Jarden Corporation; Remember Them?
Whenever VF comes out with its earnings, we all gather around to see if we can find anything about how Vans and Reef are doing. But when Jarden, who owns a winter lineup of brands that includes Atlas, Full Tilt, K2, Ride, Line, Little Bear, Madshus, Marker, Morrow, Tubbs, Volkl and 5150, we don’t even notice. Wonder why.
Jarden is another large company with $6 billion in revenue. Its Outdoor Solutions Group, of which the winter sports brands listed above are a part, represented $2.5 billion, or 42% of total revenues in the year ended December 31, 2010.
The catch of course, like with VF, is that they don’t tell us anything specific about brand performance. But if you listen carefully to the conference call, you can pick up a few things.
The Outdoor Solutions Group grew 17% during the year. Of that, 13% was organic (not the result of acquisitions). They tell us that growth was led by the winter sports brands. They view winter sports sales as a barometer for consumer confidence. Performance for winter sports was “exceptionally strong” and produced record sales and EBITDA. They say that their winter performance was a lot stronger than many of their competitors due to certain technical improvements they made in the product.
Well, it ain’t much information, but it’s better than nothing. We probably can’t afford to ignore $6 billion companies that play in our back yard.
Jarden’s winter business is run by Robert Marcovitch and judging from the smile on his face in Denver, things are going just as well as management indicated in the conference call. I wonder if those guys saw Ride’s booth. I was really disappointed when “Our customers come first” came off the sign on the booth entrance after the first day of the show. Sorry I missed seeing the booth in Europe.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!