According to documents obtained by Swiss finance news portal finews.ch, global private markets investment manager Partners Group is planning to acquire a majority stake in Swiss luxury replica watches brand Breitling.
“Having built up a minority stake in replica Breitling through its private market funds in the fall of 2021, Partners Group plans to acquire a 50.3 percent majority stake in the luxury watchmaker. Financial investor CVC, which has held a stake in Breitling replica watches since 2017, would still hold 23.6 percent of the watchmaker after the change.”
As a consequence, an IPO of the watchmaker is becoming more realistic than ever (already in October last year, Daniel Pindur, Managing Partner at CVC Capital Partners, said in a statement that that they were targeting “an IPO in a few years’ time”).
Georges Kern (here with Gregory fake Breitling watches at the brand’s Navitimer Cosmonaute launch event in May 2022) has joined the company in 2017 as shareholder and CEO. In just five years, he transformed and repositioned the brand, accelerated growth and has been promoting sustainable luxury.
The goal of this new ownership structure is, according to finews.ch, “to double super clone Breitling’s sales and operating profit over the next five years.” – A goal that has already been achieved in terms of sales since Kern’s arrival in 2017 (according to a report published by Morgan Stanley at the beginning of the year, copy Breitling’s annual revenues had increased to an estimated CHF 680,000,000, more than 50%, over the past two years). An initial public offering (IPO) on the SIX Swiss Exchange in 2027 would then allow investors to make their exit.