Despite anecdotes from athletic footwear/apparel brands and retailers about pricing pressures, we’ve not seen broad-based flow through of inflationary pressures disproportionately hit the US -- yet.
With so much capacity closing in Asia over the past 12 months (upwards of 1/3 of factories in China’s Pearl River Delta alone), my rather strong view was (and still is) that larger Asian manufacturers would begin to gain pricing power and push costs through the US supply chain (brands and retailers). Oddly enough, this has not proven to be the case as outlined by the chart below.
My sense is that the initial hit is enough to get lost in the smaller companies that do not show up in the sample of publicly traded companies. But it is a near-mathematical certainty that these pressures will work their way up the quality curve.
We can’t make any broad-based statements about who to own and not own in this context – other than to say that the key is to flag those companies that are managing through this proactively vs. reactively. On the proactive side, I like UA, NKE and HIBB. On the reactive side, it pretty much includes everyone else…
With so much capacity closing in Asia over the past 12 months (upwards of 1/3 of factories in China’s Pearl River Delta alone), my rather strong view was (and still is) that larger Asian manufacturers would begin to gain pricing power and push costs through the US supply chain (brands and retailers). Oddly enough, this has not proven to be the case as outlined by the chart below.
My sense is that the initial hit is enough to get lost in the smaller companies that do not show up in the sample of publicly traded companies. But it is a near-mathematical certainty that these pressures will work their way up the quality curve.
We can’t make any broad-based statements about who to own and not own in this context – other than to say that the key is to flag those companies that are managing through this proactively vs. reactively. On the proactive side, I like UA, NKE and HIBB. On the reactive side, it pretty much includes everyone else…
