ACTIONS CORNER

ADIDAS - a 3 striped lame duck

Whatever happened to the ADIDAS stripes that made every single one turn to point South East? When is someone going to tell the Supervisory Board that a stock market price only rises when shareholders begin to feel the wind of change?  It is more than somewhat embarrassing that eight months after failure to achieve the sales and revenue targets that he himself set, Germany's longest-serving CEO is throwing a new strategic five-year plan overboard just as the process of finding his successor is now getting up to speed. Despite this being the best of all possible worlds, and despite particularly bright prospects, ADIDAS, can still only make second place in a crucial market like the United States, losing out to a total newcomer such as UnderArmour. . .

Sponsorship of the winner of the 1954 World Cup soccer championship turned ADIDAS into a worldwide household name. The same investiture in 2014 only obliged the company to a repeated a profit alert. Purchased 10 years ago for 3 thousand million, Reebok's crop quality doesn't come anywhere near ADIDAS's. If the Supervisory Board can't supervise, it would be well advised to wake up.

"Creating the new" was the offshoot of  "Route 2015"  -but it never occurred to anyone to go into any detail about how the underperforming Reebok could be nudged into performing. The operating performance of ADIDAS  is the peer group's weakest. Share buy-back using borrowed money, high payout quotas and extensive headquarters rebuilding - sooner or later ADIDAS will divest itself of its participation in FC Bayern München AG to raise money. There is probably no need to change strategy, but to push drivers and supervisors towards doubling KPIs on the level of competitors.

What paved the way for ADIDAS to conquer the market in 1954 was their revolutionary interchangeable boot studs. Now, though, innovation has to come from those who supervise and those who administer. The wholly unjustified bonus - more of a severance payoff - has  further clipped the wings of this duck that has been lame for too long.

In the never-ending controversy that arose from the expansion towards the Russian electrical energy market that never took place, RWE has won another battle in the war against Leonid Lebedew. On March 24, the Essen Landgericht court ruled that the claim presented by the Russian oligarch for 674million Euros of damages was inadmissible. The court instead did rule admissible the case in which Lebedew is seeking monetary compensation from the former CEO of RWE Jürgen Großmann in person. If Grossmann were to appeal, the, Oberlandesgericht would rule on the admissibility of the claim. Lebedew’s motivation for claiming is that RWE and Großmann withdrew unilaterally and without authorization from the agreements that had been reached together for moving into the Russian energy group TGK-2.