Richemont have announced this morning that the merger between their Net-a-Porter and Italian online luxury company, YOOX has been completed. That took more than six months, if you need the refresher of how the investment is going to work, cast your mind back to late March and when we wrote about it: Net-A-Porter merges with YOOX. What Richemont (and by extension, you the shareholder) gets is 65,599,597 Yoox Net-a-porter shares in the bigger company, one that holds both platforms now. That is half of the business.
It will be interesting to see how the combined company trades today, double the number of shares in issue and a merger of equals to some extent. For the existing shareholders of YOOX, nothing really I suppose, they get to be diluted out of sight, yet they will get another whole business. It is early days for online luxury, yet businesses like Tesla (repeat after me, a car is not a watch or piece of jewellery, those are more likely to appreciate in value and be around for ever) sell items for over 100 thousand Dollars online. Good move, separate the two and get a dedicated person to run that business as their core focus.