Pumas Competitive Priorities

Explain its main competitive priorities (e.g. price, availability, flexibility, CSR…) and how it achieves them through the production function.

Acoording to the information we found on Puma we think that their main competitive advantages are a good price-quality ratio as well as the availability of their products adapting to their costumers needs. For the first one the procurement refers to the central management of the purchasing of products for PUMA and the Group’s own brands, Cobra and Tretorn. The necessary procurement tasks are carried out centrally by the Group company. World Cat Ltd. in Hong Kong. World Cat Ltd. acts as a purchasing agent here and provides support for the respective brands in order to furnish the respective sales organizations with products and the necessary materials for the manufacture of these products at a standardized level of quality and at a competitive price.

World Cat Ltd. manages the various branches located around the world from Hong Kong. In addition to the registered offices in Hong Kong, the various locations in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, Brazil and El Salvador manage the collaboration with suppliers and also monitor the production processes on site.

Processes are continuously improved in line with the six core principles of partnership, transparency, flexibility and speed, simplicity, accuracy and effectiveness, thus satisfying the aim of offering service at a high level for all PUMA brands and creating a sustainable production and supply chain. In order to further strengthen the link between customer demands, product design and production, product knowledge is moved closer to production, thus ensuring any developments in the market can be adapted to more quickly.

They optimize their supply chain with independent suppliers within its global production network, from the purchase of materials to production, right through to the delivery of products. The aim is to offer an optimum service to the various PUMA brands in order to meet, and continue to improve, global requirements for quality and safety along with environmental aspects in production. Also, continuous improvements are being made in its role as purchasing agent and partner with respect to costs, flexibility and delivery reliability. Taking into account everything that has been mentioned before we can see how they maintain their good price-quality ratio while still being profitable.

World Cat approximately works together with 178 suppliers in 32 countries and delivered to 44 destinations. The strategic cooperation with long-term partners was one of the key competitive advantages, that way they ensure stable procurement in turbulent market conditions. The geographic focus of the production sites located in China as the primary sourcing country has shifted slightly to South-east Asia. Asia remains the strongest procurement region overall with 89% of the total volume, followed by Europe with 5%, America with 4% and Africa with 2%, with the latter’s percentage on the increase.

6. Are there factors in this company that make forecasting in this company particularly challenging? How have they dealt with them?

During the last years the world economy gained significant momentum. However, this can be a problem for the company in order for them to do a

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