Yahoo Lifestyle SMCP Sales Steady Amid China Closures, India Openings
PARIS — Following its China strategy shakeup, Sandro and Maje parent company SMCP saw its sales broadly steady in the fourth quarter, up 1.9 percent at constant currency.
It completed the chapter of its China closings, which will total upward of 75 stores, a resizing plan that SMCP chief executive officer Isabelle Guichot put into place in early 2024. The shutterings impacted what was once its biggest growth market.
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Looking at the full-year 2024, sales were down 1.5 percent at constant currency, in results published after market close.
Despite being dragged down by China, the sales figures were in line with corporate expectations, said Guichot. “It proved that our strategy was right and that we really could anticipate the market evolution,” she said of facing the company’s overexposure in the China market.
Guichot called 2024 “an important transition year” as she seeks to right the ship across all territories. Following the China closures, the company now has 1,662 points of sale worldwide.
“Thanks to our global geographical footprint, we’ve achieved quarter after quarter satisfactory results. We really saw sequential improvement,” she told WWD of the incremental growth over the holiday sales period.
The company has also slashed its excess inventory and stuck to a full-price strategy, which also boosted sales, Guichot added.
“We have the trajectory to come back to double-digit [sales] numbers in ’26 as we expected, with a recovery in ’25 and the full effect in ’26 and overall, I think we are quite serene, and we’ve been really agile in the transformation of the group,” she said.
“We are better equipped to face the years to come, even if the context still contains a certain level of uncertainty,” Guichot added.
She said the company had anticipated the threat of potential U.S. tariffs meeting with their China suppliers in mid-2024. “We are usually quite agile when we foresee that kind of event that could have an impact on our margins,” she said. “It’s a risk that we’ve been able to mitigate as early as at the end of last year. It’s something that we’ve factored in and minimized the impact.”
There will not be any price increases in the coming months, she added.
With hikes on the luxury end of the market, SMCP’s two flagship brands are poised to strengthen their position in the accessible space.
“That’s the opportunity of the group, that with the void left by the increase of the price of the luxury goods, we have a card to play while keeping real honesty in our price positioning versus the quality,” she said. “We have an upside in that segment.”
Excluding China, sales were up 4.7 percent, with sales in its home country of France up 5.2 percent, sales in the rest of Europe rising 5.1 percent and sales in the Americas up 4.9 percent.
Guichot sees the sales boost in other regions as the result of her brand upscaling strategy, including marketing, activations and clienteling, as it looks to capture some market share from luxury brands.
Guichot frames it as a “healthier structure” of distribution. “It’s still a very important network, but it’s more adapted to the Chinese consumption,” she said. Like-for-like sales are steadying there, she added.
Moving into India, where SMCP has a partnership with Reliance Brands Ltd., the company opened its first Sandro store on Jan. 3 and its first Maje store on Jan. 10. With India now in the network, SMCP is operating in 50 countries globally.
“Overall, the main issue that we had to deal with was mainland China and that’s something that has been taken care of,” she said. “China was structurally modified for the coming years, and we have adapted our network to the new reality” as the country’s housing bubble has imploded impacting consumer confidence and spending.
In North America, Canada failed to bounce back after the pandemic, and sales are still slower in the region. SMCP is also realigning its distribution strategy there and looking at different department stores in the country. “That shift is something that we are in the middle of, so we should have a brighter future in the coming months,” she said.
The fires in Los Angeles made the start of 2025 “a bumpy ride,” making it “a little bit difficult to predict for the coming months.”
Investments have been in IT and employee training to upscale the customer experience “on a really granular level.”
SMCP has closed some Claudie Pierlot locations and will strengthen the brand “as a regional player, mainly in Europe.”
The brand suffered from an aging network of retail in secondary cities, and with the closures, SMCP will focus on rejuvenating the image, revamping the collections and new marketing strategies. Its strengths are online sales, particularly accessories, and Guichot wants to improve the in-person experience with activations as well.
She anticipates seeing the first results from new positioning during the first half of 2025, and says she is confident the brand will return to growth over the next fiscal year.
The conglomerate’s sole men’s brand, Fursac, held its first runway show during men’s week in January. The brand entered two doors in South Korea in 2024, and Guichot is now examining the Middle East. “It’s a slow evolution, but we are confident in the brand potential,” she said.
Moving forward in the unstable environment, SMCP plans to continue to optimize its store network with “better retail execution, better clustering of our stores to make sure to have the right product at the right time, at the right place, at the right price,” she said.
With the macroeconomic headwinds shifting daily, Guichot said the focus is on staying agile while sticking to its core categories. Beauty is “on our radar, but still in the early stages,” she said.
Guichot is also looking to strengthen Asia, with Japan the next target for expansion. The company is examining possible entrance strategies, following its other partnerships in Indonesia and the Philippines, and anticipates moving into the market in 2026.
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