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LOUIS VUITTON

Louis Vuitton group posts record sales

The luxury group LVMH, which includes Louis Vuitton, bucked the slowdown in the global luxury market, posting a four percent increase in sales last year to a record €29.15 billion ($39.5), although net profits were flat at 3.4 billion.

Published: 31 January 2014 09:40 CET
Louis Vuitton group posts record sales
The luxury group posted record sales despite the slowdown in the global luxury market. Photo: George Groutas

The top luxury group said its profits from recurring operations broke the €6 billion level for the first time, rising two percent to 6.021 billion.

Last year "saw another excellent performance from LVMH despite exchange rate volatility and slower growth in the European markets," the company's chief executive Bernard Arnault said in a statement.

Organic growth slowed to eight percent from the nine percent recorded in 2012.

The results were slightly below expectation of a net profit of €3.5 billion on sales of 29.34 billion with profit from recurring operations at 6.05 billion, according the consensus of analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires.

LVMH, whose stable of brands includes Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Moet & Chandon, Dom Perignon, Guerlain, kept its operating margin stable near 21 percent.

Sales in the fashion and luxury goods segment, the biggest for the group, dipped 0.4 percent to 9.9 percent in reported terms but grew 5 percent on an organic basis, which eliminates exchange rate fluctuations and changes in the company's structure.

Watches and jewelry also dipped on a reported basis, but other segments reported sales growth in both reported and organic terms.

Arnault explained the slowdown in growth to the headwinds hitting the sector due to the global economic situation, as well as developments in certain countries such as China, where a crackdown on corruption has hit sales of luxury items.

The strong euro also hurt the results and the company shifted its offer, including in Louis Vuitton where it new favours the high-end leather bags instead of other models.

The French company nevertheless expressed confidence for its outlook.

"Despite an uncertain economic environment in Europe, LVMH is well-equipped to continue its growth momentum across all business groups in 2014," it said in a statement.

The company's management proposed a seven percent increase in its dividend payment to €3.10 per share.

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ART

Paris show of masterpieces unseen in West proves a smash hit

A smash-hit Paris show of one the world's greatest private collections of modern art is to be extended after 600,000 people flocked to see it in just 10 weeks.

Published: 10 January 2017 08:40 CET
Paris show of masterpieces unseen in West proves a smash hit
Photo: AFP

“Icons of Modern Art” at the Louis Vuitton Foundation features the cream of the staggering collection of 250 paintings put together by Sergei Shchukin before the Bolshevik Revolution, which had never before been seen outside Russia.

The show includes 29 works by Picasso, 22 by Matisse, 12 by Gauguin and other top-notch Cezannes and Van Goghs that the super-rich textile merchant picked up on trips to Paris before World War I.

With 60,000 people a week flocking to the spectacular though relatively modest-sized private gallery designed by Frank Gehry, its hours are being extended to try to cope with the demand, with doors opening seven days a week until 11:00 pm (2200 GMT) in February.

In the final week of the extended run, which ends on March 5, the foundation in the west of the French capital will stay open till 1:00 am.

The gallery — paid for by the French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault — will lay on a breakfast every morning for visitors in the final week when doors open at 7:00 am, it told AFP.



Magritte blockbuster

That could end up amounting to quite a mountain of croissants as the show's attendance is already outstripping the blockbuster “Magritte” exhibit at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which is currently pulling in 6,000 people a day.

As well as the impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces, the exhibition also includes 30 major pieces from the Russian avant-garde suprematist and constructivist movements, loaned by the Tretyakov State Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in St Petersburg.

Shchukin, who fled Russia for France after the revolution, had a particularly close relationship with Henri Matisse, whom he brought to Moscow in 1911 to decorate his palatial home.

He also commissioned two of the artist's most important works, “The Dance” and “Music”, which are the centrepieces of the Paris show, curated by the former head of the city's Picasso Museum, Anne Baldassari.

Lenin himself signed the decree to expropriate the works, before Stalin scattered the collection to museums in Moscow and St Petersburg, condemning some of the greatest masterpieces of 20th-century art as “bourgeois and cosmopolitan”.

The exhibition is the fruit of years of negotiations between LVMH boss Arnault and the Russian authorities, with a partnership agreement signed last year between the foundation and the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and Moscow's Pushkin Museum.