BERLIN – German sportswear brand Puma ended a challenging year with a whimper.

The brand’s annual sales fell 8.1 percent in currency adjusted terms to 7.29 billion euros, down from 8.39 billion euros in 2024, but slightly better than market consensus.

Puma ended with a particularly disheartening fourth quarter — sales in the final three months of the year dropped 20.1 percent, currency adjusted, to 1.56 billion euros.

“2025 was a reset year for us,” chief executive officer Arthur Hoeld said in a statement. “We want to…return to above-industry growth and generate healthy profits in the medium term.”

The company blamed “strategic reset initiatives” from the third quarter onwards for the collapse in sales numbers.

Earlier in the year, Puma had been hovering around 1 or 2 percent growth each quarter. Hoeld, who was with Puma’s much larger, local competitor Adidas for 26 years, only took the top job in July and then started what he describes as “cleaning up.”

The company has taken back stock, reduced promotional activity, is simplifying its product portfolio and is cutting around 1,400 corporate roles. In October, Hoeld told journalists that, “Puma has become too commercial, overexposed in the wrong channels, with too many discounts.”

In the fourth quarter, the clean-up resulted in double-digit drops in all of Puma’s sales territories. Over the full year, this led to a decrease of 6.9 percent, in currency adjusted terms, in Puma’s home market of Europe, the Middle East and Africa and a 7.4 percent fall in the Asia Pacific region.

In January, Chinese sportswear brand Anta struck a deal to become Puma’s biggest shareholder and is promising to help the German sportswear maker improve its sales in China.

The Americas was where Puma’s 2025 sales fell furthest, sliding 10 percent. North America is seen as a problematic market, with too much discounting, and Puma has been trying to streamline sales there, it said.

Sales in all of Puma’s product categories fell by high-single digits. Footwear sales decreased by 7.1 percent, apparel by 9.7 percent and accessories by 8.5 percent, in currency adjusted terms.

The company’s earnings before interests and taxes, or EBIT — generally considered an important indicator of how well a business is doing — plummeted in the fourth quarter. Earlier in the year it had still been in the black and in 2024, Puma reported EBIT of almost 550 million euros. But by the end of 2025, EBIT had fallen to minus 357.2 million euros. This was still slightly better than analysts had expected.  

Puma executives have previously said the company is unlikely to return to growth until 2027 and the guidance for the coming year reflected this. “2026 will be a year of transition,” Puma reiterated in its statement.

As a result, Puma now expects sales to continue to decline in the low to mid-single digits over this year and for EBIT to remain in the red, somewhere between minus 50 million and 150 million euros.