Seven months after a merger with the Estee Lauder Companies came apart, Puig used its first Capital Markets Day in Madrid to answer the question that followed it. The answer was a number.
Fragrance is also where the market is most crowded. Every luxury house without a beauty division is building one, and the shelf space that made a hit in 2023 is not available in 2027.
The logic is a rebuke to the consolidation thesis. If scale can be reached without buying it, then the premium paid in a merger starts to look like a tax on impatience.
The gap between ambition and arithmetic will be closed in travel retail, in China and in the dermo-cosmetics aisle, which is a less glamorous sentence than the plan’s name suggests.
Puig also guided to an EBITDA above 1.8 billion euros and free cash conversion above half of that figure, which amounts to more than 900 million euros.
The Barcelona group intends to pass eight billion euros in annual net sales by 2032, built mainly on organic growth rather than acquisition.
