Richemont

The money behind it was older. Richemont took over the international assets of the South African Rembrandt Group, which Anton Rupert had built from the 1940s on mining, tobacco through Rothmans International, and a growing set of luxury goods investments.¹

In 1993 the luxury holdings were placed in a new UK-listed company, Vendôme, apart from the tobacco business. Richemont bought out Vendôme’s minority shareholders in 1998, left tobacco and pay television over the following decade, and in 2008 moved its remaining outside interests into a separate company, Reinet, leaving a group made up of luxury businesses.¹

The watch houses came in two waves. Through Vendôme the group bought Vacheron Constantin in 1996 and Panerai in 1997, adding them to the watches already made by its jewellers and by Piaget and Baume & Mercier.^1, 5, 6

The larger step came in 2000, when Richemont agreed to buy Les Manufactures Horlogères from Mannesmann, which had decided to sell after Vodafone took it over. The holding owned all of IWC Schaffhausen, 90 per cent of A. Lange & Söhne and 60 per cent of Jaeger-LeCoultre; Richemont bought the other 40 per cent of Jaeger-LeCoultre from the Audemars Piguet group at the same time. The two deals cost CHF 3,080 million and completed in December 2000. What Richemont wanted, by its own account, was the holding’s skill in making high-value movements. It took the last 10 per cent of Lange in 2003.^1, 6, 7

These purchases were Richemont’s part in the consolidation of the late 1990s, when the Swatch Group was buying Breguet and Glashütte Original. Günter Blümlein, who had led IWC and co-founded the revived Lange, died the following year.^{6, 8, 10, 11, 12}

After 2000 the group bought suppliers as well as brands. It acquired the movement maker Fabrique d’Horlogerie Minerva in 2006, and in 2007 the case maker Donzé-Baume and the component workshops of Roger Dubuis, which became Manufacture Genevois de Haute Horlogerie; it bought 60 per cent of the Roger Dubuis brand in 2008 and, in 2012, a maker of stamped exterior parts and a gold refiner.¹

Its watch houses also share a public stage. Cartier, Baume & Mercier, Piaget and others started the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva in 1991, where IWC and Panerai later showed their collections, and in 2005 Richemont, Audemars Piguet and Girard-Perregaux set up the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, a non-profit body for watchmaking knowledge and events.^1, 5, 13