STOUGHTON, Mass. (AP) - Reebok International Ltd. said it plans to lay off 10 percent of its 6,600 workers worldwide in an attempt to cut costs and restructure its business.
The cuts include 120 jobs out of the 1,200 people that work at the company's Massachusetts headquarters. Further details on the job cuts will be announced over the next few weeks, company spokeswoman Nancy Moss said Thursday.
Once a close competitor to No. 1 athletic shoemaker Nike, Reebok has been fighting falling sneaker sales and losing market share to competitors Adidas and New Balance.
Reebok's U.S. market share has fallen from nearly 25 percent in 1991 to just over 10 percent this year, according to industry statistics by the securites firm First Securities Van Kasper.
During the same period, Nike's market share rose from just under 25 percent to 45 percent, the securities firm said.
Josie Esquivel, a footwear industry analyst at Morgan Stanley, said Reebok's decline in market share had a simple explanation.
"Product, product, product," Esquivel said. "The name of the game is to have a cool product that consumers want to buy. They don't seem to have gotten the formula right."
Reebok President and CEO Carl Yankowski said the company would seek to focus more on women's athletics, where the company held an advantage in the early 1980s, and on footwear styles for leisure athletics rather than for professional athletes.
To that end, the company has ended many of its endorsement contracts with professional athletes, such as basketball's Shaquille O'Neal, though it plans to maintain its deals with tennis star Venus Williams and basketball player Allen Iverson.
The goal, Yankowski said, was to appeal to people who enjoy athletics for fitness, rather than producing products for professional athletes and then trying to reach the public through those athletes.
"What I don't want to be is a Nike-chaser," Yankowski said. "Nike has done a good job with sports marketing through personalities and athletes."
Yankowski also said the company was in the process of drastically cutting its number of shoe styles in order to strengthen the Reebok identity.
In July, Reebok reported quarterly net income of $4.6 million, or 8 cents per share, down from $6.1 million, or 11 cents per share, in the same time period last year.