Latest Headlines – Page 223
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Lvmh And Prada Have No Stakes Yet In De Rigo, But The Italian Chain Gets Another Lvmh License - Givenchy
Contrary to an Italian press report, there is no evidence that LVMH may have acquired a 5 percent stake in De Rigo. De Rigo denies another part of the report according to which Prada would have already exercised its option on 15 percent of the company's equity, which is due ...
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Bourgeois Lets Its General Manager Go
Philippe Castilla, a chartered accountant who had been brought in by the Bourgeois family to help restore profitability to the company at the beginning of 2000, has been let go. Charlie Bourgeois, who is now running the eponymous French firm single-handedly, has hired Deloitte & Touche, the management consultants, to ...
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Essilor Sells Its Contact Lens Business
Carl Zeiss had recently done the same thing, transferring its own contact lens operations to Bausch & Lomb. The buyer of Essilor's contact lens business, including related cleaning solutions, is Ocular Sciences, the US-based firm that was going to merge with Wesley-Jessen. That merger plan was cancelled with Wesley-Jessen's $785 ...
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Essilor Reports Preliminary Results
Essilor raised both sales and operating income by 19 percent last year, thus maintaining its operating margin at 13.8 percent. The pre-tax profit rose by 15 percent to e222 million on a total turnover of e1,979 million. The net income grew by 12 percent to e135 million, but it would ...
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Coopervision Takes Greater Control In Europe
CooperVision (CVI) has completed the acquisition of its distribution in Spain, Sweden and most recently Norway, joining the UK and Italy as fully controlled operations. Their sales activities will be placed under the management of Ian Bussey, the company's UK-based European general manager, in charge of sales and marketing. Anthony ...
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Bausch & Lomb's Troubles Continue
There is already some unconfirmed speculation that Bausch & Lomb may be up for sale now, with Novartis/Ciba Vision and Allergan as the most likely suitors. B&L a few days ago that it will eliminate an additional 350 jobs, representing more than 6.5 percent of its remaining workforce. In its ...
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Belluna's Small Eyewear Makers Meet Major European Chains
Venice will once again be the venue next Feb. 8-9 for a meeting between some small and medium-sized eyewear manufacturers in the Belluna district in Northern Italy and representatives of some major eyewear chains, but this time they will be European retailers. Like last year, when they met a group ...
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Europe Abolishes Corundum Nickel Test, Sets New Rules For Pre-mounted Frames
The European norm for evaluating the nickel content risk in metal spectacle frames has been changed. CEN, the European Union's committee that establishes the technical guidelines for this sort of things, adopted a new procedure largely based on the test method developed by the Italian certification institute, Certottica, at a ...
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Metzler Strikes An Alliance With Moulin
Moulin International, the large Chinese eyewear manufacturer, has agreed to acquire a 25.1 percent interest in Metzler, Germany's second-largest eyewear company. The partial takeover, which is being implemented through an unspecified equity increase that will strengthen Metzler's balance sheet, is part of a wide-ranging strategic alliance in production and distribution ...
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Luxottica Works Without Ysl
From Jan. 1, 2001 on, Luxottica will no longer be producing or distributing Yves Saint Laurent eyewear. Opticians have just a few weeks left to put in new orders for the last collection, as the Italian manufacturer will only sell its remaining stock. It had already reduced the production of ...
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Luxottica Floats Only 2.3 Percent Of Its Equity On The Milan Bourse
Luxottica's share offering on the Milan Bourse was much smaller than the 10-12 percent stake indicated six months ago. Launched on Nov. 28 and closed on Dec. 1, it made only 2.3 percent of the group's equity available for trading on the exchange, for a total of 10,385,000 shares. ...
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Giuliano Tabacchi Sells His Safilo Shares To Vittorio's Heirs And Quits The Board
Giuliano Tabacchi has taken a bow, bringing to a close a long family saga that came to a head last spring when his brother Vittorio resigned as chairman of the board. In a brief statement after a shareholders' meeting on Dec. 12, Safilo announced that the number of directors on ...
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Afflelou Negotiates Another Takeover
Confirming a report in the French press, Alain Afflelou says it's in advanced negotiations for the acquisition of another French network of optical stores. Lynx Optical, which was said to be a likely candidate, denies the existence of negotiations. Afflelou has given up on a previous plan to merge with ...
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German Suppliers Scrap Second Free Lens
The German Cartel Office has decided not to act against a decision by all the major suppliers of lenses in Germany to stop providing the country's opticians with a free extra sample of every prescription lens for replacement purposes, starting next Jan. 1. Essilor started the action last Summer, and ...
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Rodenstock Sells Euronet To Visualplex
Essilor, Hoya and Zeiss have all agreed to join the EuroNet Optics network following Rodenstock's decision to sell its own controlling interest in the German-based B-to-B internet platform to a new American e-business specialist, VisualPlex Corp., which wants to launch a similar service in the USA and elsewhere for companies ...
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Pearle Is Doing Well In Europe And Usa
Shopping malls and hypermarkets, particularly brand new ones, are the new segment, alongside city centers, chosen by Pearle Europe to penetrate the Italian market with Ottica Avanzi, acquired last year. A total of 14 new sales outlets have already been opened this year in shopping malls in central and northern ...
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Sunglass Hut Reports Improved Results
The world's largest chain of sunglass stores reports a 30 percent rise in operating earnings for the 3rd quarter ended Oct. 28 to $8.4 million, as sales increased by 10.6 percent to $146.2 million, with a whopping 7.5 percent gain on a comparable basis. Still, because of extraordinary items, Sunglass ...
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Italian Eyewear Exports Boom Thanks To Ray-ban And General Optica
Italian manufacturers' sales of sunglasses abroad shot up in the first 6 months of this year thanks to Luxottica's acquisition of Ray-Ban, to De Rigo's acquisition of the Spanish General Optica chain and to Marcolin's acquisition of the French Cébé group, rising by 90.7 percent to 715.9 billion lire (e369.8m-$329.5m). ...
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Zeiss' Growth Slows Down
Carl Zeiss is budgeting only a 6 percent sales increase this year to about 4.2 billion DM (e2.1bn-$1.9bn) in group sales, but it plans to invest 50 million DM (e26m-$23m) more on R&D to help speed up its future development in the longer terms. The German group has ...
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Fedon Continues To Grow
The world's leading supplier of eyeglass cases confirms that it will reach the turnover of 100 billion lire (e51.7m-$46.1m) that it had targeted for 2000, compared with 88 billion lire for the previous year. The final figure is actually likely to be even higher. Fedon is quoted on the over-the-counter ...
