Amer Sports and Salomon: The Playbook Behind $2bn

In 2019 a consortium led by China's Anta Sports paid €4.6bn, around $5.2bn, for Amer Sports, a Finnish holding company whose brands included Arc'teryx, Salomon, Wilson and Atomic. It was a 40% premium to the share price, for a portfolio of established Western sports brands that nobody would have described as hypergrowth.

Seven years on, Salomon alone grew 35% in 2025 and passed $2bn of sales. Amer Sports has told investors it wants Salomon to be a $3bn brand by 2028. The company listed in New York in February 2024 at a valuation of roughly $6.3bn, and today trades at around $16bn (Yahoo Finance, 1 October 2026).

The interesting part is not that a trail shoe became fashionable, although it did. It is that the product at the centre of the story barely changed. What changed was where it was sold, who it was sold to, and the operation built around it. That is a playbook, and it is worth reading closely.

The deal, and what the buyer actually bought

The consortium, Mascot Bidco, was Anta Sports with FountainVest Partners, Anamered Investments (the vehicle of Lululemon founder Chip Wilson) and Tencent. The structure mattered more than the price. Amer Sports stayed a separate business, while Anta, China's largest sportswear company, provided the research, production and distribution resources to expand the brands in the Chinese market (Amer Sports IPO prospectus, as reported by SGB Media).

That is the clue to everything that followed. Anta was not buying brands to run them as before. It was buying Western heritage brands to put through a Chinese distribution engine it already owned, and to convert them from wholesale businesses into brand-direct ones. Amer's own IPO filing describes this as its "Transformation" programme: a brand-direct model, rapid owned-store expansion, and accelerated growth in China (SGB Media, citing the prospectus). Three levers, none of them product.

The product that did not need reinventing

Salomon's XT-6 was launched in 2013 as a technical trail shoe for elite ultra runners. For its first few years that is what it was.

Then it started turning up in places it was not designed for. Paris boutique The Broken Arm was among the first to stock it as a fashion object; collaborations with Boris Bidjan Saberi, Palace and MM6 Maison Margiela followed, as the fashion press has widely documented. Salomon noticed, and in autumn 2018 it launched Sportstyle as a dedicated category: its technical outdoor footwear, taken out of the trail-running wall and put into high-end sneaker and fashion boutiques (Footwear News; Amer Sports Investor Day, September 2026).

The numbers from there are in Amer's own filings. Sportstyle generated $80m in 2022. It generated more than $165m in the first nine months of 2023 alone (Amer Sports IPO registration, as reported by Business of Fashion). By the 2026 Investor Day, Salomon's president Guillaume Meyzenq put the brand's mix at roughly 15% winter sports equipment, 30% performance footwear and 40% Sportstyle footwear (WWD, September 2026). A category that did not formally exist in 2017 is now the largest part of a $2bn brand.

And the shoe itself is still the shoe. The XT-6 a fashion customer buys in Paris is, in design terms, the XT-6 built for ultra runners. Salomon did not reinvent the product. It reinvented the context.

What actually changed: the channel

The operational story is in one word that Amer repeats across every filing: direct.

Group-wide, direct-to-consumer went from 30% of revenue in 2022 to 49% in 2025 (Amer Sports CEO letter, 2025). Within Outdoor Performance, the segment that is mostly Salomon, DTC revenue rose from $525.7m to $852.6m in 2025, up 62.2%, "due to an expanded owned retail store network with a net increase of 102 owned retail stores during the year and an increase in online traffic" (Amer Sports FY2025 20-F).

The store count tells it plainly. Salomon had 114 owned stores in September 2023, per the IPO filing. It had 227 at the end of 2024. It had 329 at the end of 2025 (Amer Sports FY2025 20-F). Nearly tripled in two years.

The format is specific, and it is a Chinese-market format. Amer describes a Salomon "compact shop" model and an "epicenter strategy" of brand stores in key metro markets. In Greater China, including partner stores, Salomon finished 2025 with 286 doors after adding close to 100 in the year (SGB Media, citing Amer Sports Q4 2025 results). Outdoor Performance growth in 2025 was led by Greater China, EMEA and Asia Pacific (Amer Sports FY2025 20-F).

The category shift and the channel shift reinforce each other. Softgoods, meaning footwear, apparel and accessories rather than skis, went from 54% of the Outdoor Performance segment in 2022 to 71% in 2025, and Salomon softgoods revenue grew 40.3% in the year (Amer Sports CEO letter; FY2025 20-F). Softgoods sell through owned stores in a way ski equipment never did. A sneaker in a compact shop in Shanghai is a very different business from a pair of skis in a European sporting goods wholesaler, and Amer built the operation for the first one.

The numbers

Sources: Amer Sports FY2025 Form 20-F and Q4/FY2025 results; CEO letter 2025; IPO pricing as reported; Yahoo Finance, 1 October 2026. 2024 Outdoor Performance revenue derived from the reported 31.0% growth.

Segment operating profit growing 74% on revenue growing 31% is the line to hold onto. Owned stores selling softgoods at full price carry a far better margin than wholesale ski equipment. The channel change did not just add revenue. It changed the quality of the revenue.

Where it is going

At its Investor Day on 17 September 2026, timed to Salomon's 79th anniversary, Amer set out the next stage. Salomon revenue will be above $2.5bn by the end of 2026, and the target is $3bn by 2028 (WWD; Footwear News). CEO James Zheng called Sportstyle "a weapon to unlock the big potential," particularly with younger and female consumers, and said Salomon in China "quickly will become a $1 billion market." North America, which he called the largest sneaker market in the world, is the next distribution build.

Meyzenq was candid that Sportstyle is "still quite a small player" in a global sneaker market Amer sizes at around $180bn. That is the growth argument in one line: a $2bn brand with a 40% Sportstyle mix is still a rounding error in sneakers, and the distribution is only now being built in the market where sneakers are biggest.

What it cost, and what to be careful about

A fair read includes the strain that fast growth puts on an operation, and it is visible in Amer's own numbers.

Inventory grew 33% in 2025 against revenue growth of 27%, and management does not expect it to normalise until the second half of 2026 (Amer Sports Q4 2025 results, as reported). Capital expenditure is stepping up from $310m to around $400m to fund stores. Guidance for 2026 operating margin, 13.1% to 13.3%, sits at the low end of the company's long-term algorithm because Salomon investment intensity continues into the first quarter. When those Q1 costs were flagged in February, the shares fell.

The valuation has been volatile too. Around $16bn today is well above the $6.3bn IPO, but the stock is down roughly a quarter over the past year, and its 52-week range runs from about $26 to about $43 (Yahoo Finance; Motley Fool, September 2026). At its high it implied closer to $24bn. The business has grown steadily; the market's enthusiasm for it has not.

Two structural risks sit underneath. The first is China concentration: the IPO was priced at a discount in 2024 specifically because investors worried about the reliance on China for revenue (Business of Fashion, February 2024), and management cautioned in February that it was too early to be fully bullish on Greater China for 2026. The second is the fashion cycle. Sportstyle rode the outdoor-fashion wave of the early 2020s, and the same press that documented the XT-6's rise has been asking since the IPO whether that wave is receding. A brand that is 40% fashion sneakers is exposed to taste in a way a brand that is 100% ski equipment is not.

And for all the DTC growth, wholesale is still the majority of Outdoor Performance: $852.6m of DTC against $2.40bn of segment revenue is about 36%. The channel shift is real and accelerating. It is not finished.

The honest summary is that Amer Sports took a portfolio of mature Western brands, left the hero product alone, and rebuilt the distribution, the customer and the channel around it, with a Chinese owner's market as the engine. The result is one of the fastest-growing sports brands in the world. The cost is a working-capital and capex build that is still running, in a category with fashion risk, in a market investors remain nervous about. The product did not need reinventing. The operation did, and it is still being reinvented.

What this means if you run a scaling brand

You do not have Anta's distribution engine. But the moves that built Salomon are decisions, and scaled-down versions of each are available to a $5m to $100m consumer brand.

Your hero product may already have a second market you have not built for. The XT-6 found fashion customers before Salomon went looking for them. The signal was there in where the shoe was being bought, by whom, and at what price. Most brands have a product with the same pattern, a line that sells to a customer it was not designed for, and most never build the channel, the sizing, the imagery and the stock plan that second customer needs. Changing the context around a product is cheaper than changing the product, and it is usually where the growth is.

A channel shift is an operating build, not a marketing decision. Going from 30% to 49% direct meant opening 102 Salomon stores in a year, with the inventory, staffing, store operations and fulfilment that implies. If you are moving from wholesale toward direct, or from marketplaces toward your own channel, the work is in planning stock for a channel with different demand patterns, building the fulfilment to serve it, and funding the working capital that sits in it before it sells. Crocs is making the same channel decision with HEYDUDE from a position of weakness. On is making it from strength. The build is the same.

Partner with the distribution you cannot build yourself. Amer's China growth ran through Anta's existing infrastructure rather than being built from scratch. At your scale, the equivalent is a distributor, a 3PL or a retail partner with a market presence you would take years to replicate. The question is not whether to own every channel. It is which ones to own and which to borrow. Our guide on how to choose a 3PL covers the trade-off for fulfilment.

Watch inventory when growth comes fast. Amer's stock grew faster than its sales in 2025, and it will take a year to work through. That is the predictable cost of opening 100 stores and launching into new markets at once, and at a smaller scale it is the predictable cost of any brand that scales channels faster than its planning. Weeks of cover by SKU and by channel is the number that catches it early, and our note on inventory forecasting methods covers how to plan for a channel with no history yet.

Heritage is an asset if you give it a new context. Salomon is 79 years old. Arc'teryx, Wilson and Atomic are all decades old. None of them needed to be a new brand to grow like one. They needed a new customer, a new channel and an owner willing to fund the operation to reach them. If your brand has history and a product people already trust, the question is not what to replace. It is where else it could sell, and what you would have to build to sell it there.

Sometimes the product does not need reinventing. The distribution, the customer and the context around it do.

If you want a second pair of eyes on which of your products has a second market, and what it would take operationally to build the channel for it, see how we work.