Bill Baruch, Founder, Blue Line Capital Amer Sports AS - N BUY Jun 18, 2025

New company on NYSE. Brand includes many popular sports brands like Solomon, Wilson, Arcteryx & Atomic. Too early to determine the direction of business. Unsure on how management team will perform. Would recommend not buying yet. Valuation in line with Nike/Lululemon. 

Near-term tailwinds came from China recently, which let Amer break out above its IPO price, despite an analyst downgrade today. Would buy a lot on a pullback. The brand loyalty for their sporting goods is solid. They have many revenues streams across many sports.

We like AS and think they have some good brands under their umbrella. Arcteryx is driving the growth but they also own Wilson which is a lower growth but staple type of sprts name. There could be some 'fad risk' if the arctryx brand slows down, and discretionary names are not in favour currently either, so an investor can likely be patient on a name like this. Overall, though, trading at 32X forward earnings and with 22% top line growth expected this year with mid-teends for the next few years after, we think AS look fine here. We don't think we would make the comparison to ATZ at this stage. The Arcteryx brand has potential, we just aren't sure it is 'there quite yet.
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