It was quite a week in the optical industry. HAL with its announcement of an IPO for GrandVision seemed to become the winner but finally had to take its loss when the Kering Group announced the founding of an own eyewear division and the termination of the Gucci license agreement with Safilo. As major shareholder of Safilo, HAL saw its Safilo shares drop by about 30% in only a few days. The new strategy of the Kering Group could influence the whole structure of the industry in the future but for this moment Safilo seems to be the main victim. Shares prices of for example Luxottica remained stable and it might be clear that Luxottica has a few significant advantages compared to Safilo. With Ray-Ban and Oakley it has strong own brands and depends less on its licenses and with 7.000 own stores it can be a major distribution partner for almost every brand. Whether the departure of Luxottica CEO Andrea Guerra will turn out to be a win or loss, should become clear in the future. In the ten year he was the boss, he doubled the revenues of the company and gave the profit a serious boost. Now it was time for some consolidation but that was no option for founder and owner Leonardo Del Vecchio. In an interview this week he announced to plan to once again double the turnover in the next ten years. Reason enough to quit with Guerra. We will see. (Dutch) newspapers commented on the Kering news with large analyses paying a lot of attention to the “unhealthy” power of Luxottica which for example obliges opticians to buy Ray-Ban prescription frames when they want to sell Ray-Ban sunglasses. The major Dutch national news was that webshop BRIL.nl deciced to stop its activities. It did not meet the expectations and could never deliver what it promised the participating opticians. After a quiet Summer, quite some excitement. Once again all these developments show the importance for (independent) opticians to develop their own strategy, not to easily join all these ” wild” initiatives, protect their independance in negotiations and cooperations with the large players in the market and work hard to create their own ” why”, vision and mission. Once again a lot of food for thoughts. Vision-Today keeps you posted.
