Richemont has reached an agreement to divest Yoox Net-a-Porter (YNAP) to MyTheresa. This follows the collapse of a sale to Farfetch last December.
Richemont acquired Net-a-Porter in 2010, merging it with Italian business Yoox in 2015 to create YNAP but it hasn’t been a great investment. YNAP posted a £1.23bn loss last year as sales plummeted.
The deal sees Richemont take a 33 per cent of MyTheresa’s fully diluted share capital along with a seat on its board in return for the YNAP business. MyTheresa takes on YNAP’s existing US$604m cash balances and no financial debt as well as a six year US$110m revolving credit facility to support the YNAP business. MyTheresa will effectively double in size and gain c.1.4 million Net-a-Porter and Mr Porter high-spending customers plus c.2.2 million aspirational luxury customers from Yoox and Outnet.
Richemont chairman Johann Rupert said: “We are pleased to have found such a good home for YNAP.”
Michael Kliger, CEO, MyTheresa said that the acquisition formed part of his strategy to create a pre-eminent, multi-brand, digital luxury group worldwide.
The combined business will operate three distinct luxury storefronts – MyTheresa, Net-A-Porter, and Mr Porter which will run on shared technology and back-end operations. The off-price Yoox and Outnet platforms will run separately to the main brands and will be simplified but are expected to take longer to turnaround.
The deal is subject to approval by regulators.
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