I was delighted to deliver on a promise to repurchase the ITTF marketing rights from TMS.

22 Nov 2016

The International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) and TMS International have announced that they are ending their fruitful exclusive commercial and marketing partnership on Sunday 1st January 2017. TMS International has been managing ITTF commercial rights since 2003 and managed to bring an unprecedented amount of marketing revenue to the International Federation. All of the TMS International deals brokered with marketing partners, contractual partners, sponsors, television networks will all be transferred back to the ITTF on Sunday 1st January 2017.

“Firstly, I would like to thank TMS on all their hard work over the years to assist the ITTF in commercialising our sport and bringing us a significant amount of marketing revenue. The time was right for a change and I welcome the new challenge of bringing all the commercial rights in house, which will be managed by the ITTF Marketing and Asia Pacific Headquarters under the guidance of ITTF’s Marketing Director Steve Dainton”, Thomas Weikert, ITTF President

TMS International will continue to service the sport of table tennis and other sports, through clubs, regional and continental associations and federations, with a special focus initially on North America.

“After many years representing the ITTF with their commercial rights, the timing was right for us to find this solution together with ITTF for the benefit of the sport; TMS had, more or less, reached its capacity of what we were able to generate for the ITTF, so for us to jointly look into this with the ITTF was not so difficult. With ITTF now looking after their own rights, it will give them some flexibility on how to handle their rights, some rights could be kept in-house, some other rights the ITTF can look elsewhere to get support, which I hope will benefit table tennis in the long-run.”, Anders Thunström, TMS International’s Managing Director.