Yoox Net-a-Porter: a successful entry onto the stock market

By

Dominique Muret

Published
Oct 5, 2015

The world's largest online luxury store entered the Milan stock market this Monday morning, giving birth to a new online business model. The merger between Yoox and Net-a-Porter 60 million euros as of 2018.

The stock market debut of the "largest luxury store in the world" was warmly by a host of personalities, including Diesel founder Renzo Rosso, historic shareholder of Yoox, Laudomia Pucci, president of Eataly, Oscar Farinetti, Lapo Elkann (Italia Independent), ex-CEO of Luxottica Andrea Guerra and Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of Pitti Immagine and president of the YNAP board.
 

The two companies were created in June 2000, one founded in Bologna by Federico Marchetti, the other in London by Natalie Massenet, who resigned from the project this September. The former became the e-commerce partner of several major luxury brands, while the latter focused more on the editorial content. In 2006, they each launched their first monobrand site for one label (Marni for Yoox, Jimmy Choo for Net-a-Porter).
 
"We took two different routes but we both became leaders in our market. By merging we complete each other with what the other is lacking. By example, by grouping together our logistics centres, now 9 altogether, we can serve areas that were previously unavailable to us," explained Federico Marchetti.

The two sites will continue to be managed independently and vertically. There will thus be no noticeable changes for the end customers. Everything will be behind the scenes, where the group will have a much stronger platform with a wider choice of products. YNAP will be putting a "global program store" in place, which will allow the customer, wherever they are in the world, to have access to all of the group's distribution centres and not just to the one in their region.

Richemont, which owns Net-a-Porter, is a 50% shareholder of the new group, but is voting rights are limited to 25%. The Swiss luxury group announced in a press release this Monday that the completed merger of the two online retailers will generate a significant one-off accounting gain for Net-A-Porter parent Richemont. Based on the Friday closing price of Yoox shares at 28.06 euros, the amount of the pre- and post-tax accounting gain is estimated to be between 610 million euros ($685.34 million) and 670 million euros.
 
Federico Marchetti is particularly happy with the good results in China, where Yoox saw its sales triple despite the economic slowdown in that market. "There is a marked difference in China between the online sites and the physical stores," he pointed out, without providing any financial details.