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UK sportswear retailer JD Sports has continued its boardroom overhaul with the appointment of Régis Schultz as its new chief executive.
The French retail veteran will join from Al-Futtaim Group, where he has been president of retail since 2019. The Dubai-based conglomerate operates stores such as Ikea, Marks and Spencer and Zara under franchise agreements across the Middle East, Asia and north Africa.
Before Al-Futtaim Group, Schultz was chief executive of Monoprix, the French grocery chain, and has also done stints at homewares and electrical goods retailers, including DIY retailer Kingfisher.
He will join JD in September, at which point interim chief executive Kath Smith will resume her previous role as senior non-executive director. Smith has been running JD since longstanding executive chair Peter Cowgill was ousted in a boardroom coup in May.
Last month Andy Higginson, the former chair of supermarket chain Wm Morrison, was appointed non-executive chair of JD.
Schultz’s appointment — which gives JD a permanent chief executive for the first time since Barry Bown left the business in 2014 — moves the business on from the Cowgill era, an 18-year period during which JD’s sales, profits and market value soared.
However, it was also a time when there were run-ins with investors over executive pay and clashes in the boardroom over when and how to split the executive chair role and with UK regulators, notably over the acquisition of smaller rival Footasylum.
That stand-off was finally resolved this week when JD revealed an agreement to sell Footasylum to German investment group Aurelius for £37.5mn, less than half what it paid for the company in 2019.
Schultz’s wide geographic experience suggests JD’s strategy of international expansion is set to continue. In recent years it has spent billions of dollars on leisure clothing and footwear businesses in the US, which in its most recent financial year accounted for 30 per cent of sales and more than a third of underlying profits.
The company has ample firepower for further acquisitions, having issued new equity during the coronavirus pandemic and finished its last financial year with more than £1bn in net cash.
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