Short answers, pulled from the story.
Benito and Giuseppe Panini started the business in 1960 by operating a newspaper distribution office in Modena, Italy. They established Panini as a manufacturing entity in 1961 after selling three million packets of figurines.
Panini published its first FIFA World Cup sticker album for the 1970 tournament held in Mexico. The company began selling stickers outside of Italy that same year using multilingual captions.
Kobe Bryant served as the official company spokesman and global trading card ambassador starting in 2009. He grew up collecting Italian football stickers before his NBA career.
Five million people gathered digital stickers for the 2018 World Cup through an app developed for that tournament. This followed a 2014 contest where three million FIFA.com users participated.
In March 2009, The Panini Group purchased assets of Donruss Playoff LP to form the new subsidiary known as Panini America. The company continued operations out of Irving, Texas with much of the existing upper management remaining.