Latest Headlines – Page 225
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Crown Eyeglass Has Gone Private
The Lee family has taken Crown Eyeglass off from the London stock exchange, where investors are getting more and more away from low-cap firms other than internet and mobile phone start-ups. Joseph G. Lee and his son Martin B. Lee, who are respectively the managing director and the finance director ...
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Salmoiraghi & Vigano Has 17 New Outlets, Thanks In Part To Acquisitions
Seven months after the management buyout of this Italian optical, Salmoiraghi & Vigano can boast a relatively good performance, backed up by a strong advertising campaign which is absorbing between 5 and 6 percent of its turnover. As previously reported, Salmoiraghi's top management team acquired a 10 percent ...
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Bausch's Reorganization Goes On
Bausch & Lomb says it plans to eliminate 100 manufacturing jobs in its contact lens operations by the end of this year, in addition to the 600 announced last December. The group also plans to eliminate about 450 more non-manufacturing jobs over the next few months, primarily in its own ...
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Ciba Vision Raises Its Total Sales
CIBA Vision raised its total sales by 19 percent to 1,181 million Swiss francs (e787m-$652m) in the first 9 months of this year, but only by 9 percent in local currencies. The main growth factor was the launch of Visudyne, a breakthrough treatment for age-related macular degeneration, whose sales have ...
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Vistakon Regionalizes European Sales And Marketing
Johnson & Johnson's contact lens division has divided Europe into three main regions, with one manager taking on overall responsibility for sales and marketing in each one of them. They all report to Vistakon's UK-based European manager, Paul Donald, who continues to coordinate logistics and other operations. Jim Gallagher, ...
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Grosfilley Gets The Girbaud License
Signed a couple of days ago, the worldwide licensing contract for eyewear frames signed by Marithé and François Girbaud should help the French firm to find a good distributor in the USA, where the French couple of avantgarde designers is beginning to become famous again like in the 1980s, when ...
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Marcolin Gets The Miss Sixty License
A new licensing agreement between Marcolin and Sixty, an Italian young fashion house that is budgeting a 540 billion lire (e279m-$231m) turnover for 2000, calls for Marcolin to produce sunglasses and prescription glasses with the Miss Sixty brand name for the global market. The new business is expected to generate ...
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European Court Allows French Mutual Insurance Firms To Control Optical Shops
French optical stores owned by mutual insurance companies, which have already reached an estimated market share of 17 percent in the country, are likely to continue to develop at the detriment of other optical retailers following two recent judicial verdicts. A parliamentary bill, which should be voted into law by ...
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Optometrists Get A Favorable Court Ruling In Germany
German optometrists have scored a partial victory in the German Constitutional Court, which cancelled last Aug. 7 a previous decision by the Supreme Federal Court that had banned them on Dec. 10, 1998 from carrying out measurements of intraocular pressure and the visual field. The Consitutional Court has asked ...
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Fielmann's Fast Progress Goes On
The German market leader achieved a 9.3 percent sales increase on a comparable basis in the 1st half of this year, contributing to boost the group's pre-tax earnings by 14.1 percent to 65.8 million DM (e33.6m-$29.7m). A record pre-tax profit of 137 million DM (e70m-$62m) on external sales of 1.4 ...
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Grandvision Should Improve Faster In 2001
This year's results will be affected by higher-than-expected costs for the acquisition or renovation of stores, but some tangible positive effects of this policy of accelerated expansion should be felt in 2001. GrandVision will have opened or acquired a record of 120 stores of all kinds in the year 2000, ...
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Grandvision Internationalizes Solaris
The French-based optical retailing group has opened its first Solaris sunglass shops outside its home country, targeting mainly airport locations and tourist resorts in the sunnier Southern European countries. Two stores were opened recently in Lisbon. Four others will open shortly at A1 locations in Italy ? 2 in Milan ...
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Sunglass Hut Reassesses Its European Expansion
Sunglass Hut has closed its small store in one of Paris' airport terminals, and it's looking for new tenants to take over its two existing leases in downtown Paris, but company executives deny a rumor that it plans other store closings throughout the Continent. In fact, the US chain, whose ...
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Essilor Forms New Future-oriented Partnerships, Raises Net Earnings By 25%
Essilor International has signed up Johnson & Johnson Vision Care as its first partners in a new business-to-business internet portal, VisionWeb, that should become operational in the USA at the start of 2001. The two leading companies are looking for new financial partners in the new initiative, which is intended ...
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De Rigo Multiplies Its Net By Four, But Its Debt Load Rises Sharply
After announcing a healthy 38.9 percent rise in turnover in the first 6 months of this year, as reported in the last issue of Eyewear Intelligence, De Rigo can now boast a sharp increase in earnings for the same period. They shot up from to 13.5 billion lire (e 6.97m-$6.2m) ...
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Marcolin Has Higher Profits As Well
Marcolin's finances are improving. In the first half of 2000, Italy's 4th largest eyewear company, floated just 12 months ago on the Milan stock exchange, improved slightly its pre-tax earnings to 10,588 million lire (e5.5m-$4.8m). The pre-tax margin thus rose to 8.4 percent of revenues, after dropping from 10.3 to ...
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Cantor Acquires Nissel
The acquisition of Nissel by its larger British competitor, Cantor & Silver, has led to the establishment of a new company, Cantor & Nissel, that claims to be probably the largest independent European-based manufacturer of special contact lenses. Besides artificial eyes and a variety of other cosmetic and prosthetic products ...
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Silmo Fair Diversifies
The successful Paris trade show has not yet reached the limits of growth. The number of square meters sold for SILMO's next session, scheduled for Oct. 27-30, has risen by 10 percent as compared to the year-ago edition. The number of exhibitors is set to grow to 950 from 910, ...
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Vittorio Tabacchi Regains The Top Post At Booming Safilo
Members of the Tabacchi family have reached a new consensus on their respective shareholdings in Fimit, the holding company that controls 60 percent of Safilo. Consequently, Safilo's board of directors has reconfirmed Vittorio Tabacchi as president of the Italian company. Vittorio had resigned from the top post in mid-May to ...
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Luxottica's Results Rise Even Faster
The integration of Ray-Ban has been completed ahead of schedule, and the market's positive response to the brand's new sales strategy has been quicker than expected, allowing Luxottica to improve its results sharply n the first 6 months of 2000. The group's turnover soared by 40.6 percent to 2,433.9 billion ...
