L’Occitane: Elemis investment pays back
The beauty retailer L’Occitane International (3,420 points of sales including 1,572 company-owned stores), announced net sales of € 727 million in the quarter to late September 2019, that being a 22.1% increase year-on-year. Sales of L’Occitane en Provence, core brand of the group, grew 5.7% thanks to product launches and account for 76.3% of group’s H1 net sales. “We continue to build on the initial success of the Immortelle Reset serum to strengthen our skin-care position, said Thomas Levilion, Chief Finantial Officer. “We sold 500,000 units in the first half, and we’re on track to exceed one million this year.”
In January 2019, the group acquired the British skin-care brand Elemis for US$900 million. Elemis is now the group’s second largest brand, after L’Occitane en Provence, with €84.2 million in sales (11.6% of total revenue) and is sold online, on third-party marketplaces and present in approximatively 425 retail stores at High Street locations in the U.K. (John Lewis, Debenhams), World Duty Free, Ulta, etc. According to Thomas Levilion, the growth is attributed to strong sales and key geographic investments. For 2019, the U.S.A. (16% of sales), Japan (16%), the U.K., China and Hong Kong were L’Occitane’s top 5 markets. China accounted for 10.5% of the group’s H1 net sales, via about 190 L’Occitane stores in Mainland China.
