TALL and lithe, dressed in black, Jochen Zeitz slides into his seat with chilly elan. He is as buffed as a model – sandy hair, blue eyes, aquiline features – and as flinty as an iceberg. Ask him a question he wants to avoid, and he lets an answer just slip away before you notice it has gone.

Here’s one question: can his sports-lifestyle company Puma ever catch rivals Nike and Adidas?

“Not interested in catching them,” he shrugs, chin on hand, feigning boredom. “Whether you are three, two or one is mean-ingless. You need to be relevant and innovative; that’s what counts.”

He has a point. Chief executive of Puma since 1993, Zeitz, still only 44, is credited with transforming his company from an insular loss-maker to a global leviathan. And he did it by pioneering the surge of sports brands into the lifestyle arena, and making Puma one of Germany’s best-known businesses abroad.

Now all the global sports brands make more leisurewear than track shoes, and many are touting for top designers to produce high-fashion items. Zeitz, the youngest-ever boss of a publicly quoted German company, was there first.

He remains a star of global branding, and by reputation an obsessive controlling presence at Puma – he operated as his own board-level finance director until 2005 – with a lifestyle to match. Trained as a marketer by the American multinational Colgate-Palmolive, he speaks five languages, never wears a tie, keeps a holiday home in Africa, and flies his own planes.

In fact, he is out of Germany more often than he is in it. “Seven months of the year I am in hotels,” he sighs. His £8m salary and bonus – making him one of Europe’s highest-paid executives – is some compensation.

But Puma still trails its German rival Adidas and America’s Nike. Both are five times its size, having quickly followed Zeitz’s “sports lifestyle” path. Zeitz’s response is to push Puma even further into fashion – £180 Puma brogues, for instance – and save the company’s sports-marketing cash for less competitive territories such as Africa.

Hence his itinerary this month: the Africa Cup of Nations in Ghana – where four Puma-sponsored teams contested the semi-finals – London Fashion Week, then back to Puma’s base in Bavaria. He announces Puma’s annual results on Tuesday, then hits Paris Fashion Week from Wednesday.

That also reflects a key change at Puma. Last year Zeitz surprised many by encouraging PPR, the French luxury brand and retail group, to buy a majority stake in Puma, valuing the business at £3.6 billion – twice Puma’s annual sales (£1.8 billion).

PPR, which reports its results on Wednesday, had previously tried to lure Zeitz to head its Gucci subsidiary. Was this the most expensive executive poaching ever?

Zeitz, sitting in the coffee shop of his swish London hotel, tugs at his black poloneck. “You don’t spend billions of euros just to buy a boss, do you?” he says in his German-accented English. “And it was clear that they wanted me to stay at Puma, otherwise they didn’t want to buy it.”

It is also protection – Nike was rumoured to be circling. Zeitz waves that away. “I never do anything because I am worried. I do them because I believe in them.”

To prove that, he has signed on for another four years at Puma, and joined the PPR board. In return, PPR – which also owns the luxury brands Yves Saint Laurent, Boucheron, Bottega Veneta, Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen – has promised Puma arm’s-length independence.

So what does each party get out of the relationship?

Zeitz shuffles his designer-trainered feet. “It’s a perfect fit, there’s no cannibalisation. We are left to run our business but with a partner that could be supportive in many different areas. They want to internationalise, reduce dependency on the French market, and become more global. And Puma is a wonderful name.”

And the Puma brand may need help. Global sales jumped more than 50% from 2004 to 2006, but growth slowed to about 5% last year, hindered by difficulties in America.

So the business could bulk up to grow fast again. It has regularly achieved higher margins than its rivals, and Zeitz had been diffident about putting more brands in the group. Not any more. The support he wants includes brand-building expertise.

“Yes, eventually we would like to build nonPuma brands. We have just one so far - Tretorn, a casual, tennis-based sneaker company. I bought it in 2001. But they have to make sense, from a cultural and positional point of view, not just come out of the blue.”

Was the British brand Umbro, now being bought by Nike, a target? “Nah, too blood, sweat and tears.”

Meaning? “Not sexy enough,” he says. Creating sexy business is Zeitz’s passion. Born into a medical family near Heidelberg - his father was a gynaecologist and his mother a dentist - he was the youngest of three siblings, all marked to be doctors.

Zeitz was the only one to drop out, and since then has had a point to prove. He switched from medical school to business school in his early twenties, and took a job at Colgate on its new product team in New York.

He worked on developing new deodorants and medicines - “tremendous experience, 360 degrees of selling, marketing, financial, everything”. When Colgate eventually sent him back to Germany, he baulked at the slow progress he made there. And when a headhunter offered him a marketing job at Puma, he jumped. “Because as a kid, you were either Puma or Adidas – Puma was more individualist,” he says.

Back then the company was on the skids. Founded by Rudolf Dassler in 1948 – his brother Adi founded Adidas, and both businesses are based in the same Bavarian town – it had slumped into loss after the glory years of making Pele’s football boots.

“It was a mess, very bureaucratic, very traditional, very German-centric,” says Zeitz, frowning. “Our export manager could barely speak English.”

But the difficulties gave Zeitz the opportunity to rise fast. “We had three chief executives in two years, each one promoted me. Then we were taken over by a Swedish owner, who asked me to give a presentation about what I thought was wrong.”

The presentation won Zeitz the top job. He was just 29. “Everyone thought I would only last six months.”

He started by laying off staff, closing unprofitable production lines and warehouses. By 1994 he had recorded Puma’s first profits since 1986. Three more years of retrenchment were followed by five years of investment.

Colleagues say his mix of skills is unique. “In Germany, bosses are often from the finance side, or marketing,” says another Puma executive. “Jochen does both.”

Most importantly, says Zeitz, the brand was repositioned. “Puma in the 1980s was a cheap brand. I said let’s become premium. Let’s bring fashion and style into play.”

And he made Puma cool with a series of gambles, such as pouring money into Jamaican reggae. “We are a sports brand but we want to be something else, too. Jamaica is perfect. There are athletes but also the atmosphere, the climate, the music, the lifestyle.”

Design coups like the bodysuits worn by Serena Williams and the Cameroon football team kept Puma in the headlines. The difficulty is that rivals catch up quickly.

Since then, Adidas’s work with designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Stella McCartney has grabbed the fashion world’s attention. So Puma has to run faster.

More recently Puma’s sheer size has forced Zeitz to delegate more. Last year he appointed the first female deputy chief executive of a German listed company – a typical Puma move.

The Beijing Olympics and European football championships promise a good summer ahead. Puma sponsors World Cup winners Italy. But Zeitz wants more sales in China, and more input on retail. Puma has 116 flagship stores globally and 400 other outlets.

“We are good retailers, but not yet great retailers.” That’s another area PPR can advise on, he says.

PPR, for its part, will want to tune into his antennae for cool - the Zeitz-geist – which brought them together in the first place. Who rang who?

“Rumour has it that I turned down the Gucci job,” says Zeitz straight-faced, “but we stayed in touch.” He is on good terms with PPR’s 45-year-old boss, François-Henri Pinault. “Culturally, it’s a good match.”

Further details of the tie-in will be announced in Paris, he promises. PPR intends to buy all Puma’s shares over time, taking the company off the stock market.

Will it inexorably become a luxury brand?

“No,” he says. “We are sports, lifestyle and fashion. But we can strengthen our upmarket approach.”

Will Zeitz end up as PPR’s chief executive? He laughs. “Puma is enough for me.” Anyway, he is late for another meeting. He gives me his e-mail address. Just send any queries, he says, he will respond.

I do. He doesn’t. I was probably wearing the wrong shoes.

JOCHEN ZEITZ’S WORKING DAY

THE Puma chief executive wakes at his house near Nuremberg at 6.30am. Jochen Zeitz starts the day with a protein shake, checks his e-mails and then drives 25 minutes to Puma’s head office in Herzogenaurach.

He oversees a range of matters. “If we sign a new designer or creative director, I will meet them. If it’s a new athlete or footballer, people ask my advice. I also look at daily sales figures – Asia in the morning, China in particular.” Many of his key executives are based abroad.

He drives home at 8pm, then works on e-mail till after 10pm. “I don’t do work/social functions. I hate that.”

VITAL STATISTICS

Born:April 6, 1963

Marital status:married, with no children

School:Karl-Friedrich Gymnasium, Mannheim

University:European Business School, Frankfurt

First job:product manager, Colgate-Palmolive

Salary package:€10.65m (£8m)

Homes:Nuremberg, Ibiza, Kenya

Car:white Land Rover Defender

Favourite book:For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway

Favourite music:The Rolling Stones

Favourite film:Legends of the Fall

Favourite gadget:Blackberry

Last holiday:‘I haven’t had one. My life is a holiday.’

DOWNTIME

JOCHEN ZEITZ likes to get away from it all in Africa. “I have been travelling there every year for 18 years,” he said. “I love the place and the people. It’s the only time I really relax.”

He has a farm in Kenya, and runs his own African charitable foundation. “It looks after wildlife, and provides renewable energy for communities.” He also has a holiday home in Ibiza.

Zeitz flies himself around America. “I don’t have a plane; I just rent them. The landscapes are so beautiful.” He also runs, trains in the gym and reads a lot. “I like to learn and study other cultures.”