A new analysis of the market capitalisation of the world’s leading luxury goods companies shows that five of the top 25 are jewellery businesses.
Interestingly, two companies are retailers rather than wholesalers/product brands. Chow Tai Fook Jewellers and Signet Jewelers are ranked 12 and 24, respectively, while Pandora, with a market capitalisation of $USD13.3 billion, is ranked 13.
Pandora’s business model encapsulates both business-to-consumer (retail) and business-to-consumer (supply/wholesale) distributing its product to retailers.
Unsurprisingly, two watch companies – The Swatch Group and Rolex – complete the jewellery and watch industry’s appearance in the Top 25 list.
It should be noted that many of the remaining 20 companies listed also have watch and jewellery products/brands.
For example, LVMH owns TAG Heuer and Tiffany & Co., and Richemont houses watch and jewellery brands such as Baume & Mercier, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and Piaget; however, only Pandora, Swatch, Rolex, Chow Tai Fook and Signet Jewelers focus on the watch and jewellery industry as a core business.
Most companies operate across multiple retail categories, including cosmetics, perfume, apparel, fashion and leather goods.
EssilorLuxottica is an Italian-French multinational corporation that specialises in eyewear and eyecare. Its eyewear brands include Ray-Ban, Oakley, Giorgio Armani, Brunello Cucinelli, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, and Dolce&Gabbana.
The high-profile brands were part of Luxoiitca before it merged with the French eyecare giant Essilor under an €EUR16 billion deal in 2017.
Similarly to Pandora, EssilorLuxottica straddles both business-to-consumer (retail) and business-to-consumer (supply/wholesale). Essilor operates retail optometry retail stores in Australia under the OPSM banner.
With a market capitalisation of $USD9.08 billion, Rolex is listed at 19, while Swatch Group is valued at $USD9.08 billion. It is also worth noting that Swatch has 17 different watch and jewellery brands, including Longines, Omega, Rado, Breguet and Swatch, while Rolex is a single-brand company.
The analysis confirms that Pandora is the largest jewellery brand in the world given that all other jewellery and watch brands are part of larger holding companies – for example, Tiffany & Co., which was acquired by LVMH in 2021 in a landmark $US15.8 billion takeover.
The analysis was undertaken by Insider Monkey, a financial markets website.
The company explained its methodology as using “various sources including industry reports, multiple similar rankings in addition to our own rankings, and consulted stock screeners from Yahoo Finance and Finviz.”
“We used fiscal year revenues to rank the companies that are not publicly traded. For foreign companies, we converted the market caps and revenues to US dollars according to their respective exchange rates.”
The analysis valued and ranked publicly traded companies according to their market capitalisation as of 15 February 2024.
This also means that the rankings are dynamic and can change from day to day and week to week; however, it provides an insight into the size of the companies and their market dominance.
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