For years, Centauro () grew at an accelerated pace, surfing the expansion of shopping malls in Brazil, the boom in consumption and the strength of the sports market. But the company’s trajectory has also gone through moments of strong pressure, including the financial crisis, high interest rates, the pandemic and the economic impact caused after the 2014 World Cup.
Now, at 45 years old, the company is trying to open a new chapter. At the company’s new headquarters, located in Lapa, in São Paulo, founder Sebastião Bomfim Filho stated that the group is going through a process of operational and strategic renewal to sustain a new phase of growth.
“We want to continue being an innovative company”, he said in an interview with From Zero to Top.
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Now chairman of the board of the SBF group, Bomfim follows the company’s transformation more closely after leaving executive command of the operation.
According to him, the company focuses its efforts on logistics, modernizing stores and adapting to tax reform.
According to the businessman, the company renovated 10 units last year and significantly accelerated construction time. “We hired more than 900 new employees for the stores alone. Today the average period for a completely closed store is just seven days.”
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From the impact of 7 to 1 to the resumption of growth
Not all the bets made by the company over the last few years have paid off.
Bomfim stated that one of the biggest mistakes in Centauro’s recent trajectory was believing that the decade between 2010 and 2020 would be “the decade of sports” in Brazil, driven by the holding of the World Cup and the Olympics.
During that period, the company increased investments and became an official sponsor of FIFA. But the economic and political environment changed quickly. The scenario worsened after the Brazilian team’s historic defeat to Germany.
“The World Cup started to be very contested in Brazil. I was in the stadium at 7-1. It was an announced disaster”, recalls Bomfim.
At the same time, the increase in interest rates increased financial pressure on the company, which had to renegotiate debts, which generated a financial crisis for the company.
The reorganization began in 2015, when Pedro Zemel assumed the company’s executive presidency. According to Bomfim, the succession process was decisive for the company’s recovery.
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“A succession process depends more on the person who succeeds than on the successor.” He states that he had to step away from the operation to allow space for the new management. “I had a lot of discipline to stay away.”
In the following years, the company went public on the stock exchange and took over Nike’s operation in Brazil, a move that practically doubled the size of the group.
Today, according to Bomfim, the company enters a new stage of growth, supported by technology, digital integration and strengthening of physical stores.
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“The group is the largest sports products company in Latin America by far. Between sneakers and football boots, we sell a product every two seconds in Brazil”, he concludes.
To find out more details about the creation and business model of Centauro, see the full episode on . The program is available in its podcast version on the main streaming platforms such as , , , and
About From Zero to Top
The Do Zero ao Topo podcast is a production of InfoMoney and brings, every week, the stories of prominent women and men in the Brazilian market to tell their story, sharing the biggest challenges faced along the way and the main strategies used in building the business.
