A holding company: a company whose business is owning other companies. The study compares it to a shopping centre where one owner has every shop, but each shop still acts as its own little kingdom. Dior and Louis Vuitton share accounting, logistics and buying power behind the scenes, but never marketing or identity.

In the study: Screen: The business model

Because scarcity is the model. If everyone can get the bag, it loses its value as a status symbol. That is also why LVMH owns much of the chain itself: tanneries (Heng Long, 2011; Tanneries Roux, 2012), 117 factories and workshops in France and 6,283 stores, for full control of the story the customer is told. Even in the weak year 2025, 35 cents of every euro sold in fashion and leather became operating profit.

In the study: Screens: The observation; Your verdict

Not in the accounts but in the succession. In 2022 Bernard Arnault restructured the family's ownership so that each of his five children gets an equal 20 per cent of the family's new holding company when he steps down, locked for 30 years, and without other instructions decisions there need at least three of the five to agree. The question is whether the names are guarded as strictly when five siblings must agree.

In the study: Screens: The ownership; Your verdict