Can Adidas ever catch up with Nike?

A few years agoit appeared as though Adidas might challenge Nike for the title of the world’s biggest maker of sportswear. The American giant was well ahead, to be sure. But its three-striped German rival had pep in its step. Under Kasper Rorsted, who took over as chief executive in October 2016, Adidas’s revenues shot up—by a cumulative 30% or so in the first three years of his stewardship. A lucrative deal from 2013 to make and sell trainers designed by Kanye West, an American rapper, was paying off handsomely; by 2021 Mr West’s Yeezy line contributed 12% of Adidas’s overall shoe sales. In August that year the company’s market capitalisation reached €67bn ($79bn), more than twice what it had been five years earlier.