a privilege to be part of Salomon journey since then. As CFO, my focus has been driving sustainable profitability and strengthening our financial foundation so we can accelerate global brand growth. The team and I introduced rigorous financial discipline with strategic commercial vision, which supported into the result we have today.
You heard a lot already today about Salomon's transformation journey and our strategic priorities for the future. Now we walk you through how it all comes together in our financials, the key components behind our growth story over the next five years. Sometimes, and this is important, we forget where we are coming from. Salomon transformation delivered a 23% CAGR over the past five years, and we doubled our operating margin along the way. As you have heard from the other leaders today, we have transformed this business from a European-centric performance and B2B brand into a global multi-category, omnichannel brand with strengths across the board. That growth came from clear direction and focused investment in a few key areas.
First, we stayed relentless, and I think you got today a picture of it on product innovation and excellence, designing durable, high-quality products from day one. That is what let us earn and keep our credibility. Second, we expanded in multiple categories. You got a feeling today. Footwear remains our core, and there we have grown beyond outdoor into running sports style. Our paddle bags and accessories are amplifiers. They round out our head to toe offer. Third, we transformed how we go to market, premiumizing our wholesale partnerships, accelerating D2C with a focus on full price brand stores, and building out our global epicenters to nurture our target communities. Finally, we build a team and infrastructure to enable and fuel the business at scale.
Again, the result is on the slide, 23% revenue CAGR from less than EUR 1 billion as I started, to over EUR 2.5 billion over the past five years. And we doubled, and there I am very proud of, we doubled our operating margin at the same time. 2026, looking a little bit ahead, will be our strongest year yet, and I am proud to say we are significantly ahead of the five-year plan we set back in 2024. By year-end, we will surpass the EUR 2.5 billion in revenue, which means about a 30% year-over-year growth. More than 85% of that comes from softgoods with the rest from major sports. All four regions are outpacing their regional markets, you heard that, and we are delivering that growth with operating scale, which means higher profitability too.
Our D2C share will reach about 45% of revenue by year-end, 5 points higher than last year, with approximately 540 owned and partner stores around the globe. Strong digital acceleration in Europe and North America, new or deepened partnerships with high-quality B2B partners that set us up well for the future. From a category standpoint of view, the numbers back up our positioning. We are still anchored in performance, which is 55% of softgoods revenue, while Sportstyle now gave us an access to broader categories in consumers, which is basically 45% of softgoods. What happens from a regional point of view is actually the summary you heard today. We have a very balanced portfolio. No single region represents more than 40% of our sales. Looking ahead, we expect broad-based growth, meaning every region will accelerate.
EMEA as largest region will grow at low double-digit CAGR over the next five years. China, our largest D2C, will grow at high teens. APAC will also grow at high teens, led by strong omnichannel growth. Lastly, North America will accelerate significantly, growing at a low 20s CAGR. From a category standpoint, we have winter sports. We will continue outpacing the market, reinforcing our leadership across all winter sports. Softgoods will grow at mid to high teens CAGR, led by the acceleration of Sportstyle and running footwear, as well as our head-to-toe portfolio. Within softgoods, footwear, which is the largest part of our business, will grow at mid to high teens CAGR. Apparel, accessories, and bags will grow at low 20s CAGR as we begin investing in this category, and you got the snapshot this afternoon.
Coming together, and this is why I took the job four years ago, because I believed to see the potential. I did not know that it was so big. Looking ahead, I am excited about the potential for the brand to keep growing. From a top-line perspective, we expect to deliver mid-teen CAGR over the next five years, and we expect to see higher growth rates in early years, which naturally normalize as the brand gets bigger. We also expect to deliver 20 - 60+ basis points of operating margin expansion annually, ensuring we manage the business in disciplined manner, driving strong profit flow through, while balancing key investments needed to scale the business over the long term. Let us dive into these growth drivers, which is what make us confident that the target is achievable. You see them here.
Before we go in this, there is one thing I would like to highlight. We are not just growing somewhere. We are growing across multiple areas at the same time, not relying on any single lever. That is important. We try to balance the business. Let us start with the product. We expect strong growth across whole softgoods portfolio, footwear, apparel, accessories, and bags. Our head-to-toe offer, apparel and bags, will also accelerate, growing in line with run and Sportstyle. As mentioned before, no single region represents more than 40%. Looking ahead, we expect broad-based growth, meaning every region will accelerate. Let me repeat that. We are not relying on a single region to bring in the growth. We have a robust plan in place, driven by our global and regional epicenter strategy and strong locally go-to-market strategies.
As our younger regions, call it younger, develop, our regional portfolio will become even more balanced. That is important. We will also expect that our channels will grow. All the channels will grow. D2C growth is expected at the high teens CAGR from 2026 to 2031, driven by both retail and e-commerce. You heard that today. On retail, we will keep building out our fleet globally and increasing productivity in China while prioritizing premium locations and full-price store formats in every region. On digital, we will keep increasing consumer reach year-over-year and improving e-commerce productivity as we grow awareness and boost online conversion. We expect wholesale to keep growing consistently, focused on high-quality premium accounts aligned with our brand positioning, delivering the right consumer experience across run, Sportstyle, and winter sports. Growth priorities, it is clear they vary by region. EMEA is our most mature market.
It is mainly focused on growing doors, while North America and APAC need to grow both doors and strategic partners. This is my nice thing here. I like that because I am really working every day. This is my everyday monitor. It is operating margin. It will expand 20 - 60+ basis points every year, driven by a mix of gross margin improvement and SG&A leverage. Gross margin will be a key lever here due to the category, channel, and regional mix effects. Let me break that down. On category mix, footwear is our highest margin category, and Sportstyle is our highest margin segment within. As Sportstyle and footwear overall becomes a bigger part of the business, we benefit from a higher product gross margin. On region and channel mix, as our D2C channel expand globally, gross margin improves along with our full price sell-out.
There is a regional component to regions with a larger D2C share gain more momentum. Across all of this, brand premiumization matters. We will keep protecting full price sales and reinforcing our premium position globally and across every channel. On SG&A, we expect modest leverage, especially in the early years. We are leveraging our fixed operating costs while making the critical investments we need to build and enable this business. These are investments we have to make now to build the capabilities to scale over the next five years and beyond, and the gross margin improvement help us to fund them. What are these key investments? Before I go into that, I want to share the shared philosophy this leadership team has behind them. We will increase investments, you heard that, also in marketing in strategic areas, but we will do so with discipline.
We invest in proven drivers, consistently measuring the returns as we go. This is not just about investing, but it is more investing better. On brand and product innovation, you have heard it today, product innovation is a constant. We are always fueling that. We need that. On strategic priorities, we are increasing investments in D2C expansion, especially on full price stores, epicenters, and full-funnel marketing to increase awareness, recruit new consumers, and expand our community of loyal consumers. On technology and digital, we continue to invest in capabilities that support our omnichannel approach, strengthening the customer experience and engagement across all touch points. In parallel, this is also important, we are also modernizing our internal platforms and processes, leveraging AI to improve productivity and scalability. Last but not least, talent and capabilities.
We will continue building our teams with best-in-class talent from the industry. We will also expand our corporate presence globally with corporate and design hubs across Annecy, New York, Ogden, Shanghai, Tokyo, to name a few. To close, I want to leave you with three main takeaways. We have experienced significant growth in the past years, driven by clear strategies and strong execution, which has led us to outpace the market across key categories and regions.
We are still, and this is really also my belief, in the early innings of the Salomon journey, with white space to be captured in younger categories, regions, and channels. There is ample growth potential ahead. We have clear and achievable plans to deliver on our objectives while staying true to our DNA, bringing the modern mountain sports culture to the city. Thank you for your attention. I will now hand over to Andrew, who will walk you through the financial of the wider Amer Sports portfolio.
Am I on? Good. Thank you, Antonio. What an awesome presentation today. Before I get into the numbers, let me just say thank you to the Salomon team for an awesome presentation, awesome set of content, and thank you guys for coming. Maybe give a round of applause for that. I think it's important before I dive into the financials today and give you the updated Q3 guidance, let me take a moment to really reflect on how we got here and how we were able to really unlock the value across our portfolio and set ourselves up over the last five years. Our shift from a central model to a decentralized brand direct model is key to the decisive revenue unlock that we've experienced over the last six years.
This model has enabled our brands to operate independently, supported by putting in place the right management team and the organizational structure designed to enable long-term value creation. This is what you call demonstrative evidence. Essentially, we've gone from a mature portfolio of equipment brands stuck at the $2 billion-$3 billion range for decades, to a unique portfolio of premium sports and outdoor brands fueled by three growth engines poised to eclipse $8 billion in sales this year. This represents a 20% CAGR of the portfolio since 2020. Today, we have three key growth drivers that are still relatively small in the global marketplace, and I put this up here for a reason, guys. Arc'teryx is one of our key growth drivers, Salomon softgoods is one of our key growth drivers, and Wilson Tennis 360.
So I have basically, within each operating segment, defined what the growth drivers are. These numbers do not represent the operating segment, but rather the growth drivers. Arc'teryx has been our largest and fastest-growing brand and continues to be driven by broad-based strength across categories, regions, and channels. It has grown at a 40% CAGR since 2022, and it will eclipse $3 billion this year. We are very confident that Arc'teryx still has significant growth and runway ahead as we continue to open stores across all four major geographies as well as expand key growth categories such as women's footwear and Veilance. Then you have Salomon softgoods, which you have heard a lot of details about today. It is a critical growth engine for Amer Sports.
30% CAGR since 2022, but it is still only a $2 billion revenue business in 2026, with a significant runway across all four geographies, as Antonio just pointed out. Then our third growth driver, Wilson Tennis 360, a 20% CAGR over the last four years, and it will exceed $600 million in 2026. The success has been driven by both Wilson apparel and footwear, as well as performance rackets. Moving down to gross margin, it is clear that this is not just a sales inflection. Profitability has also meaningfully accelerated for the group. Since 2022, we have enjoyed a very positive gross margin mix shift benefit. This includes sales shifts toward softgoods from hardgoods, D2C from wholesale, and China and APAC versus the rest of the world. All three of these mix shift benefits have benefited the company.
When you think about that, this mix shift, combined with management's commitment to maintaining our brand's premium positioning in the marketplace and disciplined inventory management, have allowed us to expand our adjusted gross margins by over 1,000 basis points since 2022. Gross margin dollars have nearly tripled from $1.8 billion in 2022 to $4.9 billion at the midpoint of our 2026 guidance. So what does this all mean? Our strong gross margin performance has enabled us to reinvest in growth engines from a position of strength. Our confidence in our key growth opportunities has increased. We have been able to significantly increase our investment behind this portfolio over the last four years, and we have been able to make this investment at a challenging time for many others in our industry.
We have also been able to do this without sacrificing operating margin, which has increased 450 basis points since 2023, 150 basis points per year, well above our 30 - 70+ basis points that we provided in our algo. We believe that this is the natural result when you have great assets that have been under-monetized, and then you put the right organizational structure with great teams who are well-incentivized to make the right decisions and execute. You fuel this with the natural gross margin mix shift that I talked about. This is what you get. You get the ability to invest in growth as well as expand operating margin over that time period. We believe that that disciplined approach and decision has significantly benefited our organization. This transformation continues down the P&L.
If you look at this and look at our EPS trajectory, similar trajectory as you have seen in our operating profit. Turning to the balance sheet. As many of you know, it was not just the P&L that inflected. We have also transformed our balance sheet, with net debt going from approximately $3.5 billion pre-IPO and a leverage ratio well above five times to a net cash position today. Thanks to the strong business momentum as well as disciplined working capital management, we are generating strong improvements in our operating cash flow. Now, turning to the Q3 update we shared this morning. Please note that since we have not yet closed Q3, we are not updating full-year guidance at this point. We will publish our Q3 results and our updated full-year outlook when we report Q3 in November.
As you saw in the press release this morning, we expect another strong quarter in the third quarter this year, which ends in a couple of weeks. We now expect reported growth revenue of 20%-22%, versus the previous guidance of 18%-20%. Also, we now expect adjusted operating margin to be slightly above the high end of the previous range of 13.5%-14%. The strong results continue to be driven by strong performances from Salomon, Arc'teryx, and a solid performance by Ball and Racket. Now moving into the long-term financial algorithm. Please note, this is important, that the midpoint of our most recent full year 2026 guidance, this represents the new baseline for the updated five-year algorithm that I am going to discuss today. Starting at the group level, we are reiterating the group sales algorithm we provided a year ago of low double digits to mid-teens.
This is despite the fact that we are starting from a revenue base that is 30% higher or $2 billion larger today than it was last year. Regarding the cadence of our growth over the five-year horizon, we expect growth to be towards or above the high end of the CAGR range in the earlier part of our planning horizon and slower in the later years as we grow from an increasingly large base. Switching to profitability. At the group level, we continue to expect adjusted operating margin expansion of 30 - 70+ basis points per year, despite the fact that our baseline EBIT margin is approximately 200 basis points higher than from a year ago. All right. One thing that is important, let me walk you through the tariff.
Regarding the tariff benefit of $64 million or 80 basis points that we received in 2026, approximately half of that 80 basis points of margin benefit related to 2025. This means that our 2026 guidance of 14.2-14.5 includes a benefit of approximately 40 basis points related to 2025, so one time pickup this year. As such, when you back out the 40 basis points, the baseline for our updated five-year margin is effectively 13.8-14.1. This is the operating margin that we believe reflects our underlying business in 2026. Okay. Margin expansion will continue to be driven by three factors. A positive mix shift as the higher technical apparel and Outdoor Performance segments continue to grow faster than the lower margin Ball and Racket business. Number two, margin expansion within each of the segments.
And then number three, some leverage of corporate expenses, which we expect to grow slower than revenue. A couple of points to consider regarding our updated EBIT margin. We have generated significant margin expansion in the last three years. As I noted, 450 basis points. Our EBIT baseline margin is now approximately 14%, as I just discussed, and we believe it is imperative that we invest behind our three big growth engines. All of which means that we expect future EBIT margin expansion to be more in line with our long-term algo of 30 to 70 basis points per year versus the much higher expansion that you have seen since the IPO.
Given the significant value creation potential for each of our three growth engines, we want to be flexible to invest behind our brands and capabilities so that we can deliver healthy and sustainable growth and ensure strong brand equity over the long term. This means making the investments to attract and retain high-quality talent, support our brands with best-in-class marketing, build out our premium own store network, and develop strong IT and digital platforms. Accordingly, we expect EBIT margin expansion to be driven more by gross margin in the first half of the planning horizon and more SG&A leverage as you get later years in the planning horizon. Now moving to the segments. For technical apparel, we continue to expect annual revenue CAGR of mid-teens, and this is on a sales base that is 30% higher than a year ago.
Sales growth will continue to be driven by new store openings and omnichannel growth across all geographies. We continue to expect technical apparel segment to expand at adjusted operating margin of 20 - 60+ basis points annually. Please note, technical apparel expansion will be towards the lower end of the range in the early years and towards the higher end of the range in the later years as Arc's investment in store openings and brand awareness begins to really scale. Moving to Outdoor Performance. As you heard today, Salomon footwear and apparel are driving the revenue and profitability acceleration in this segment. As such, we have elevated the Outdoor Performance segment long-term sales algorithm. We now expect Outdoor Performance to achieve mid-teens long-term sales growth versus low double digit to mid-teens previously provided.
This incorporates mid-teens for the Salomon brand and low to mid-single digits for Atomic and Armada winter sports equipment businesses. On margin, we are now expecting 20 - 60+ basis points of annual operating margin expansion versus the 40 - 80 basis points previously provided. The lower annual margin expansion expectation is due to two factors. Number one, very strong, nearly 400 basis points of underlying margin expansion the Outdoor Performance segment achieved just this past year. Number two, our strategic decision to reinvest in the many growth opportunities across categories, channels, and regions that you heard about today. Outdoor Performance margin will continue to be driven by mix shift from hard goods towards softgoods, which carries a higher gross and operating margin than winter sports equipment. Now for Ball and Racket.
We now expect a mid to high single digits revenue CAGR over the next five-plus years versus our previous mid-single digits rate. Growth will continue to be driven by Wilson Tennis 360, especially softgoods, which now represents 15% of segment sales and is growing at a very strong double-digit rate. We expect the remaining Ball and Racket equipment business to grow low single digits. Lastly, we expect adjusted operating margin expansion of 20 - 60+ basis points versus the 40 - 80 basis points previously provided. This is driven by our strategic decision to accelerate investment behind Wilson Tennis 360. We believe this franchise has strong and unique value proposition in the marketplace and still low brand awareness. We are confident in the overall growth of racket sports participation globally.
Ball and Racket margin expansion will be driven predominantly by scaling the softgoods investment over time, especially as we build out our retail expansion in China D2C and wholesale expansion in Europe and North America. A few other financial considerations as you build out your models. We expect our effective tax rate to continue to approach 25%. We continue to expect annual CapEx of approximately $400 million. CapEx will be focused on building out our D2C footprint and making IT and other infrastructure adjustments to support our growth engines. We continue to target inventory growth at or below revenue growth, and this is a key KPI for our management team. We are very pleased with the quality and the quantity of our current inventory position across all of our brands. Moving to capital allocation. Following our newly achieved net cash position, our priorities are as follows.
Number one, invest in the growth of our business. We see significant long-term growth opportunities in all three of our growth engines of Arc'teryx, Salomon softgoods, and Wilson Tennis 360. Share repurchases to the extent that they offset dilution of our long-term incentive plans and maintaining a net cash balance sheet midterm, given that our portfolio consists of three early-stage growth brands in a volatile and uncertain external environment. Lastly, I would emphasize that M&A is still not a priority given the opportunities that exist in our existing portfolio.
To wrap it up, I want to leave you with this. If you apply our updated long-term sales and margin plans to our 2026 baseline, we believe Amer Sports Group has the strong potential to achieve significant earnings power by 2031. That includes $14+ billion of sales, 16%+ operating margin, and EPS of greater than $3 or more. With that, I will pause for a second. We are now going to take a break. Just about two minutes. We are going to reset the stage. We will set up for Q&A. Okay?
Okay. Thanks everybody for the great day. Thanks to the team. We have about 30 minutes for Q&A. We have Sara and Yaron from the IR team with microphones. We are going to try to get as many of your questions we can. Please just do one each for now, and then we will go from there. Let us start with Lorraine right here, Yaron.
Thank you. Andrew, my question is about the capital structure. You have gotten yourself to net cash. You have laid out a great investment plan for the next several years, that you talked about share buyback just to offset dilution. Why, and what will you do with the cash that you generate over the next five years?
I think it is a great question. I think that given my last point around the volatility of the environment, leaving ourselves the flexibility to really invest in the growth of our three growth engines is very important to us. Making sure share buyback and M&A is not a priority right now, but we have left ourselves flexibility. As the environment changes, as opportunities come up, we have left ourselves the flexibility, and we believe that that is important and prudent right now.
Matt, right here.
Great. So on the multi-year wallet share opportunity for Salomon, you cited performance has led growth in Europe, Sportstyle has led in China, and both categories are very small, I think you might have said tiny in the U.S. Do you see both Sportstyle and performance in early innings today? Can you elaborate on the diversified drivers of growth for the brand?
So, in fact, the Salomon story is about a performance story. This is the first point. What we are looking for is definitely, we are convinced that if we tell the performance story and you see we're coming from winter sport, outdoor, and then moving to running and running on more opportunity than trail, so all-terrain. We believe that we can really create a very strong connection with the consumer. Sportstyle is how we translate that into a cultural moment, and then people are using our product every day. When you are saying that Europe is coming from performance, China from Sportstyle, I think it's yes and no because, of course, Europe is performance first because this is where we are standing and where we developed for many years. But in China, we have a very strong reputation in performance.
You have seen some video today. We organized trail running on the Great Wall, for example. People get this image of core performance, innovation, and fun. I think that we have to pay attention not to decouple. I think the driver is more on the brand awareness, on the acquisition of consumer, and the capacity, if we acquire consumer on performance and Sportstyle, that they become to the full ecosystem. I think that we have to look at this way in term of consumer journey. I just want to add one thing is, there is one slide about how we spend the media, and you understand that we are reducing a lot the paid media, and we are starting to tell the story to the consumer. This is a lot about that. A lot of new consumer coming to the Salomon ecosystem.
We could have two choices. We could have one say, okay, we just bombard with paid media on one or two style, and we try to sell as much as possible, or we go on quality. We are telling the full Salomon story to this consumer, and we are trying to convert this consumer to the Salomon ecosystem. Today, this is what we start to observe in the data. We start to have this type of second wave of success where buying one and then going back to the store or going back to the system and moving forward. This is the way we look at the strategy today.
One question. On Lorraine, back to your question on capital allocation. I think it is important to inform the group that should our capital allocation strategies and priorities change, we will signal that and update the market on the priorities. If that was your embedded question.
Kelly.
Hi, Kelly Crago, BMO. Thanks for having us, guys. Great day. There has been a lot of news out there, obviously, about the lifestyle sneaker category since you last reported. It seems like Salomon may be the only brand right now that is really in demand by the consumer. I assume the retailers need to fill this hole as we look to next year. Just curious if there is any opportunities to accelerate distribution or how you are thinking about that. Thanks.
What we are looking for is, once again, how you install the brand for long run. This is a good example of what we have been doing in U.S. for the last 18 months, I would say. We are starting to work on B2B with Nordstrom, JD Sports or Foot Locker. We are not coming to them and say, "Okay, you have your A, B, C store, and we are starting to fit Salomon on the A store." We are looking at where Salomon get traction and choose the store strategically in order to make sure that we secure the demand and we are telling the right Salomon story. Now the question is how much we are developing, and today it is still quite small, so we speak about maybe between 50 and 100 store in each of the partner.
It is how we are driving the sales in this area, and we secure that, and we start to build this awareness in this space. Then, of course, we are moving forward to the next step. Today we have these two epicenter, which is New York and L.A. I speak about U.S., but it is a good example. Now we have unshored cities, so we define 10 city where we believe that we can have, again, an investment connection with community, a bit more media. Then we are partnering with them, so we are choosing their store in this area. Of course, then we see how much we can transform season after season, and we start to feed the demands. There is one good signal, e-com is helping a lot. Now we have a very modern platform. We are able to drive data.
As soon as we have information and signal on the e-com platform, that one place is good for Salomon, then this is where we engage our partner. Epicenter strategy, consumer demand is really what we are looking for. It may look like a bit cautious compared to jumping on this opportunity, but I think in the long run, this is where we would like to install the brand in the market.
Before I go to the next question, I just want to remind you that all the Salomon team here, too. So if you have questions for the regions or the product guys, we have mics for them as well. Michael Binetti.
Today was about Salomon, so I want to thank you, Guillaume. I know we've been waiting a long time to hear this. It was excellent, thank you. I do have a question for Andrew, though. Andrew, there's really been some very tough supply and dynamics at play for the stock here lately. I think people who believe in this story think it's hard to buy a big position in where this is going because of the low float. I think other people are afraid that there's some concentrated holdings that could mean unexpected supply hitting the market
When you think about that, does this business need to operate at net cash? Is there anything you can do to create a perceived buyer of a sizable position to backstop people who believe in everything that we hear from Guillaume and his team today, but think the stock is trading far below what fundamentals would warrant?
Yeah. We definitely appreciate the fact that of our concentrated, of the limited float that we have out there. We have heard from the market and long-only investors and key investors that, in some cases, is a hurdle. Again, I think that creating and leaving the flexibility for us to be able to run our business, grow our business, do the things that we need to do, and invest in our growth initiatives is important. Also having the flexibility to make key decisions if we need to in the future is also critical.
Yeah, I would just add on Andrew's comment. We have been in a net debt position in the past. We have a substantial cash flow. It is not debt in and of itself we are afraid of. I think it is really more just the position we are in, the early stage of the growth companies.
Yeah.
We have the flexibility to do a myriad of options in the future if we should so choose.
I will go to Laurent here.
Laurent Vasilescu from BNP Paribas. Thank you very much for a great day here. I thought it was very helpful this morning, the product segmentation, particularly around Sportstyle. I think one of your colleagues said, "The big elephant in the room." With that said, I think it was 40% of your business is sports. Where do you think that goes as we think about that $5 billion target for Salomon? Within that, is it going to be the XT-6 or is there going to be a whole more complete offering within that? Thank you very much.
A few point. First of all, the sneaker market is three times bigger than the performance market. We look like over-indexing, but we are not. We are still rooted in performance, which is one. You have some usual suspect in the room that you are going. We get already a big signal from the B2B partner where they want to play a big game, in order to diversify after XT-6. I think the case you hear about XT-Whisper is a very good case, so that how much we can expand to new franchise. We have a big launch in 2027 with another one, which we expressed this morning. I think we have a portfolio of products. At the end of the day, we have a portfolio of products. Usually, you cannot kill an icon.
We were discussing about, we open this new store, new market, which is modern outdoor sneaker, and XT-6 will remain the kind of usual suspect where people say, "Okay, I understand this segment because I think about this product." It looks like in all your question, a weakness, but guys, everybody, every single foot program in the world would love to have only one segment and having the icon of the segment. We have to leverage that.
Of course, now you see that we are going for life cycle management, opening the sneaker distribution, having new style. Sometimes OG, and sometimes we are also with the ambition to have new design and leveraging this new design for sneaker. Five billion, I will not go in detail on that, but of course, the market potential is much bigger in sneaker, but we will fight how to open this all-terrain running opportunity, for sure.
Paul Lejuez right here.
Hey. Thanks. Paul Lejuez, Citi. Curious how you think about performance versus Sportstyle and the crossover between those customers. How much are you really pushing one customer to try to get them over to the other side? How successful have you been? Are you really making that a big push within your marketing efforts to take that Sportstyle customer and get them over to performance and the other way around? Where do you think you've been successful, and where are the big opportunities on that front?
Today, it is part of the strategy. I think that you understand that we are growing so fast that we did not transform yet all the opportunity of newcomers. You hear this morning, we have a lot of new consumer, first buyer from the brand, and so on. But once again, I will repeat that when you look at the way we are looking at our store, and we have just limited store for sneaker, and all the store will tell the full Salomon story with performance. When we are investing in media, where we are really telling the Salomon stories, mid funnel, upper funnel, where we drive campaign, and we are telling the story. It is everything about that. Today, we have some good signal in the data, but it is time to transform as well.
Because of very early success and how much we have been able to acquire a lot of new consumer now, but it is really part of the strategy, is how much a first-comer in the brand buying an XT-6 tomorrow, considering changing his running shoe because of affinity of the brand, because they start to have some emotional connection, could consider to move to Salomon. It is one of the biggest challenge we have in front of us. We are very confident with all innovation we are coming, energy behind the brand, that we will be able to convert this consumer.
You have the CRM capability, agree?
Yes, we have the CRM. We are very obsessed by looking at the data and looking at the consumer journey and how much consumer are collecting and repeating behind. Yes.
I think Xavier made a good point, too, that brand heat is circular. It is going performance to sport style, back to performance, and so on.
Yeah.
Brooke Roach right here.
Hi, Brooke Roach, Goldman Sachs. Thanks so much for taking our question. I had a follow-up on the customer acquisition journey. Can you speak to what you're seeing regarding customer repeat rate, given the significant number of new customers you've gained over the last five years? Does that differ by geography or by Sportstyle versus performance?
Valérie, d o you have some data about repeat sales? Anyone has to calculate data, so I don't want to-
Qualitative.
Yeah.
Answer qualitatively.
Maybe just qualitative data at this point. What we definitely know is that there's a frequency that is very different from geography to geography. Our EMEA clients come less frequently, and that's also linked, I think, to the distribution structure that we have compared to our Greater China clients, where we have really, really high frequency. I think it's also somehow linked, besides the distribution itself, to the fact that we probably have, at this point, more apparel in our China stores, which also is a driver for frequency. The more we're going to have a diversified portfolio, I think the more we're going to work on the velocity in the different geographies.
Jon Komp, you are on over here. Thanks. Mauricio next.
Hi, Jon Komp from Baird. Thanks to everyone for hosting us here. Maybe a question for Steve and Guillaume. I want to follow up on North America. The plans certainly imply a much bigger part of the growth going forward than over the last few years, and I am wondering when you look at providing a complete running solution, cleaning up the marketplace distribution, and the global brand heat, how would you lay out the biggest factors supporting the confidence for the next few years, and what does North America look like, just the roadmap the next couple of years on the growth strategy?
Do you want to go?
Okay. Steve Doolan over here, and Guillaume, you can add on any comments.
Thanks for the question. The cleanup in terms of the wholesale market is complete today as far as we're concerned. That is good to have that behind us. In terms of run, we were chatting about this a little bit earlier, we have a consumer base and a retail partner base that has looked to Salomon for traditional trail running product and hydration vests. Hydration, as you've heard, is a key part of the business for us.
It's a really important solution that consumers turn to, especially as we move into an environment where heat and longer running is part of their everyday life. I'll pause there. I'll talk about, you've had a view of where it is that we're going in terms of partnership that we have in IRONMAN. There's obviously a key road running component there. Then you've had a view of where it is that our product is going in terms of development.
We believe that we are building the assortment that a consumer is going to need and find full flight from stability shoes to m ax cushions to Tempo shoes, so that every consumer is going to have the product that they need. As you continue to see us build out the product assortment, we believe that one specialty is absolutely where we have to live and win, then we'll build from there.
Adrienne? Oh, sorry, Mauricio. Sorry, Mauricio, my bad. Then Adrienne.
Hi. Good afternoon. Mauricio Serna from UBS. I think you mentioned that you were doing investments on several items, but I think one of them was leveraging AI. Could you talk a little bit more? I think you mentioned something about leveraging for productivity, what you've achieved and what you aspire to do. On the marketing front, heard anything about the marketing dollars in the next five years as part of the plan? Thank you.
Are you talking about Salomon AI or just as a company? I think Antonio mentioned some investments. Are you talking about Salomon?
You want to give some?
Salomon.
Andrew, if you want to touch on AI, I think it is relevant.
Touching on AI today. If you see the usual suspect, everybody is speaking about AI right now. We have two big driver of development. The first one is when you have your system with big player, which are running some operation, is how we capture the last updated. When you have a PLM, you have a kind of supply chain system and so on, is how much you are getting the first one to capture the last updated system, supporting AI and so on, and how much, because we are also showing to our partner that we have new technology and new idea, we can capture this type of update. This is one, and this is general. I do not think it is going to be a point of difference for the brand. Everybody will benefit from that. The second one is we are generating a kind of bottom-up area.
We have a lot of different area where we have data, or we can use GenAI for different style, like design, for example. We are trying to develop new opportunities. In the team, we have a system with kind of circle where people are pitching their idea and how we are moving forward and how each job by job, we are looking at what could be the opportunity to use AI to go to the next step. For example, you have today new editor on design, for example, where from the sketch you can start to move to industrial design, for example. I just sign up, it was 18 months ago, 10 license for our designer are sketching and we start to learn what are the benefits of using this type of new system.
I speak about design, but we see the same for when we are looking at CRM, where we are looking at IT and the way they are coding also, coding development. I think we have kind of 14 initiatives in the company which are a bit elevated. This one we are really tracking month by month and see how it could influence tomorrow the organization. Do we need some competency? Does it mean that maybe we have some idea of we need more people in some area we may not need in the future? We have this type of circle, moving forward. There is no magic wand. There is no like, we just say AI and suddenly you change the organization. We are ready to go on this type of process of learning, test and fail learning.
Anytime we see an opportunity, we are really pushing the opportunity. But we feel confident that, the way we address it, and it is also in close cooperation with Amer Sports, because we are very transparent, and we try to elevate AI initiative in every brand and department at the level of the company. I feel that when I start to benchmark with outside, we are on the race of having this transformation.
I mean, similarly, to the points that Guillaume was making. As a company from Amer Sports perspective, we look to proven technology, taking proven technology, proven AI technology to create capacity for our resources around the organization. How do we do things faster? How do we do things smarter? How do we see and mine data out of our data lakes more quickly and more accurately? But it is through proven technology. To Guillaume's point, we are not leading with unproven technology and doing anything out in front as it relates to our back office infrastructure.
Adrienne and then Alex, after Adrienne.
Great. Adrienne Yih from Barclays. Guillaume, my question is on the evolution of R&D and innovation. The two places you are going to invest to drive the flywheel are marketing and then the innovation. How has it changed now that you have multiple categories? Where are you sourcing dollars from? And then maybe at the corporate level, in that plan, relative to Arc'teryx, does Salomon require more R&D because there is possibly more technical make? In the long range plan, are you pushing dollars back into that R&D line? I will start with Guillaume.
We have all this category for a long time. Some of them were successful, some of them were not. We are still investing. When we look at, we say head to toe, and we have this bag on upper, we have already a team here. But finally, footwear was taking all. You understand that we are in this building where we are nurturing engineers, so we are using a lot of young engineer, and then we hire them and we develop and so on. I think that what we have to pay attention is making a shortcut where we believe that innovations could be made shorter or the quality could have. Quality is always something that you have to rethink every season, every time, because if you start to forget, this is where you start to do some mistakes.
When we are speaking about investment, it is more like we are growing, we have a lot more money. We want to invest, and you see the space where we are investing. What we would not like is suddenly believe that we are at the end of the journey of innovation and we start to cut investment and we say, "Okay, we are happy with what we have." We are a lot more bigger. We have several regions. We have to drive innovation and also make sure that the product is appealing for all the consumers in the region. So we know that we need to generate a little bit more investment to continue to have this type of momentum in our hands.
Alex Straton, welcome back.
Thank you.
Welcome back.
Maybe for Yaron or for Steve, just on Salomon, it has had a lot of success early in China. As we are thinking about the North America growth acceleration, can you just walk through how that market and your strategy there is either similar or different to what made you so successful in the Chinese market?
I think the recipe of getting traction in the market, and especially when we are speaking about this Sportstyle, I think the recipe was more or less the same. We were connecting with rooted community, Tier 0, Tier 1 store, creating energy around that and starting to show up at the time that the consumer were looking for this type of proposition. What is the major difference is China was retail only, so we had to develop our own retail distribution, own retail store, elevating the capacity, the capability as well to support retail. So, adding a little bit more drop, making sure that merchandising is matching what retail required. U.S. is omnichannel.
The fundamental difference is we are looking for epicenter strategy because if you spend marketing in U.S. without any targeted area or consumer, it is kind of drop in the ocean and you do not ever arrive. The main focus on U.S. is going city by city, opening some store to create the best experience and partnering with B2B in the same space and start to develop and having this type of propelling the brands according to epicenter. Today we are at early stage, so we will have the second store in L.A. in a month. So, we are really at this stage of how we are able city by city, going for the investment and having this omnichannel approach so that getting very close to our B2B partner and make sure that they are also joining our strategy, which is really a consumer demand strategy.
Did you want to finish? I think I cut you off before you answered my call.
Yeah. I think, one of the things that is remarkable and really beneficial about our brand direct strategy, is that our brand direct strategy provides the autonomy to each of the CEOs of the brands. Part of that autonomy means that they are designing their business, their go-to-market strategy, their funding, all of that to be able to be self-sustaining in that business. There is not a center-led R&D remit as a brand-led R&D remit. Luckily, and because of that, our brands are generally self-funding. There are some group initiatives, but that is far and few.
Sure.
Thank you. Aneesha Sherman from Bernstein. I want to ask about Sportstyle. We have seen several other Sportstyle franchises, many of your bigger competitors experience a wave of brand heat for a couple of years and then fade. What are the signs that you are looking for to anticipate a potential shift in brand heat? How flexible can your cost base be if you were to see a deceleration quicker than you expected in the sales trend?
It is a lot about the portfolio of products we are currently managing. You see that we are starting to run on diversification. One key driver of having a short life cycle for our success is also how much you put the product in the market. Today when we are looking at our best seller, we decide how much we would like to put in the market. You understand that we have a great momentum today. We have good partnership with our B2B partner, and we are able to master also this type of area, such as, for example, in Europe, we agree on how many pairs of certain style we are dropping in the market. Of course, it is also a question of marketing allocation.
When you have this type of success, you are also making sure that you are using this product maybe to move and open new distribution, while in the current distribution you are starting to remove and you are starting to build a merchandising play with a larger assortment. We feel good that at the time that maybe if tennis may be plateau, we will have at least two to three style, which will be above 1 million pair and being able really to capture.
Any last-
I think also the product innovation is also coming.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
Of course. Yeah. Then it's launching new product as well. Yeah.
Okay. It looks like we are all out of questions. Oh, one more from Brooke.
If we have a moment, I will ask one more. I was hoping that you could break down the contribution to the gross margin expansion at Salomon brand over the course of the next five years between each of the key drivers, and then help us understand some of those relative mix dynamics just a little bit more between Sportstyle, performance running, and how much of the gross margin expansion in the next five years is driven by mix. Thank you.
So maybe before Antonio gives the details, I am just going to reiterate what we have said publicly before. The overall winter sports equipment, so the overall Outdoor Performance segment is going to be about 25% winter sports equipment this year, 75% softgoods. The winter sports equipment piece includes both Atomic winter sports equipment and the whole Atomic. Sorry, Salomon winter sports equipment and Atomic and Armada. What we have shared in terms of relative profitability in the past is really the equipment business can be double-digit, sometimes high double-digit differential between gross margin, between the equipment business and our full-price softgoods business. I do not know. We have not really. You can use that to come up with your own growth rates and quantify what the mix benefit could be.
Gross margin.
Yeah, sorry, gross margin.
Yeah. It would be gross margin.
Also more profitable on the operating margin line. Typically, winter sports equipment historically has been a high single-digit margin, and you can see the guidance for this year is into the mid-teens for the segment, which means softgoods obviously lifting it up.
You already answered.
Okay. All right, Matt Boss, one last question.
Andrew, I just have one more. On the cadence of the five-year plan, I think you cited higher returns in the earlier years of the plan than the later. Is that top line and bottom line? Or just elaborate on the cadence of the five-year plan.
Yes. I said in the five-year horizon that on the revenue side, that the growth rate was going to be at the higher end of the range, and as we mature through that over a larger base, the growth rate will slow as you get to the back end. Then I disaggregated between the operating margin contribution. So with Arc'teryx as an example, the operating margin is going to be toward the lower end of the range in the earlier part of the years, and then it will start to accelerate or expand more in the later part of the planning horizon, given that we will be scaling the investment in the store build-out.
As you can imagine with regard to the Outdoor Performance business, you would expect that the operating margin performance, this is a fast-growing business that is delivering a lot of profitability down to the bottom of the line. It is not going to be front-weighted toward slower expansion in the beginning. It will be more even.
Yeah. Andrew also noted in the technical apparel, 20 - 60 basis points of margin expansion will be towards the lower end in the earlier years and the higher end in later years as they invest in store expansion as well as brand awareness because they obviously also have a big brand awareness opportunity.
But again, overall, a lot of the point that I really wanted to make on the operating margin is, again, 150 basis points a year that we've delivered over the last three years is really indicative of we've said if high demand continues, then there's no reason that we can't deliver more in the bottom line. We realize that now we have three growth engines that are all popping. We have to really invest in Arc'teryx awareness in North America. We really need to invest in Arc'teryx store build-out. We need to invest in brand awareness for Salomon. We need to invest in our commercial go-to-market North American strategy for Wilson Tennis 360.
So the need to invest and making sure that we are setting ourselves up for long-term growth is more imperative than it ever has been. We're going to be very thoughtful and disciplined in how we expand bottom-line margin going forward. So really just kind of resetting the expectations that our expansion will be closer to the algorithm than it has been over the last three years.
Okay, perfect. We're 5:01. I can't believe we came in within a minute of when we said we were going to end. Thank you, everybody, for joining. Thank you Salomon team. Thanks, everybody, for making the journey. Thanks, everybody, for being online to watch. For people in person, just stay in your seats for one second. I want to sign off the webcast and then give you some instructions for what's next. Thanks again, everybody.