Adidas Plans China Expansion Drive

BERLIN - Adidas (IW 1000/232) is looking to expand beyond major Chinese cities into smaller urban centers, its top executive for the country said in an interview published Monday.

"We are currently active in 1,000 cities (in China) and by the end of 2015 we will be in 1,400," Colin Currie told business daily Handelsblatt.

Adidas posted more than 1.2 billion euros (US $1.6 billion) in China sales in the first nine months of 2013.

The company has 7,600 stores in the country, with a presence in all top cities including 200 shops in Shanghai alone.

But "two-thirds of our growth comes from smaller cities, most of which have fewer than one million inhabitants," Currie said.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2013