Puig, the family-owned Spanish beauty conglomerate, announced plans for an initial public offering on the stock exchanges in Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao and Valencia. The company owns 14 brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Paco Rabanne and Byredo, as well as a number of fragrance licences.

The company hopes to raise €1.25 billion ($1.3 billion) through the first round of IPO, followed by a larger secondary sale that would bring the total fundraising north of €2.5 billion. The Puig family will retain a majority stake in the company and the “vast” majority of voting rights, the company said.

In 2023, Puig reported net revenues of €4.3 billion ($4.6 billion), up 19 percent, while net profit rose to €465 million ($503 million), up 16 percent on the previous year.

In October 2023, chairman Marc Puig confirmed the group was mulling an IPO among other strategic options to raise fresh capital. In a statement released today, Marc Puig said the decision was a “decisive step” in the company’s 110-year history, and that it was important to ensure the “right checks and balances” were in place during a “generational transition.”

“We believe that the balance of being a family-owned company that is also subject to market accountability will allow us to better compete in the international beauty market during the next phase of the company’s development,” said Marc Puig, adding that being a publicly listed company will align its corporate structure with those of best-in-class, family-owned companies in the global premium beauty sector. Top industry players such as L’Oréal and Estée Lauder have long been publicly traded, as well as retaining founding family ownership stakes.

The company plans to further diversify into skincare and makeup, and focus on prioritising brands it owns outright rather than licenses, which can be expensive to renew and disruptive when they lapse. 95 percent of revenues came from fully-owned or majority-owned brands like Paco Rabanne, Dries Van Noten or Nina Ricci last year, Puig said.

The company has been making more acquisitions of late – in January, it purchased luxury skincare brand Dr. Barbara Sturm, following its acquisitions of Byredo and Charlotte Tilbury since 2020.

“Our unique and creative DNA has allowed us to attract leading founders and brands… We strongly believe that building premium brands requires long-term thinking,” Marc Puig said.

Currently, fragrance is Puig’s largest revenue driver. But the group’s smallest segment, skincare, grew the most in 2023, with revenues up 31 percent to €431 million ($466 million). The company has long been profitable, Puig added.

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The head of Rolex SA said viewing luxury watches as investments is dangerous following a surge in interest from speculators during the pandemic.

“I don’t like it when people compare watches with stocks. This sends the wrong message and is dangerous,” chief executive officer Jean-Frédéric Dufour said in a rare interview with Swiss newspaper NZZ ahead of the Watches and Wonders trade show which begins this week in Geneva.

Led by brands including Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet, prices for pre-owned watches soared to unprecedented levels in 2021 and early 2022 as speculators, boosted by low interest rates and soaring cryptocurrency values, snapped up expensive Swiss timepieces.

But secondary market prices have fallen sharply in the past two years amid weaker economic growth and higher interest rates. The Bloomberg Subdial Watch Index, which tracks prices for the 50 most traded timepieces by value, has declined 40 percent in the past two years.

Rolex is the biggest Swiss watch brand and dominates the industry with an estimated 30 percent market share. Known for its Datejust, Daytona and Submariner models, the Geneva-based company’s sales crossed 10 billion Swiss francs ($11.1 billion) for the first time in 2023, according to estimates by Morgan Stanley.

Dufour, who has led Rolex since 2015, told NZZ that he expects 2024 to be a difficult year for the Swiss watch industry as demand slows from the peak.

Bloomberg News reported in December that the surge in retail demand for the top Swiss watchmakers’ products had slowed significantly after three years of frenzied buying.

The Rolex CEO said the slowdown will hit sales of smaller watch brands hardest. “The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction, and it is naturally more pronounced for the less established brands,” he said. “While they may have seen a 20% increase in sales during the upswing, they may now experience a 15 percent decline.”

“For the big brands, the fluctuations are smaller,” Dufour added.

Watchmakers tend to overproduce during good times and when markets weaken, retailers come under pressure to cut prices. “This is extremely problematic because discounts damage emotional products like ours,” Dufour said.

The Rolex boss said the strong value of the Swiss franc against other currencies is also adding to pressures on the industry, as is the rising cost of raw materials such as gold.

“The increased interest rates are also affecting people’s spending mood, and the geopolitical situation isn’t helping either,” he said.

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Spanish beauty and cosmetics company Puig Group SL is planning to announce its intention to hold an initial public offering as soon as this coming week, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Barcelona-based, family-owned firm plans to file the so-called Intention to Float document as soon as April 8, the people said. Puig and its current shareholders aim to raise between €2 billion and €3 billion ($2.17 billion-$3.2 billion) with the listing, which will be in Madrid, according to the people.

Deliberations are ongoing and details of the offering could change, the people said. A press officer for Puig declined to comment.

The decision comes after another Spanish firm, the car and auto-parts logistics company Bergé y Compañía announced on April 4 that it was scrapping plans to list its Astara unit amid lukewarm investor interest. Berge’s decision was a setback for bankers, who had been counting on a stream of listings between the Easter holiday and the start of the summer vacation season.

Companies have been prepping for IPOs, emboldened by the surge in benchmark stock indexes to record highs and recent successful offerings from the skincare company Galderma Group AG in Switzerland and social networking platform Reddit Inc. in the US.

But investors still haven’t gotten past their nervousness over the surge in interest rates that kicked off in early 2022, causing the IPO market to falter. An offering last month from the German perfume retailer Douglas AG also fell flat.

Astara’s offering also would have helped revive Spain’s IPO market, where there have been no sizable listings since Acciona SA’s clean-energy unit went public in 2021.

Founded in 1914, Puig is still controlled by the founding family. The company makes perfume, skincare and beauty products as well as clothing, with brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Barbara Sturm and Jean Paul Gaultier.

In 2023, Puig posted net revenues of €4.3 billion, up 19% from 2022, and record earnings before interest, taxes, amortization and depreciation of €849 million, with an EBITDA margin of 20%, the company said in March.

By Swetha Gopinath, Rodrigo Orihuela and Macarena Muñoz, with assistance from Manuel Baigorri.

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Last month when Coachella tickets went on sale and did not immediately sell out, it touched off a bit of soul searching. The two-weekend music festival had, bit by bit and then all at once, built its identity as the influencer event of the year.

Those tickets did eventually sell, but there was still a lingering fear among the selfie set: if 150,000 people showed up in the California desert and their TikToks didn’t go viral, did Coachella really happen?

It’s a pressing question for fashion and beauty brands, too. Coachella has played host to some of the industry’s most over-the-top marketing activations over the years, and turned niche labels into Instagram sensations. Countless brands release “festival edits,” with a mix of new items and Coachella-friendly selections from their inventory (this year, prairie dresses and jorts are proving popular, while more dressed up styles, such as sequined dresses, are on the way out, according to retail analytics firm Edited). Festival sponsors make over gas stations, build party houses from scratch and host elaborate, all-day events with their own slates of musical artists. The Revolve Festival, hosted by the influencer-friendly online apparel brand since 2015, is a veritable institution at this point; the brand’s sales now top $1 billion.

This year, Revolve Festival is down to one day, from two (the status of the region’s gas stations remains unknown at press time). It’s contributing to a general sense that Coachella is less essential than it used to be. Music lovers, influencers and brands now have their pick of all-day concerts. Of retailers tracked by Edited, just one, Wolf & Badger, has released a Coachella edit, with others opting for a generic “festival edit,” albeit often with desert themes. Tecovas, a western wear brand that can thank Coachella in part for the surging popularity of its cowboy boots among non-cowboys, has no official presence at the festival, opting to sponsor the country-themed Stagecoach at the same venue later this month.

Coachella is also feeling the effects of changes in the marketing world, particularly in how influencers build and monetise their brands. Take Aimee Song, a Revolve Festival regular, whose Song of Style collection has been sold by the company since 2019. She is independently launching a new luxury knitwear line, Amiya, and says she wants the clothes to be the main attraction, rather than her Instagram feed. Coachella doesn’t feel like the right place to market $1,000 sweaters.

That’s not to say the festival is a flop. Plenty of fashion and fashion-adjacent brands will be on site, with Paper and Nylon magazines and True Religion hosting events, among others. Levi’s still sponsors the Neon Carnival dance party, and Nike will be pushing its newly released Air Max Dns.

And if you still question whether Coachella still has a unique ability to draw attention, check out the frenzy over reports that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were making the trek to see Friday’s headliner, Lana Del Rey. The couple definitely weren’t in the audience for the singer’s stops in Huntsville, Alabama or Burgettstown, Pennsylvania.

“I am a Coachella guy,” Kelce told People.

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