Abu Dhabi,: Gulf Tech News
Something unusual happened in luxury this month. Three companies reported growing sales. Two of them saw their shares fall.
Richemont posted sales up 20%, with growth in every region and the jewellery segment extending double-digit gains to seven consecutive quarters. The stock rallied about 10% before easing back roughly 3%. Burberry reported comparable sales up 5%, with every product division growing for the first time in three years. Yet its shares fell 5% and remain around 3.85% below their pre-report level. Likewise, Moncler beat expectations with revenue up 5%, but its shares have dropped roughly 10% since.
According to Nagham Hassan, Market Analyst at etoro, growth alone no longer moves these stocks. What separates them is the quality of that growth, and whether investors believe it will still be there in a year.
Consider what Richemont sells. Customers do a different kind of mental accounting when they buy jewelry compared to when they buy a jacket. Cartier and Van Cleef buyers are often making decisions about the store of value when they choose a product, and so demand for their goods holds up when confidence wobbles. Richemont’s growth came from a category structurally less exposed to fashion cycles, and it arrived alongside strength in every geography. Nothing in the result needed a caveat.
By contrast, Burberry and Moncler both grew with an asterisk. Burberry saw real improvement, but this just early-stage repair work for a brand that has spent years off balance. The Middle East accounts for only about 2% of its business, yet the conflict cost it twice. Customers inside the region stopped spending, and Asian shoppers who would normally fly to Europe and buy at the London and Paris flagships stayed home, so the damage showed up in European sales rather than Middle Eastern ones. A brand can have almost no exposure to a region and still lose meaningful revenue when conflict disrupts how people travel.
Moncler’s problem is structural. Most of its revenue arrives in autumn and winter, making April to June its slowest quarter by some distance. It beat expectations in the three months that tell you least about the business, and the market read that as confirmation of the seasonality problem rather than progress against it. Building a summer business means new collections, which take years to reach shops.
Kering shows the same logic inverted. Its shares fell around 10% in June after Barclays warned that full-year targets looked increasingly out of reach, and have recovered only about 2% since. The weak quarter was not the surprise, since analysts had already forecast a decline. What seems to have shifted is how long investors think the recovery will take. The company reports on 28 July.
Hermès faces a subtler version of this dynamic. First-quarter growth of 5.6% would be respectable for most of the sector, but Hermès trades at 36 times forward earnings against a sector average of 24, and HSBC downgraded it because that outperformance gap is narrowing. Whether the premium holds will be clearer when the company reports on 29 July.
Bain projects 2% to 4% growth for the personal luxury goods market this year. A rising tide that size does not lift everyone. Roughly 70 million consumers have left luxury since 2022, and HSBC blames greedflation, raising prices beyond what costs required, alongside weak creativity in the product. Customers paid more for things that were not getting better, and many left. Those who went were the most price-sensitive, leaving a smaller and wealthier base.
LVMH reports 27 July, Prada and Brunello Cucinelli 30 July. For two years the question was whether luxury would recover. That is largely settled. The better question now is which brands the recovery belongs to, and the next two weeks of results will start to answer it.
