Kering
Kering S.A. is a French multinational luxury goods company headquartered in Paris. It owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Brioni, Boucheron, Pomellato, Qeelin, Ginori 1735, Kering Eyewear and Kering Beauté, and holds a substantial minority of Valentino. It is the second largest luxury group in the world after LVMH and, like that company, is controlled by a French family.
| Kering S.A. | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | Euronext Paris: KER; CAC 40 component |
| Industry | Luxury goods |
| Founded | 1963 as Pinault S.A.; renamed Kering in 2013 |
| Founder | François Pinault |
| Headquarters | Paris, France |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | François-Henri Pinault (chairman), Luca de Meo (chief executive), Armelle Poulou (chief financial officer) |
| Products | Leather goods, ready-to-wear, footwear, watches, jewellery, eyewear, beauty |
| Revenue | Approximately €17.2 billion (2024) |
| Employees | Approximately 47,000 |
| Website | kering.com |
The company's name, adopted in 2013, derives from the Breton word ker, meaning home or hamlet, a reference to François Pinault's origins in Brittany, and is pronounced in the same way as the English word caring, which the company has said is intentional.
Kering's history is unusual among luxury companies in that it was not built around a house. It began as a timber and building materials business, became a retail conglomerate, and converted itself into a luxury group between 1999 and 2018 by acquiring brands and disposing of everything else, a transformation conducted over two decades and completed by the sale of Puma in 2018.
History
Timber, distribution and retail, 1963 to 1998
François Pinault left school at sixteen and entered his family's timber business in Brittany, founding Pinault S.A. in 1963. He expanded through the acquisition of distressed businesses in wood and building materials, bought at low prices during downturns and restructured, a method he pursued with a reputation for ruthlessness, and the company listed on the Paris exchange in 1988.
It moved into retail and distribution in the 1990s, acquiring the electrical distributor CFAO, the office supplies company Guilbert, the mail order retailer La Redoute, the furniture chain Conforama, the entertainment retailer Fnac and, in 1994, the department store group Printemps, after which the company became Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, abbreviated PPR. By the late 1990s it was among the largest retailers in Europe.
Gucci and the contest with LVMH, 1999 to 2004
In January 1999 Bernard Arnault's LVMH began buying shares in Gucci Group, accumulating 34.4 per cent with the evident intention of taking control. Gucci, which had been revived from near-collapse by the chief executive Domenico De Sole and the designer Tom Ford, resisted, and issued shares to an employee share ownership plan to dilute LVMH.
Gucci then invited PPR to act as a white knight. In March 1999 PPR bought 42 per cent of Gucci for approximately US$3 billion, diluting LVMH further, and litigation followed in the Netherlands, where Gucci was incorporated. The Amsterdam Enterprise Chamber found in 2001 that the employee share issue had been improper but declined to unwind the PPR investment, and a settlement was reached under which LVMH sold its stake and PPR undertook to buy out Gucci's remaining shareholders by 2004, which it did at US$85.52 a share.
The contest, conducted publicly and with considerable acrimony between Pinault and Arnault, established the rivalry between the two families that has shaped French luxury since. It also gave PPR Gucci and the brands Gucci Group had itself acquired, including Yves Saint Laurent, bought from Sanofi in 1999, Boucheron, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney.
Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole left in 2004 after failing to agree terms with the new owner, a departure widely regarded at the time as ruinous and which Gucci survived.
Conversion into a luxury group, 2005 to 2018
François-Henri Pinault, the founder's son, became chief executive in 2005 and directed the disposal of everything that was not luxury.
Printemps was sold in 2006, Conforama in 2011, Fnac demerged in 2013, La Redoute sold in 2014 and CFAO disposed of between 2012 and 2015. The company bought the German sportswear company Puma in 2007 for approximately €5.3 billion, together with Volcom and Cobra Golf, and distributed Puma to shareholders in 2018, completing the transformation.
Acquisitions on the luxury side included the jewellers Pomellato and Dodo in 2013, the Chinese jeweller Qeelin in 2012, the Swiss watchmakers Girard-Perregaux and Ulysse Nardin, sold in 2022, the Italian tailor Brioni in 2011, and the establishment of Kering Eyewear in 2014, which brought the design and manufacture of the group's sunglasses in house rather than licensing them, a move LVMH subsequently imitated.
The company was renamed Kering in 2013.
Gucci's recovery under the chief executive Marco Bizzarri and the creative director Alessandro Michele, appointed in 2015, was the most dramatic in recent luxury history. Michele's maximalist, historically referential and deliberately eccentric aesthetic reversed the brand's decline and took its revenue from approximately €3.9 billion in 2015 to more than €9.6 billion in 2019, and for several years Gucci produced the majority of Kering's profit.
Difficulties and the change of leadership, 2019 to 2026
The same concentration became the company's principal problem. Michele's aesthetic, having defined a period, ceased to sell; he left in November 2022 and Sabato De Sarno was appointed, his collections were received without enthusiasm, and he departed in February 2025. Gucci's revenue fell substantially in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and because it constituted roughly half the group's sales and a larger share of profit, Kering's results fell with it.
Balenciaga produced a separate difficulty in November 2022, when an advertising campaign photographed children holding bags with accessories resembling bondage equipment, and a second campaign included, in the background of an image, documents referring to a Supreme Court judgment on child pornography. The reaction was severe and international. The company withdrew the campaigns, apologised, commenced and then withdrew legal proceedings against its own production company, and the creative director Demna issued a personal apology; the brand's sales were affected for more than a year.
Kering acquired a 30 per cent interest in Valentino in 2023 for €1.7 billion with an arrangement permitting it to acquire the remainder by 2028, and acquired the fragrance house Creed for approximately €3.5 billion in 2023 as the basis of Kering Beauté, having previously licensed its beauty operations. It bought substantial real estate in Paris, Milan and New York in 2023 and 2024, spending more than €3 billion on flagship locations on the reasoning that control of the best retail sites is a durable asset, a judgement that added debt at a point when trading was deteriorating.
In September 2025 the company announced that Luca de Meo, chief executive of Renault, would become chief executive of Kering, with François-Henri Pinault remaining chairman. The appointment of an executive from outside the luxury industry was unusual and was read as an acknowledgement that the group required operational rather than creative reorganisation. Demna, who had left Balenciaga, was appointed artistic director of Gucci in 2025, a selection that surprised the industry given his association with the aesthetic that had produced Balenciaga's difficulties.
Sustainability
Kering has been the most prominent luxury company on environmental reporting and is generally ranked first among its peers in independent assessments.
Its Environmental Profit and Loss account, developed from 2011 and published since 2015, assigns a monetary value to the environmental effects of its operations and its entire supply chain, covering greenhouse gases, water use and pollution, air pollution, land use and waste, from the farm on which the leather originated to the shop in which the product is sold. The methodology was made public so that others could use it, and it established that the great majority of a luxury company's environmental impact occurs in raw material production rather than in its own operations, a finding that has shaped the industry's approach.
The company has set targets for reducing that impact in absolute terms, has committed to regenerative agriculture on a very large area of land supplying its materials, has prohibited fur across its brands from 2022, exotic skins in certain categories, and angora, and has published animal welfare standards. It co-founded the Fashion Pact in 2019 at the request of the French government, bringing together a substantial proportion of the industry on climate, biodiversity and oceans.
The criticism made is that a luxury company's business consists of persuading people to buy objects they do not need, that the most effective environmental measure available to it would be to sell fewer of them, and that no amount of supply chain improvement addresses this. Kering's answer is that luxury goods are made to last and are increasingly resold, that its products displace cheaper and more wasteful alternatives, and that an industry which cannot be abolished should at least be conducted as well as possible.
Corporate affairs
The Pinault family controls the company through Artémis, which holds approximately 42 per cent of the capital and 59 per cent of the votes under the French double voting rights available to long-term shareholders. Artémis also owns Christie's, the auction house, acquired in 1998; the wine estate Château Latour; the football club Stade Rennais; the magazine Point de Vue; and other assets.
François Pinault assembled one of the most significant private collections of contemporary art in the world, displayed at the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana in Venice and, since 2021, at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, converted for the purpose by Tadao Ando.
The family's rivalry with the Arnaults of LVMH is among the enduring features of French business, conducted over Gucci in 1999, over Christie's, over artists and over the acquisition of brands, and has been a subject of continuous press attention in France.
Competition
Kering competes with LVMH, which is roughly four times its size and owns Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Céline, Loewe, Tiffany and a very large number of other houses; with Richemont in jewellery and watches; with Chanel and Hermès, both privately held and both conspicuously successful; with Prada; with Burberry and Ferragamo among the smaller listed houses; and with Moncler, Brunello Cucinelli and a set of brands that have grown rapidly from a narrow base.
Its structural position is weaker than LVMH's in two respects. It is considerably more concentrated, with Gucci historically producing around half of revenue against Louis Vuitton's smaller share of a much larger group, so that a single brand's difficulties become the company's. And it lacks the wine, spirits, retail and hospitality businesses that diversify its rival's earnings. Its strength is that its brands are creatively distinctive and that Gucci, Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta each have genuine cultural standing, and the group's recovery depends substantially on whether Gucci can be made desirable again, a question that has been answered affirmatively twice before.