In 2022, Kering generated €20.35 billion in revenue, of which €10.49 billion from Gucci (50.6%), €3.3 billion from Yves Saint Laurent (15.9%), €1.74 billion from Bottega Veneta (8.39%), and €3.87 billion from the other houses.
Indeed, Gucci contributed to over 50% of the Kering Group revenue in 2022.
There is also another interesting aspect of it.
In the late 1990s, the luxury sector started consolidating in the hands of a few prominent players, including LVMH, headed by Bernard Arnault.
Arnault had tried to take over Gucci, but a war ensued as the executive team at Gucci tried all it could to prevent LVMH from taking over.
They knew that once Bernard Arnault had taken a stake in the company, he would have taken control shortly (that was the aggressive playbook used by Arnault).
Indeed, while LVMH had successfully acquired a stake in Gucci, it never managed to gain a majority stake.
Eventually, Gucci went into the hands of another french billionaire, Pinault, which created the only luxury group able to compete against LVMH.
LVMH is a luxury group owned by the Arnault family, which generated over €86 billion ($93 billion) in revenues for 2023, with a luxury empire that spans many segments. Yet the fashion and leather goods segment (comprising brands like Fendi and Louis Vuitton) is the major one, generating €42.17 billion in revenue in 2023 (nearly 50% of total revenue).
Today, Kering and LVMH combined to form two luxury giants, now a good chunk of the most iconic luxury brands.
A few brands, like Prada, managed to stay independent.
The family-owned Italian luxury brand – Prada – generated over four billion euros in revenues for 2022. Among Prada brands, Prada made more than 87% of the company’s revenues, followed by Miu Miu and Church. Prada also owns Marchesi 1824 (a luxury bakery) and Car Shoe (a shoe company) made about half a percent of the total revenues.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
