LVMH boss Bernard Arnault visits China

Bernard Arnault, CEO of global luxury goods leader LVMH, is currently in China, according to online publications, the latest foreign boss to visit the country after the pandemic. Second fortune in the world behind the CEO of Tesla Elon Musk, according to the Bloomberg agency, the Frenchman was seen on Tuesday in several shopping centers in Beijing, according to videos published on the social network Weibo.

Bernard Arnault was then seen on Wednesday in the big city of Chengdu (southwest China), where he notably visited stores. The official New China news agency also mentioned the visit of the big French boss via a video account on the WeChat social network.

Bernard Arnault is accompanied by his children Delphine (at the head of Christian Dior) and Jean (director of marketing and development of watches for Louis Vuitton), according to the videos published. China is an essential market for the luxury sector. Before the pandemic, the Asian country accounted for a third of all global spending on luxury goods.

The drastic anti-Covid measures (confinements, quarantines, large-scale screening) implemented in the world's second largest economy during the pandemic have however hit the sector hard. Chinese customers accounted for only about 17% of global luxury sales in 2022, down from 33% before the pandemic, in 2019, according to bank UBS. “The Chinese clientele is much larger than it was in 2019”, assured however in February during an interview with press agencies Jean-Jacques Guiony, financial director of LVMH.

In addition to its flagship brand Louis Vuitton, LVMH owns the Dior, Celine, Givenchy and Kenzo brands. “I am quite confident, the Chinese leaders being very wise, they will surely use the period which is opening to revitalize Chinese growth”, declared Bernard Arnault at the end of January. "If this is the case (...) we have every reason to be confident, even optimistic, on the Chinese market", underlined the CEO of LVMH.

He had received the Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao shortly before in his Dior boutique on Avenue Montaigne in Paris. Bernard Arnault's current visit to China is far from being his first. In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, he said he had already visited the country about 20 times, praising the potential of the world's second largest economy.

Many big foreign bosses have visited China in recent months, from Apple CEO Tim Cook to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, taking advantage of the reopening of borders after strict anti-Covid health restrictions. The latter even had the supreme honor of being received by Chinese President Xi Jinping, as co-president of the Bill and Melinda Gates philanthropic foundation. Elon Musk had met with senior leaders, before going to Shanghai to visit the Gigafactory assembly site, inaugurated by Tesla in 2019.