Luxury consumer goods giant LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton has appointed a new CEO for its Wine & Spirits division
French investigative publication La Lettre said today (18 October) the Dom Pérignon producer has chosen Laurent Boillot to lead the Moët Hennessy unit.
Boillot, who has been CEO of the Hennessy Cognac brand since 2019, would take over the leadership of Moët Hennessy from Philippe Schaus, who has worked in the role for the past seven years.
According to Bloomberg, LVMH is due to announce confirmation of Schaus's exit shortly.
LVMH could not be reached for comment at the time of writing.
Earlier this week, LVMH reported its sales figures for the first nine months of the year. The group's Wine & Spirits unit saw revenues fall 11% to €4.69bn in the period, down 8% organically.
Revenue from its wider Cognac and Spirits business unit dipped 12% to €2.1bn, equivalent to a 11% decline on an organic basis.
Speaking to analysts this week, LVMH’s director of financial communications Rodolphe Ozun, said the Cognac market in China “continues to remain challenging”, in light of “ongoing prudence amongst retailers, given the weaker demand related to the current macro environment”.
Comparatively, Hennessy saw “saw another quarter of growth” in the third quarter in US, Ozun said, “driven by VS restocking and the gradual realignment of sell-in with sell-out after excessive destocking from retailers at the beginning of this year”.
LVMH's Champagne sales declined on 2023 amid "ongoing normalisation of post-Covid demand," but were still "significantly higher than in 2019".
In the results call with analysts, the group was asked about the potential impact of China's "provisional" anti-dumping measures on the company.
Last week, China imposed “provisional anti-dumping measures” on the imports of brandy from the EU.
Starting last Friday (11 October), upon arrival into China, businesses importing goods which include brandy must hand over a security deposit to local customs authorities.
Deputy finance director Cécile Cabanis said the tariffs were "not good news, especially in a market where the demand is weakened."
She added: "As far as our business and impact is concerned, probably the mitigation factor is that we carry a bit more stock and inventory that we would do usually, so we won’t face any concrete impact in the next few months.”
Commenting on the long-term effect for Cognac in the market however, Cabanis seemed a little less certain.
"As far as the impact overall and on a running basis is concerned, it will obviously depend on different… decisions we can take, whether it is about the consumer going through substitution in duty-free, especially on XO, whether we would be inclined to pass price increases and with which amplitude,” she said.
“And what would be the competition response, so we are looking at all of this, and we will come back with more detail probably in the next quarter.”
