Word: ning
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...COMPANY: Li Ning SECTOR: Sportswear REVENUE IN 2008: $979 million THE LESSON: Be nimble...
...Every Olympics has its underdog stories. At the 2008 Beijing Games, one of the most memorable was not on the track but in the boardroom of a Chinese sportswear company named after its founder, Li Ning - a triple gymnastics gold medalist at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. While the then 18-year-old firm wasn't an official sponsor, it used careful planning to outflank its deep-pocketed overseas rivals by picking likely medalists to outfit with Li Ning - branded gear (official sponsor Adidas had the rights to provide uniforms for medal and other ceremonies, but athletes were free...
...flop. "We had only one kind of material, in seven colors," he says. "It took us three years to sell them all." The experience made him see that it might be smarter to outsource design and production and concentrate on retail. He envisaged a chain of Li Ning shops, capitalizing on the goodwill that his name retained as memory of the Seoul snafu faded. "I realized if I ran the company by myself it wouldn't be a success," he says. So he began taking on expert advisers as the 1990s began, and over the next two decades expanded...
...planning well in advance (662 days, by the count of CEO Zhang Zhiyong), focusing on bang-for-buck sponsorship choices. Knowing, for instance, that the U.S. Dream Team would wind up in the basketball finals, but that its NBA-star-packed roster would be too pricey to support, Li Ning sponsored eventual silver-medal winners Spain and bronze-medal winners Argentina. Li Ning - sponsored athletes won 27 out of China's 51 golds...
...These days, the company works with NBA stars like Baron Davis (who has a signature Li Ning shoe, the BD-1) and Shaquille O'Neal (who is under a five-year contract with the brand). But it still maintains its value-for-money approach to marketing - recently making a big push, for example, into badminton, a sport largely ignored in the West but played and watched by some 300 million Chinese. Li Ning - sponsored shuttlecock star Lin Dan graces billboards and TV ads around China, and the firm opened a "badminton paradise" last year in Singapore, its first international outlet...