Big news:North Face owner gets a China filip

Among global consumer businesses, the move into China’s lesser-known big cities has been a bandwagon not to be missed. But VF Corporation – the owner of brands including North Face, Wrangler and Timberland – is showing there’s an upside to being late to the game: it makes it easier to keep sales growing even as China’s economy slows down.

While Burberry and others have already shown the ill-effects of a slower China in their results, VF on Thursday reported accelerating sales growth. Its China revenues rose by 30 per cent in the past quarter, exceeding growth of 20 per cent in the previous quarter.

Bob Shearer, its chief financial officer, told beyondbrics that the growth came partly because VF’s brands – led in China by Lee jeans, Vans shoes, North Face outdoor gear, and Kipling bags – are still expanding into places where its peers are already established.

“Some other brands have a bigger business, are more penetrated in different tiers of cities where we’re not,” he said. “We’re in many of the tier one cities, in some tier two, and just starting in tier three.”