Hello. Hi. Anne-Laure Bismuth from HSBC. I can't hear you. Sorry. I'm here. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes, I'm a bit blind, which helps in this situation. I have two questions, please. The first one is on your 2017 targets have been achieved earlier than expected in sales. What went on differently and more profitably than what you expected? We have been better. Yes, sure. No, I mean. V ersus. In reality, we fixed our targets, and what has been better has been the incredible halo that the brand has had, and the understanding that there has been in all of the market, driven above all by America. America has been for sure the market that from the beginning has clearly understood the positioning of the brand, and that has also given to us a lot of confidence about staying true to who we are. I would really say that the investment that we put on the brand and on the legacy of the brand has paid off even in a bigger way than what we could think. I have to say that everything went pretty much on track. We opened the stores that we were supposed to open. The categories have performed above our expectation, but there hasn't been one that has been better than the other one, so it was, you know. Probably we executed the strategy even better than we thought or we announced. Thank you. Which doesn't mean that now we are gonna do the same for the next. My second question is, regarding outlets and t he outlet strategy. Could you share with us how much of your turnover is now sold with a discount? I assume it's a very limited portion. Did you set any targets for this aspect? Okay, I can't. There's Jean-Marc that is, you don't see him, but he's doing every possible sign. I love this question about outlets because when I started to work in luxury, what I was told was that the ultimate luxury thing that you could do was to destroy the product that were unsold at the end of the season. I'm talking about 1999, 2000, more or less, when I started to work in luxury. Well, yeah, it could have been great to create scarcity, but it's really not sustainable. Destroying product is absolutely not an option. What do you do with your leftover? Well, you study different things, and what we think is the best thing to do at Saint Laurent is to not liquidate, but to sell your leftover through the outlet channel. Today, we have a minimal amount of outlets compared to the. It's so difficult because I know the figures, so you can imagine how it is for me to answer to you knowing that I cannot say. I know how many outlets I have. I just can't tell you. We have, you know, a minimal amount of outlets that, by the way, is the one that we estimate is gonna take us to EUR 5 billion. We don't need to open more. Since Anthony has arrived, and when I say the business is built after creativity, for us, from a business side, has been very. We have been very, very lucky in the way he has been creating the collection because he builds up the collection. It doesn't go from the moon to the sky. This means that very rarely his product are obsolete. This, since his arrival, has allowed us to slow down the cycle of markdown. Even if we did markdown until 2020, we never put, since the arrival of Anthony, on markdown any product that was of the previous season. We gained a season, and so we gained a season of full price sales and a season of sell-through. Over the years, and this is also why you see an increase in our gross margin and our profitability, we have been able to manage quite well our discounted and markdown sales. Ultimately, with 2020, the continued stop of our markdown. Why do we think the outlets are the right channel to manage the unsold product? Because it's a channel that you control. It's a channel that you manage yourself. All of our outlets are directly operated. If you look at the consumer and you look at the CRM data, the overlap of customers between outlet and full price store is less than 2%. In some markets, around 1.2%. Actually, sometimes it happens that in some markets that are new to luxury, some people approach the brand starting from the outlet to then grow into the full price. For us it was, in particular now that you're not gonna do any public markdown, the outlet channel becomes even more relevant because you find products in the outlet at a higher price than what you would have put them if you would have put them on markdown. It's a controlled way to sell off. It's a channel that we manage to liquidate only. As I said, we don't intend to open more outlets. It could even be that in the future we close some. We don't wanna go into like this humongous friends and family that in the end are open to everybody, or this kind of strategy that are hidden behind a sort of luxury positioning, and in the end, they're not. Zuzanna Pusz from UBS. I can't see you. I have two questions. The first one is on your revenue target, which as you mentioned is EUR 5 billion, and it looks like majority of that will be driven by both retail expansion, but also sales densities increase. Yes. Would you be able to maybe give us an idea of, when we look by region, where your densities are maybe lagging the most, the average, and at which region they are maybe above the brand average? There is not a big difference actually in the sales density among the regions. There is more difference among the typology of store. Of course, a flagship has a different sales density compared to a shop-in-shop, but there isn't at all a different in terms of region. I'm really sorry. I wouldn't know how to answer. Of course, there are some stores. Like I said before, why you saw not such a big increase big increase between 2021 and 2016 because there were some very small locations in key department stores that were driven a lot by tourists that had a humongous sales density, but this is across the world. One of them is Galeries Lafayette, but when you talk about the equivalent in Asia, we had exactly the same. It's more done by store typology. Our challenge that we give to ourselves is to grow the sales density while increasing the average size of our stores. We think we can do it because we have humongous opportunities in the product categories. If you apart from our flagship today, some of our categories don't have the opportunity to express themselves fully. I'm not only talking about ready-to-wear, but I'm talking about shoes, I'm talking about what I mentioned before, the jewelry, the silk, these more aspirational parts. The real challenge that we want to give to ourselves is to become bigger, but to keep increasing the sales by square footage and keep increasing also our average ticket. Perfect. Thank you. My second question is on China, and I promise it's not on current trading. It more has to do with the fact that I think historically the brand has been maybe somewhat underexposed to the Chinese consumer. My understanding is that maybe it had to do a little bit with the image, which maybe didn't necessarily resonate that well with the local consumer. As you mentioned in your presentation, it's quite important for you as a brand to really stay true to who you are. Can you maybe give us an idea, an update on China, what has really changed? Because it does seem like in the last two years you've actually seen a nice acceleration in the region. If you give us some sort of, you know, update on what exactly have been the key drivers of that would be helpful. Thank you. Yeah. I love this question because finally allows me to talk about the Chinese consumer of Saint Laurent. What will change? Nothing will change in the sense that we will continue to communicate who we are. We are not gonna change the brand because we wanna conquer whatever stereotype of Chinese consumer we may have in our mind. The Chinese consumer of Saint Laurent is a consumer of Saint Laurent. Our current Chinese consumer have the highest share of ready-to-wear. The stores with the highest share of ready-to-wear are in China. China is a region that has been the fastest in recruiting elite. What has changed in the last two years is that we have invested a lot more in communication and amplification of the brand. This is why when I say we want to leverage and consolidate in what we have, is because by continuing to invest in those kind of activities, we can absolutely grow China and we can arrive to more people in China that love our brand in the way we are, without needing to become something that we are not. Who was with Thierry? I think Thierry has been raising his hand for quite a while. Here you are. Yes. This is Thierry Cota from SocGen. Two questions. You detailed or you commented the future growth of like-for-like versus space, but I was wondering if you could elaborate on mix and price, what factors they could play, and actually more globally, how you position the brand versus your closest competitors. Do you think you are at the right price, or do you think they are raising prices faster and you need to catch up and that creates an opportunity or not? Maybe depending on the categories of leather versus ready-to-wear, et cetera. Yeah. And [crosstalk] I mean, I don't know if I can answer to all of the points of the question, but I can give you for sure a general view. Well, how do we price our product? We price our product starting from the local customers. We are not a bank, and we don't price product through spread. So every single product is priced to the level that we think is appropriate for the market. So the merchandising and pricing team does an exceptional work before the sales campaign to study the market, to study competition, to study where each product can position itself locally. Like I said before, there is brand resistance in the consumer. So having worked on the brand and on the elevation of the brand is allowing us to really offer products at a quite high price point. So far throughout the years, in particular in the last few seasons, and also thanks to the improvement in the quality that has been pushed a lot by Anthony, we have been able to increase the price of our carryover by an average of 6%-7% per season. In the last two years, our key line have also increased by 12% or 20%. But again, always because we give the right content. I consider simply raising prices of carryover like à la whatever, unethical. As simple as that. You need to deliver to the consumer the correct price-value relationship. Then, thanks to your brand positioning, you can inject in the market products that are more expensive. The bag, well, I have it there, but you saw it also the picture, that we just launched that is called Icare, is a volume bag for Saint Laurent in leather, not precious, at EUR 3,500. Maybe eight years ago when I arrived, we wouldn't even think that we could have been able to do that. Today we can, and it's sold out everywhere. It's really a question on working on your brand and positioning the brand and in the right way, and then the product and the position of your product follows. The ready-to-wear to this point is a category that being the category that we were born from, as the one that has always been elevated. This is why we say the ready-to-wear has always served that purpose, while the accessory has also have also allowed the brand to become a little bit more inclusive in terms of consumer. Where we can go? Well, there's no limit on where you can go as long as your brand is up here and you are consistent and you know what you are doing. In terms of our competitors, we are priced quite above the people that we consider having a brand image below us, and we are priced similar or to the people that we consider having the same brand image as us. You don't consider you're lagging at the price level at this point? No. Your closest peers? Okay. No. We are raising. You know, we are also smaller than most of the mega brands, so it's also a matter of growing in the ladder. Just maybe a second question briefly. The margin, you want to raise it from below 12% to above 30%, but you also highlighted that the goods will shrink as a portion of sales. I was wondering whether that includes a lowering of the gross margin and hence? No. A significant OpEx leverage or not? No. Well, we are in the business and we need to make money at the end of the day. To think that you can inject in the market products that are not at the right marginality is wrong. It's not. Why ready-to-wear or shoes has a lower margin than ready-to-wear? It has nothing to do with the initial margin. It is due to the sell-through and the sizes and the leftover. Managing the company with less markdown, higher full price sales is not gonna generate a reduction in the margin due to the product mix if you do things right. Of course, with leather goods it's easier because a bag doesn't have sizes. You have one, you sell one. At the same time, by managing ready-to-wear shoes and all of the category with sizes, with a great attention to sell-through, shouldn't have any compromise on the marginality. Again, it derives from a better management of the sell-through and a lower weight of markdown sales. Thank you very much indeed. It's Luca Solca from Bernstein. I have a question on your ambitions to integrate further into your production activity. You spoke about the product development center. Are you also envisaging to integrate upstream into actual production of the products you sell? Or are you going to rely on third parties? Not inside our operation, because the first thing to do is to protect what is part of the brand, and the brand is really development, research, innovation, and that is the first thing that we want to internalize 100%. Internalizing production is what comes after. In the future, I don't exclude that in order to internalize production, we could partner with some suppliers. To build factories to internalize production is not something that we envisage as part of our strategy. Thank you. My second question is on digital. You produced a very remarkable increase in digital sales, reaching 18%, if I noted right, in the first quarter. Do you see the 20% mark as a sort of ideal level, or do you anticipate that within the long-term ambition you announced today, that this should go up even further? The 20% mark is at EUR 5 billion is for the moment the ambition that we want to have. Can I see it? Okay. I'm so scared. I try not to look. Yeah, that is a good target that we have. At the same time, we saw that something that happens all the time whenever we take direct control, for example, of e-tailer, is that the sales explode simply because we take more risk and we are more audacious in the terms of the products that we buy and we put at disposal of the consumer. I think that the 20% mark is what we should have in mind. For sure, not less than that. Yeah. Marco Sormani, Varenne Capital Partners. I really can't see you. Yeah. Where are you? I'm here, yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's up there. Thank you very much. I have a question more concerning strategy mid, long term. Okay, I agree with you. The main element is the brand, the magic, but in some way how to be even stronger in that. For example, Yves Saint Laurent Beaute was sold years ago to L'Oreal, so you don't control so much this part. The beauty, the parts, you said, out of reach for you. Also mainly the haute couture has been stopped years ago. At the same time, I see the Yves Saint Laurent Foundation that is completely not linked to you. No. They do their own exhibition about the brand, about the haute couture design. In some way I think maybe you need to collaborate more or reappropriate or integrate all this storytelling and the history because my impression, I agree with you, its main thing is the brand. For me it's even like a new religion today, but to do that properly, you know, you need to be more linked to the past and integrate and control completely the brand. What do you think to do? What you can do about that, and what is your strategy? Mid- to long-term, I'm not concerning that, but it's for me it's more important than opening some new stores. Okay. All companies are saying the same story, but what about really the brand, the identity of Yves Saint Laurent, which relationship with the past, with the creator, with the design, with the history? Thank you. Well, first of all, I sit in the board of the Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, so to say that there is no link, it's not correct because we decide together, and they do their own exhibition. They propose and they do their own exhibition, but we do that in sync. We work together for the brand. Actually, I consider an incredible luck to have an entity that comes directly from our founders, managed by people that were with our founders 100% fully dedicated to that. Remember that Yves Saint Laurent is the only creative director that has two museums fully dedicated to himself, and only to himself, one in Paris and one in Marrakesh. We use a lot, for example, their premises exactly to do what you're saying, both training of our employees, but also engagement experience for our customers. We have regular tours at the museum. We take our elite customers to Morocco to the museum. We do our global retail meetings, and we take the team to Marrakesh. Maybe you didn't know, but there is a lot of synergy about the activity that the foundation does and us, and the fact that it's managed by them, it makes it even more authentic, as opposed to have a marketing department in Saint Laurent that tries, among 2,000 other things, to also protect the legacy of the brand. On that part, I think we are pretty well covered. Even the way in which the anniversary has been managed, I think they have done a remarkable job, and they could do it only because they did it with the name and the legitimacy of being a real foundation and not a brand that tried to create a marketing tool out of an exhibition in a museum. The part of the legacy and the heritage doesn't worry me at all, and actually we work more and more together. Like I said before, in the case of the [Babouska] Tour exhibition, there has been a completely correlated collaboration, and the exhibitions that we are running around, that we are proposing in the world, like China and Japan, are done very much in sync and collaboration with them because we are telling the history. Regarding beauty, what can I say? It's a license. We nurture each other. It is true that compared to a normal license, we have less control, but at the end of the day, I don't see that many brands where beauty and couture at the end of the day, even if they seem to be under the same umbrella, are exactly managed by the same person. I believe a lot in human relationship, whatever is the contract. I meet every month with the people of Yves Saint Laurent Beaute, and I can tell you I'm having with them the same discussions as I was having when I was at Bottega Veneta or when I was at Gucci with our licensees. I don't consider the fact that beauty is outside and is not a normal license at all as detrimental to the brand. I wouldn't be doing my job if that would be the case. For the moment, we are very focused in elevating our brand, and there is a famous sentence of Mr. Saint Laurent that was saying that whatever is in your collection should be strong enough to be put in a couture show and whatever is in a couture show should be strong enough to be put in your stores and in your normal collection. For the moment, it's not an area that we are exploring. We are focusing more on the ready-to-wear that is, you know, what was launched in 1966 by Yves Saint Laurent. Never say ever. It's not an area that you're not exploring. I mean, it's there. Maybe one day. Hi, Francesca, here. Sorry. Edouard Aubin from Morgan Stanley. Just a kind of a follow-up on some of the questions which were asked. It's just one question. If we look at the three greatest, you know, Parisian couturiers of the 20th century, I think you would agree with me that you have Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent. In another order, but yes, I agree. If you include cosmetics to make things comparable, I think in terms of sales, you're about slightly less than half of Dior and slightly less than, you know, a third of Chanel. Yeah. I guess, you know, you've kind of already partially answered it, but, you know, to what extent is the brand, the DNA of the brand strong enough for you over time, obviously not tomorrow, but over time to narrow the gap? You alluded to that in terms of ASP, for example, but also, as you mentioned, in terms of product category, you know, brand extension. You know, Coco Chanel was doing, you know, jewelry a century ago, so clearly, you know, Chanel has very strong legitimacy in jewelry, in watches and so on. You know, if you compare and contrast, so it's a bit of a difficult exercise, but I'd be curious to have your view. Well, I think it's stronger at the end of the day because if you look at the way in which we have reached EUR 2.5 billion, a lot of the opportunities that you are mentioning that were already present in those brands when they were that size, because, I mean, I cannot name it, I don't wanna talk about competitors, but we reached our results without untapping some of those opportunities that of course are among the things that are in the pipeline. So being already EUR 2.5 billion with this level of profitability and only 268 stores, I think is giving to us even more potential to grow in the long term. We are not big fans of the big highs for the big drops. We wanna build our growth steadily and do things with the right path. We will get to the EUR 5 billion, we will get even above the EUR 5 billion, but with a steady path and keep working on everything that I talked to you about without selling our soul to the devil to sell an extra bag. We're taking the next question. I think it's the last question, right? I see from the timer. Yeah. No, it's 23 seconds. I know. Come on, it was fake. Hi, Francesca. Thomas Chauvet from Citi. I have two question. The first one, on your leather goods business, I was thinking earlier, I don't know that many brands whose original metier business is not leather goods that have become so big in leather goods. And I just wanted to know, one, why do you think that success in leather goods, we all know the Sac de Jour, we all know what Slimane has done, but why still today, that brand is successful, and how do you stay relevant in leather goods in a very competitive segment, going forward? And two, Francois-Henri mentioned that Kering was a house of houses, referring also to his origin from Brittany. What do you think you need to learn from other houses of the group that are doing something perhaps extremely well and that you want to implement? Vice versa, what do you think some of the other houses of Kering should learn from what you've achieved at the group, knowing that this group is generally sharing lots of information, know-how, et cetera, has a lot of common platforms to be very efficient? Thank you. Okay. I start from the first question about the leather goods. The strength of Saint Laurent in leather goods was created many years ago. It was created around 2009, 2010. Why? Because again, people worked on the brand itself, and they understood in that moment, and that was a moment in which also Saint Laurent became part of what at that time was a Gucci Group that has an incredible strength in developing and producing leather goods. When, for example, I joined Gucci, that was the year 2003, there was a lot of the people that had been working at Gucci before, and particularly with great capabilities on leather goods, had moved to Saint Laurent because Saint Laurent for the group, can I say, that has always been the best brand and the most loved, and the one in which a lot of the experience and the success of the leather goods comes from the fact that when the brand joined, Gucci was already very strong there, and a lot of know-how was transferred. I remember the best person that was working on product development at Gucci was moved to Saint Laurent. In this case, at that time with Tom and then Stefano Pilati, created a successful business in bags and in shoes, which like you said, is quite unusual, but they have been able to do it. When I personally joined in 2013, of course the brand was smaller, but all the ingredients were already there. It was small, but the share of the business was already there, so it was a matter of untapping the opportunity, right? It's unusual, I agree with you, but I think it was done because it was the courage of the group at that time to invest in the brand and to take talents and put them here because they understood the potential of the brand itself that today probably we have made more evident thanks to the investment that the group had kept into the brand itself. Regarding to other brands, well, I have worked in three of the brands of the group, Gucci, Bottega, and Saint Laurent, and the CEO of Balenciaga was previously working for Saint Laurent. There is a lot of natural cross-pollination, we want it or not, among ourselves. Francois-Henri challenges at every meeting, because you can be sure that if there is something that another brand does well, that's a question that you get at your business review. He makes sure that we champion and we have a healthy competition among the brand. What can we learn from each other? Well, everything. I mean, we look at each other all the time. The strategy, for example, also of moving towards selected distribution, I felt more confident in doing it because Gucci did it before us, and I could see the results there. I think that other brands have been inspired by Saint Laurent in doing that. One thing in which I think that we can be taken as a reference is this no compromise on whatever it is your brand image. I think that in Kering, everybody's doing a pretty good job in being true to who they are and having a portfolio of brand that is quite complementary. Can we take the last one? I have all zeros there, so you have the control of the time. Okay. Yes. Hi. It's Antoine Belge at BNP Exane. Two questions. First of all, when I was looking at your videos, what really was quite striking is that not all the models were of the Gen Z generation. There were, let's say, some less young ones. I mean, is it a bit of a parti pris? I mean, is it something that maybe compared to other brands within the Kering portfolio that you are, I mean, less obsessed with the Gen Z and then the Millennials, and it is something that you are conscious of and trying to drive at this point? Well, what we said, and this is really driven by Anthony and his interpretation of the brand, that's our way to express diversity. Like I said, we are not after a specific generation, we are after an attitude. I hope that what you saw in the video is that whatever generations were the model, whatever color of the skin were the model, remember that Yves Saint Laurent was the first creator to use a black skin model on his catwalk. Whatever is that, you see a fil rouge that is in the attitude, it is in the pose. You have models that are not of the Gen Z generation, but they are as audacious as as the Gen Z generation models. It's really a question of attitude, and this is what drives a brand. Anthony has been particularly open in expressing inclusivity in that way, both in men and in women. My second question is about, you know, the sort of trends that we've seen over the last two or three years especially. You know, before that, you know, most of the growth in the industry was driven by the Chinese, and we've seen really U.S. Consumers and European consumer, you know, even outperforming in the recent period. I'd be curious to hear your views, especially at a time when, as Francois-Henri said, you know, there was some, you know, macro challenges and even I heard, you know, like alternative scenarios. What’s your view on the sustainability of what we've seen in U.S. and Europe especially in the luxury world? Well, what I saw is a little bit what I said before, an incredible enthusiasm and great adoption from American consumer from the very start, in particular after the arrival of Anthony, his aesthetic and strong interpretation of the brand and emphasizing in particular the woman, and that particular Saint Laurent woman was particularly strong and well-received from the American customers. Like I said, no matter what happens outside, we can focus. I mean, I tend not to worry too much about what's going on outside because that's the same for everybody. In that moment is when we need to focus even more on the things we can control, and for sure what we can control is the business with the consumer that we have. I showed you that loyalty of 21%, growing that with the consumer that we know is for sure gonna be a way to overcome whatever resilience. When we talk about China, we were never dependent on Chinese. At the end of 2019, our business with Chinese was less than 20%, and it has remained like that notwithstanding the strong growth of China, exactly because we don't go after a specific generation or a specific nationality. We express ourselves, and we let the people who like us come into the brand. Whenever the situation with COVID is gonna be solved in China, Chinese will start traveling again. Until they don't travel, they can shop in their country. We saw, for example, now the stores reopening in China and people going back to shop in their stores even if they cannot travel around China. For us, that we have been quite new in the market, no matter what happens remains an opportunity. I am optimistic by nature. I think every CEO should be. In the medium term, that is what you're talking about today, I'm very optimistic about any market. Finito. Thank you. Thank you very much.