It’s been almost a year since the tennis racket maker Technifibre was acquired by Lacoste, and their CEO Nicolas Préault was recently interviewed on how the merger is going. And, when he was asked, Nicolas was extremely enthusiastic about the advantages that Lacoste brings to his company:

“Now with the arrival of Lacoste we can think about a lot of things. It was my first mission when I arrived a few months ago. Thierry Guibert (Lacoste’s CEO) asked me to first of all set up the future for the next five years of the future with Tecnifibre; this is done, and then to think about all the possible synergies.

“There are two types of synergies that we are going to set up. The first one is what you can call a classic company where a big company buys a small one. Today we can use all the expertise and the power of the Lacoste group in terms of human resources, in term of legal department, in term of IT systems and so on and so forth. This is very important for us because we move from 45 people to 10,000 collaborators so it’s very important, but it’s not enough.

“There is a second part of the synergy which is much more strategical. The starting point of the thinking that we have set up as a team is to say, well, who are our consumers? The consumers of Tecnifibre are for sure the players, and there are different types of players, in terms of style, in terms of frequency of playing, but the players have some needs which are linked to different parts in terms of product categories, so there are textiles, there are shoes, there are racquets, there are strings, balls and when you think about the market today you have some giants in this market, for example Nike, which have been selling a lot of textiles and shoes but no racquets on one side and on the other side you have another giant like Wilson or Babolat or Head—even some challengers that are moving up like Yonex—which are selling a lot of racquets, strings, balls—they try to sell textile but it’s quite tough and we cannot say that today those guys are really pushing on textiles.”

You can read more of the interview at TennisNow.com.