Luxury goods brands struggle in Japan
13/11/2008
The global economic downturn is affecting even the highest flyers in Japan's luxury goods market, Le Monde has reported.
The Paris-based newspaper said LVMH has seen sales drop by 7% in Japan in the first nine months of this year, which is a substantial blow to its leathergoods business as 20% of its sales in that space are in Japan. LVMH has achieved growth of 22% in the rest of Asia and of 9% in Europe.
For Hermès, the situation so far has not been quite so bad, with growth in Japan for the first half of 2008 standing at 1.5%. However, the result is poor compared to Europe, where the corresponding figure was 27.8%.
Le Monde quoted research organisation JMR as saying that young professional women in Japan, who had been the mainstay of the luxury goods market there for a long time, have now become more careful over spending. It carried out a study there earlier this year, which showed that 93.4% of Japanese consumers had noticed prices going up and that 40.3% of them intended to cut back their spending as a result.
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