French luxury group Kering proved to be very successful in 2017: its turnover grew 25 % and its net profit more than doubled compared to the year before.
“Spectacular year”
Kering’s 2017 turnover reached 15.48 billion euro, up 25 % compared to the year before. Its luxury brands, which contributed 10.8 billion euro, performed extremely well: Gucci spiked 42 % to 6.2 billion euro and Yves Saint Laurent grew 23 % to 1.5 billion euro. According to Kering, Gucci experienced a “spectacular year”, with a turnover that surpassed 6 billion euro for the first time ever. Western European like-for-like turnover grew an astonishing 57.5 % for Gucci’s own store network and North America also added a decent 43.9 % growth.
The brand’s powerful surge meant that Yves Saint Laurent was only second best, despite a 23 % turnover increase. The Sport & Lifestyle division, almost entirely devoted to Puma, grew 12.8 % to 4.4 billion euro. Puma’s own turnover grew 14 % and it contributed 4.2 billion euro to the division’s result.
“Phenomenal performance”
That turnover growth obviously also impacted Kering’s profit result: EBIT grew 56.3 % to 2.95 billion euro and its net profit even more than doubled, from 813.5 million euro to 1.79 billion euro.
“Kering delivered a phenomenal year in 2017. We created over 3 billion euros in additional revenues in a single year, and generated more than a billion in additional EBIT”, a proud CEO François-Henri Pinault said. “In a global environment that remains uncertain, we will not relax our vigilance, but we are confident that the complementarity of our Houses, our geographic footprint, the diversity of our customer base and the strengths of an integrated Luxury Group will enable us, this year again, to do much better than our markets.”