Richemont's 'bold digital bet' was really the end of a fifteen-year slide.
Richemont's 2018 tender valued YNAP at €5.3 billion. Then came a €3.4 billion charge, a €1.5 billion loss and roughly €1.0 billion more, before it handed YNAP over with €555 million of cash inside.
Transcript
The official story is that Richemont bet boldly on digital luxury, and execution let it down. The record tells a different story.
The 2018 move everyone calls the acquisition was really the buyout of the remaining half of Yoox Net-a-Porter, a culmination of fifteen years, not a single leap. Richemont's tender valued YNAP at €5.3 billion, and Richemont paid roughly €2.8 billion for the shares it did not already own.
Then the bill. In the year to March 2023, Richemont booked a €3.4 billion charge moving YNAP to held for sale, crushing group profit to €301 million. The next year added a €1.5 billion loss. The year after, roughly €1.0 billion more.
In April 2025, Richemont handed YNAP to Mytheresa with €555 million of cash still inside it and no debt, and took shares in the buyer instead.
Richemont spent years learning it bought the wrong business. Before you pay a premium for full control, test the business on its own numbers, not on the story about where an industry is going. One exit does not prove online luxury cannot work.
The records behind this video
Every figure in the video comes from this Decision Record, each with its sources.
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