Yahoo Finance Succession drama grips Gucci as sales fail to make the cut
As a stream of A-list celebrities took their seats in the basement of Tate Modern earlier this week for Gucci’s latest cruise collection, executives appeared relaxed.
Seated next to his wife, Salma Hayek, François-Henri Pinault, the chief executive of Gucci owner Kering, “beamed confidently”, wrote The Telegraph’s head of fashion Lisa Armstrong after the show.
Pinault and Gucci’s 600 other guests, who included Debbie Harry, Demi Moore and Dua Lipa, had gathered to see the latest collection by Sabato De Sarno, the luxury brand’s new creative director, in his first show outside of Milan.
After years of declining sales at Gucci, De Sarno has his work cut out in winning back customers.
Last year, Kering revealed Gucci’s revenue had slipped another 6pc to €9.9bn (£8.5bn). It recently said that it was expecting profits across its business to fall as much as 45pc in the first six months of the year, placing the lion’s share of the blame at Gucci’s door.
Increasingly, the poor performance is causing frustration among investors, who have seen the value of Pinault’s empire crumble.
Shares in Kering are down 57pc since their peak in August 2021, giving it a market value of €41bn. It is a bitter pill for Pinault to swallow after Kering’s biggest rival, LVMH, enjoyed a record year in 2023, propelling its valuation to almost €398bn and placing it only behind Novo Nordisk, the maker of the diabetes drug Ozempic which is also used off label for weight loss.
Pinault once said that Gucci might have “the same potential as Louis Vuitton over time”. His reasoning? “Why not?”
However, six years after those comments were made, such confidence appears misplaced. Some investors are even beginning to ask whether Pinault should consider passing the baton at his luxury empire and bring in fresh blood.
“Performance at Kering has been lacklustre,” says GlobalData’s Neil Saunders. “As the latest quarterly numbers show, there are few signs of improvement on the horizon. This does raise the question as to whether new leadership is needed.”
Pinault inherited the luxury empire two decades ago after his father retired aged 64.
Today, aged 60, Pinault is chairman and chief executive of Kering, as well as president of its ultimate parent company Groupe Artémis.
Together, the Pinault family has a 42pc stake in Kering and control 59pc of its voting rights.
While Pinault has been adamant that he has not been training his children to succeed him, last month he moved to bring the next generation into the fold, appointing his 26-year-old son as a director on the board of auctioneer Christie’s.
The younger Pinault, who started his career with an internship at Boucheron, a Kering-owned jewellery business, and who is also called Francois, replaced his grandfather and Kering founder on the Christie’s board. He is the eldest of Pinault’s four children. For some time he has been earmarked as the natural heir, appearing alongside his father and grandfather in 2016 when they announced the creation of the Bourse de Commerce in 2016.
Experts say he is still too young for the top job, but his appointment at Christie’s was viewed as the first step towards his ascension.
Insiders say the problems within the luxury conglomerate have stemmed from how the dozens of brands within the Kering empire are managed.
“The Pinault family was very removed from the daily management of the brands,” says one former director. “All the various Kering brands’ chief executives have an uncommon freedom of actions.” This is in stark contrast to LVMH, which the former director said is “continuously controlled by the Arnault family and their immediate trusted top executives”.
Some observers claim this hands-off approach has led to a lack of focus within many of Kering’s brands – not least within Gucci which has been hit by a series of designer and management changes.
Pinault said in 2014 that focusing on quantity over quality at Gucci “would be the greatest danger to the brand”.
Yet, just years later Gucci sought a sales boost by targeting swathes of younger, more aspirational US and Chinese shoppers, which experts say has eroded the exclusivity of the label.
It has come amid confusion over leadership after star designer Alessandro Michele left in 2022.
“Investors were left hanging before they announced a replacement,” says HSBC’s Erwan Rambourg. De Sarno was named as its new creative director last year.
The shake-up went further last year when Gucci’s then-chief executive Marco Bizzarri announced his departure after eight years in the job. It appointed number-cruncher Jean-François Palus as a temporary replacement. He has since taken up the role permanently.
Rambourg says this approach to succession planning for the brands is something that would not happen at rival LVMH. “At LVMH, every brand’s chief executive has a number of possible replacements and that is reflected every time you hear about a change,” he says.
There are early signs that Pinault is waking up to this, with insiders saying they believe the family have taken steps to “try to be more involved in the strategies and brand positioning of each brand”.
However, critics say recent moves instead indicate that Pinault is planning a change to how Kering is run, and even potentially considering a different type of succession.
In last year’s leadership shake-up Francesca Bellettini, Yves Saint Laurent chief executive and rising star, was appointed to a new role as Kering’s co-deputy chief executive, with the remit of reinvigorating its brands.
It follows years of investors pushing for Pinault to consider bringing senior leaders into the fray. “It would be a positive if Kering gets professionally managerialised,” one shareholder says. They suggest that the business could flourish if Pinault stepped to the side, relinquishing his role as chief executive.
Some view Bellettini’s promotion as the first step towards Pinault splitting the top position into two roles. “You could imagine a time when he would keep the role of chairman and give the group CEO position to a luxury heavyweight internally or externally,” says Rambourg.
As Pinault approaches the age when his father passed the mantle, scrutiny over who will replace him is increasing. For the elder Pinault, timing was everything. “I felt that he was getting fidgety and I didn’t want to hand over to him too late,” the Kering founder had said.
In the hours before models walked out on the runway for Gucci’s show on Monday, Hayek shared an Instagram post with the caption: “The calm before the Cruise”.
With investors getting fidgety, Pinault will need to act soon before their nerves spill over and trigger a storm.
