Latest news with #Zara-owner
Time of India
16-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Inditex to reopen budget brand Lefties in France as it takes on Shein
Zara-owner Inditex plans to expand its budget brand Lefties to France, the fashion giant's CEO told investors on Tuesday, as it tries to attract more young consumers and steps up competition against Shein and other low-cost rivals. The planned opening marks Lefties' return to France, having initially launched there in 2009 before shutting both its French stores by 2012. Established 25 years ago and named for its beginnings as an outlet selling Zara 's leftovers, Lefties has stores in 18 countries and has grown as Inditex competes against online-only retailers like Shein that sell at rock-bottom prices. In May, Lefties unveiled a new, all-caps logo in an Instagram post along with its "Lefties everywhere, on everyone" slogan. The brand is currently mostly focused on Spain and Portugal, but last month Inditex CEO Oscar Garcia Maceiras said Inditex is "testing Lefties in new markets". The brand's dresses are priced at as little as 9.9 euros ($11.55) and jeans at 12.99 euros, comparable to Shein and Primark, and providing a cheaper alternative to Zara - which has increased its prices in recent years. Inditex is also expanding its other brands, Garcia Maceiras told the group's annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday. Bershka is opening its first stores in Denmark; Stradivarius in Austria; Oysho in the Netherlands; and Massimo Dutti in Brazil, while the Zara Man label is launching in the United States with a store in Costa Mesa, Los Angeles, he said.
Business of Fashion
14-07-2025
- Business
- Business of Fashion
Zara Billionaire Ortega Buys Hotel in Paris for $113 Million
Fashion billionaire Amancio Ortega bought Hotel Banke in Paris for €97 million ($113 million), the Zara brand founder's second property acquisition in the French city in the past year. Ortega's family office Pontegadea acquired the building from Derby Hotels, a spokesman for the Spanish firm said, confirming a report in newspaper Expansion. The five-star hotel is located in central Paris, near the Palais Garnier opera theatre. Pontegadea holds Ortega's 59 percent stake in Zara-owner Inditex SA and reinvests its dividends, mainly in real estate. The family office also holds investments in infrastructure and energy assets. This year, Ortega had already acquired an apartment building in Fort Lauderdale for about €165 million and an office building in Barcelona for €250 million. It will be the first year Ortega, 89, receives more than €3 billion in dividends from Inditex, the company he founded more than 50 years ago in northwestern Spain. In 2024, Pontegadea acquired a commercial building in Paris for about €200 million. Pontegadea's strategy is to invest mainly in high-end commercial and residential real estate, mostly in a handful of cities in western Europe, as well as in the US and Canada. The firm rarely invests in hotels. Inditex, the world's largest clothing firm, has a market value of €136 billion. Ortega's personal fortune amounts to about €103 billion, making him Spain's wealthiest person and Europe's second richest, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. By Rodrigo Orihuela Learn more: Zara Founder Ortega Buys Dutch Warehouse Leased to Primark for $110 Million The deal follows investments in logistics assets in the United States, including the acquisition in December of a warehouse in Florida.
Business of Fashion
11-07-2025
- Business
- Business of Fashion
The World Is Getting Warmer. Fashion Thinks It Can Handle the Heat.
For much of the last two weeks, large parts of Europe and the US steamed under heat domes that pushed temperatures to dangerous and unusual highs. At men's fashion week in Paris, fans were among the hottest accessories. Rihanna reportedly carried a mini electronic one at ASAP Rocky's second runway show for AWGE. Guests arriving at Hermès were handed cooling towelettes, and water was passed round at the particularly steamy Grace Wales Bonner venue. (Dior was carefully climate controlled to safeguard the priceless Chardin paintings on display). But the heatwave meant more than a sweaty week of discomfort on fashion's front rows; it is a sign of dangerous and destabilising changes to the climate that mean such weather extremes are becoming more frequent, more severe and wider spread, according to climate scientists. And that means greater risk for fashion's bottom line. Unpredictable weather changes the way people shop and makes it harder to manage inventory and merchandising mix. It threatens supply of raw materials like cotton, cashmere and leather, with flooding and drought posing critical threats to growing regions. And it risks worker health, hampers manufacturing productivity and presents erratic logistical challenges. ADVERTISEMENT Insurers are increasingly blaring the alarm about how all this is likely to affect the global economy. 'This is not a one-off market adjustment. This is a systemic risk that threatens the very foundation of the financial sector,' insurance giant Allianz SE board member Günther Thallinger wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year. 'This is not about saving the planet. This is about saving the conditions under which markets, finance and civilisation itself can continue to operate.' But fashion seems to think it can handle the heat. Managed Risk or Risky Business While the industry's biggest brands acknowledge climate change poses a business risk, it's not one they consider financially material in the near term, according to regulatory filings published over the last few months. Many companies are disclosing this level of analysis for the first time under new European reporting rules that require the biggest businesses operating within the trading bloc to assess and publish how the changing climate might impact their bottom lines. Kering, Hermès and Richemont all concluded their current exposure to climate-related risks had no significant material impact. Adidas declared its business is sufficiently resilient for the 'foreseeable future.' Zara-owner Inditex sees 'relatively limited' financial impact from physical climate risks within the next five years. LVMH noted that increased costs for raw materials like leather, cashmere, wool, cotton and silk could become a critical issue as soon as 2030, but added that the company had taken steps to insulate itself against such risks by moving to procure lower-impact and certified materials. The disclosures offer a glimpse into one possible reason climate issues are moving down executive agendas, even as the consequences of a warming planet are becoming more visible. Five years is a long time horizon in a trend-driven industry where executives have to navigate plenty of other macro challenges — from tariffs to geopolitics — that are having a more immediate and tangible financial impact. To the extent that weather extremes and other climate-related disruptions might affect business, companies say they have managed these risks through flexible, diversified supply chains, insurance coverage and transition plans that include reducing emissions, switching to lower-impact materials and reducing water consumption. ADVERTISEMENT The problem is most companies and countries are not delivering on their environmental commitments with the result the world is careening towards critical climate tipping points faster than expected. Among some insurers, investors and climate experts there is growing concern that companies are underestimating their risks. 'If you'd asked me five years ago how bad things could get, I would not have guessed about these heat waves we're having now,' said Vidhura Ralapanawe, a climate scientist and head of sustainability at Hong Kong-based apparel sourcing business Epic Group. 'I think everyone is underplaying the materiality.' Model Behaviour Climate risk assessments are difficult. They're costly and technical and rely on in-depth knowledge about complex global supply chains that many brands simply don't have. Accurate and up-to-date data on flood and heat risk is hard to come by and in some cases non-existent. Companies base their analysis on a range of different scenarios, but the rapidly changing climate landscape is messing with models that rely on historic data to project future trends. Changing boundaries and assumptions can lead to vastly different conclusions. An analysis conducted by Cornell University and the asset manager Schroders in 2023 concluded that soaring temperatures and intensifying flooding in four key apparel manufacturing hubs in Asia could reduce operating profits at exposed brands by 5 percent or more. And that was a conservative estimate. Schroders has upped its engagement with apparel brands and other investors to deepen the conversation around climate risk and resilience. The topic is still quite nascent, but interest is rapidly growing, said Schroders' active ownership manager Katie Frame. More brands are also beginning to pay attention to indoor heat risks at the factories they work with and to introduce temperature standards into their sourcing policies, said Jason Judd, executive director at Cornell's Global Labour Institute. By and large, though, fashion companies are leaning on risk mitigation and contingency plans that assume there's enough agility in their sourcing to absorb near-term climate shocks. But addressing the issues after a crisis has already hit is likely to be much more expensive and there may be less flexibility in the system than projected. Suppliers and their employees are already grappling with the fallout from longer bouts of dangerous heat and risks of more frequent flooding, even that has yet to filter through to material disruptions at a brand level. 'I'm not convinced that when multi-region climate risk comes whether we have sufficient elasticity in the supply chain to switch,' Ralapanawe said. 'There won't be any places for people to shift.'
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trending tickers: Intel, Tesla, GameStop, Inditex and Prudential
Shares in Intel (INTC) surged nearly 8% on Tuesday, amid hopes of easing restrictions on US chip exports to China. Following talks in London, US and Chinese negotiators announced overnight that they had agreed on a framework to restore their trade truce. There are hopes that a de-escalation in trade tensions, would lead to Washington easing curbs on US exports of semiconductors to China. Read more: Spending review: Rachel Reeves unveils more funding for schools, NHS and defence Ahead of the meeting, Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, told CNBC on Monday: "Our expectation is that ... immediately after the handshake, any export controls from the US will be eased, and the rare earths will be released in volume, and then we can go back to negotiating smaller matters." Prior to this latest truce announcement, chip stocks rose more broadly, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Stock Exchange (^SOX) closing Tuesday's session up 2%. Shares in electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA) rose nearly 2% in pre-market trading on Wednesday morning, as the feud between CEO Elon Musk and US president Donald Trump cooled off. In a post on X on Wednesday morning, Musk said: "I regret some of my posts about president [Trump] last week. They went too far." Read more: FTSE 100 LIVE: Stocks rise as traders await UK spending review and US-China trade update Tesla (TSLA) shares tanked last week, as the public fallout between Musk and Trump escalated. The stock has recovered over the past few sessions, as tensions between the two appeared to cool off. Shares were also higher as the Tesla's robotaxi rollout gained steam. On Monday night, Tesla was listed as an autonomous vehicle (AV) operator on Austin's Transportation and Public Works website, ahead of the reported June 12 targeted start of Tesla's robotaxi service. Shares in GameStop (GME) slipped 4.2% in pre-market trading on Wednesday, after the video game retailer posted a fall in sales in the first quarter. GameStop said net sales fell to $732.4m (£543.1m) in the first quarter, down from $881.8m for the same period last year. Meanwhile, diluted earnings per share came in at $0.09, which was up from a loss of $0.11 per share in the first quarter of last year. Read more: Stocks that are trending today Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: "GameStop shares came under pressure in pre-market trading as the one-time 'meme stock' missed revenue forecasts. "The company invests heavily in bitcoin but it seems investors still care about the core retail operations. The sales miss overshadowed better-than-expected earnings." Zara-owner Inditex ( fell 4.4% on Wednesday morning, after the Spanish clothing company reported weaker-than-expected first quarter sales. Inditex posted first quarter revenue of €8.27bn (£7bn), which was below average analyst estimates of €8.36bn, according to a Reuters report. Profit before tax was flat at €1.7bn, while net income edged just 0.8% higher to €1.3bn. Read more: Pound dips ahead of Rachel Reeves' spending review "Inditex is the eurozone's equivalent of Next (NXT.L) — a company that sets the gold standard for its sector. When it disappoints on trading, shockwaves are felt across the retail industry," said AJ Bell's Mould. "A lot of Inditex's success has come from the way its business is run. It is the master of efficiency and has fine-tuned operations so everything runs smoothly," he said. "It is able to get new designs onto the shop floor quickly so it can stay on top of latest fashion trends. It's a great position to be in, except some things are out of its control." "If the consumer is worried about the economy and is watching every penny, retailers are going to struggle to shift goods unless they discount hard," Mould added. Insurer Prudential (PRU.L) was the biggest riser on the UK's FTSE 100 (^FTSE) on Wednesday morning, up 2.4% at the time of writing. The rise in shares came following news of the US and China's latest trade truce, given Prudential is an Asia-focused financial firm. Stocks: Create your watchlist and portfolio Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor, said: "Having flirted with its record high on several occasions yesterday, the FTSE 100 breezed past the record closing level once more at the open, driven by a rising global tide which is lifting all boats. "Stocks at the sharp end of Asian focus were particular beneficiaries, with the likes of Standard Chartered (STAN.L), Prudential and HSBC (HSBA.L) posting healthy gains, while the banks more generally resumed their onward march and selective buying among the miners typified a more risk-on approach." Read more: The UK's rental boom is over What you need to know about UK's private stock market Pisces Stocks to watch this week: TSMC, Adobe, Tesco, Bellway and Inditex
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trending tickers: Intel, Tesla, GameStop, Inditex and Prudential
Shares in Intel (INTC) surged nearly 8% on Tuesday, amid hopes of easing restrictions on US chip exports to China. Following talks in London, US and Chinese negotiators announced overnight that they had agreed on a framework to restore their trade truce. There are hopes that a de-escalation in trade tensions, would lead to Washington easing curbs on US exports of semiconductors to China. Read more: Spending review: Rachel Reeves unveils more funding for schools, NHS and defence Ahead of the meeting, Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, told CNBC on Monday: "Our expectation is that ... immediately after the handshake, any export controls from the US will be eased, and the rare earths will be released in volume, and then we can go back to negotiating smaller matters." Prior to this latest truce announcement, chip stocks rose more broadly, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Stock Exchange (^SOX) closing Tuesday's session up 2%. Shares in electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA) rose nearly 2% in pre-market trading on Wednesday morning, as the feud between CEO Elon Musk and US president Donald Trump cooled off. In a post on X on Wednesday morning, Musk said: "I regret some of my posts about president [Trump] last week. They went too far." Read more: FTSE 100 LIVE: Stocks rise as traders await UK spending review and US-China trade update Tesla (TSLA) shares tanked last week, as the public fallout between Musk and Trump escalated. The stock has recovered over the past few sessions, as tensions between the two appeared to cool off. Shares were also higher as the Tesla's robotaxi rollout gained steam. On Monday night, Tesla was listed as an autonomous vehicle (AV) operator on Austin's Transportation and Public Works website, ahead of the reported June 12 targeted start of Tesla's robotaxi service. Shares in GameStop (GME) slipped 4.2% in pre-market trading on Wednesday, after the video game retailer posted a fall in sales in the first quarter. GameStop said net sales fell to $732.4m (£543.1m) in the first quarter, down from $881.8m for the same period last year. Meanwhile, diluted earnings per share came in at $0.09, which was up from a loss of $0.11 per share in the first quarter of last year. Read more: Stocks that are trending today Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: "GameStop shares came under pressure in pre-market trading as the one-time 'meme stock' missed revenue forecasts. "The company invests heavily in bitcoin but it seems investors still care about the core retail operations. The sales miss overshadowed better-than-expected earnings." Zara-owner Inditex ( fell 4.4% on Wednesday morning, after the Spanish clothing company reported weaker-than-expected first quarter sales. Inditex posted first quarter revenue of €8.27bn (£7bn), which was below average analyst estimates of €8.36bn, according to a Reuters report. Profit before tax was flat at €1.7bn, while net income edged just 0.8% higher to €1.3bn. Read more: Pound dips ahead of Rachel Reeves' spending review "Inditex is the eurozone's equivalent of Next (NXT.L) — a company that sets the gold standard for its sector. When it disappoints on trading, shockwaves are felt across the retail industry," said AJ Bell's Mould. "A lot of Inditex's success has come from the way its business is run. It is the master of efficiency and has fine-tuned operations so everything runs smoothly," he said. "It is able to get new designs onto the shop floor quickly so it can stay on top of latest fashion trends. It's a great position to be in, except some things are out of its control." "If the consumer is worried about the economy and is watching every penny, retailers are going to struggle to shift goods unless they discount hard," Mould added. Insurer Prudential (PRU.L) was the biggest riser on the UK's FTSE 100 (^FTSE) on Wednesday morning, up 2.4% at the time of writing. The rise in shares came following news of the US and China's latest trade truce, given Prudential is an Asia-focused financial firm. Stocks: Create your watchlist and portfolio Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor, said: "Having flirted with its record high on several occasions yesterday, the FTSE 100 breezed past the record closing level once more at the open, driven by a rising global tide which is lifting all boats. "Stocks at the sharp end of Asian focus were particular beneficiaries, with the likes of Standard Chartered (STAN.L), Prudential and HSBC (HSBA.L) posting healthy gains, while the banks more generally resumed their onward march and selective buying among the miners typified a more risk-on approach." Read more: The UK's rental boom is over What you need to know about UK's private stock market Pisces Stocks to watch this week: TSMC, Adobe, Tesco, Bellway and InditexError in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
