Tradeinn continues unstoppable with its growth despite the slowdown in online commerce after the pandemic and the decline in consumption caused by inflation and the rise in rates.
The Catalan company –specialized in the online sale of sports equipment– closed the 2022 financial year with revenues of 433 million euros, an increase of 14% compared to 2021, when it had a turnover of 378 million. In a context in which its competitors are slowing down their expansion, even cutting staff, the key to Tradeinn’s growth lies in sticking to the formula that has always worked for it since it opened its store in 2008.
“We are a boring digital company. We do not announce funding rounds or competitor acquisitions. We limit ourselves to investing in technology and efficiency, and that has led us to be profitable and to know how to react to adversity. Last year, we weathered the supply crisis by anticipating all orders at the beginning of the year. That was how we managed to respond to the demand”, comments the CEO, David Martín, who does not venture to make forecasts of results for this year.
Another of the keys to the business is its powerful algorithm, which allows it to detect the prices of its competitors and update its prices upwards or downwards based on the behavior of the rest. “We always try to lower prices to gain users, but last year we managed to raise them by up to 5% in some cases due to inflation,” he qualifies.
This formula has led Tradeinn to become a highly internationalized company. 82% of sales occur abroad, in countries such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy or the United States, among many others. Operations are centralized in Celrà (Girona), in a warehouse that manages two million references of some 6,000 sports brands. “Our extensive catalog is another of our strengths. We touch all the categories, although cycling is the one with the most prominence. It contributes 23% of the income, followed by the category of mountain equipment ”, he comments.
To face the growth of recent years (from 2020 to 2021, turnover grew another 31%), Tradeinn has just invested around 15 million euros in doubling the capacity of its warehouse and robotizing part of its operations. With this investment, the company has a surface area of ??30,000m2 and a capacity to process 50,000 orders per day. The robots – in which the firm has invested five million – help increase efficiency, although labor is still relevant. Currently, the company employs around 500 people.
With this investment, Martín assures that operations will continue to be centralized in Celrà, although this year the company will subcontract a logistics warehouse in Germany to shorten delivery times in central Europe. Regarding everything else, Martín does not foresee any change. “We are fine as we are. We do not foresee acquisitions because they do not add value beyond the user data, which we already have”. There will be no shareholding changes either. Since the exit of the VentureCap fund in 2015, the company has been in the hands of David Martín (52%), the Barcelona fund Suma Capital (30%), the investor Didac Lee (17%) and other minority partners.