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Thirty years of providing the world’s finest wool to the fashion house Loro Piana has done almost nothing for the Indigenous people of the Peruvian Andes.

Once a year, Andrea Barrientos, a 75-year-old subsistence farmer in the Peruvian Andes, works free of charge for the world’s richest person.

She does that by joining dozens of people from her village in herding wild vicuñas for miles on a remote plain 13,000 feet above sea level and shearing them for their soft, golden-brown wool. Vicuñas, big-eyed camelids that roam the southern Andes, produce the finest and most expensive wool there is. In New York, Milan or London, the fashion house Loro Piana sells a vicuña sweater for about $9,000. Barrientos’ Indigenous community of Lucanas, whose only customer is Loro Piana, receives about $280 for an equivalent amount of fibre. That doesn’t leave enough to pay Barrientos, whose village expects her to work as a volunteer.

Loro Piana, meanwhile, is owned by the luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE and controlled by Bernard Arnault, who’s worth $202 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Based in Italy, where it was founded in 1924, Loro Piana has become a touchstone brand in the so-called quiet luxury trend, made visible in shows about the wealthy. A Loro Piana cashmere baseball cap, famously worn in Succession by the character Kendall Roy, retailed in the real world for about $600.

Vicuñas were hunted almost to extinction in the 20th century by poachers who shot and skinned them instead of shearing them. Trade in the wool was outlawed in 1969. An international treaty later helped reinstate a legal market while dictating that income derived from vicuñas benefit Indigenous Andean peoples, a historically impoverished population. Lucanas was the first community to shear vicuñas under this regime, in 1994, and Loro Piana has been its buyer ever since. The trade has done little for the 2,700 people of the village. Most houses are made of mud, as is Barrientos’, and don’t have plumbing. Older residents remain subsistence farmers while the younger people either move to cities or work in the unregulated and often dangerous gold mines that dot the region.

There are now about 200,000 vicuñas in Peru, close to half of the world’s population. The increased supply seems to have increased demand, and Loro Piana’s prices keep rising. The rate paid to the people of Lucanas for raw fiber, however, has fallen 36 percent in the past decade. In 2018 a government-commissioned study found that 80 percent of those living in the town said they hadn’t benefited from the community’s participation in the trade. “The vicuña has not helped any community escape poverty,” says Omar Siguas, the researcher at Peru’s National University of Huancavelica who led the study.

Loro Piana disputes that conclusion. “Since it arrived in Peru in the ‘80s, Loro Piana has been committed to upholding the highest standards of ethical and responsible business practices,” the company said in a statement. “Loro Piana represents a key economic support locally, protecting and fortifying the demand and the value of the vicuña fibre, regardless of market dynamics.”

Peru’s wildlife and forestry agency, known as Serfor, said in written answers to questions that the vicuña trade “does not improve the quality of life of peasant community members.” Some communities, the agency added, derive more income from tourist activities surrounding vicuña shearing than from the sale of the most expensive natural fiber on Earth. Serfor officials have in the past said it’s a priority to find ways for Andean communities to sell value-added vicuña products, but no policies to do so have been put in place. Barrientos, for example, has never had an opportunity to make a vicuña garment. She’s never even seen one.

Herding wild vicuñas is hard, physical work, done at an altitude of 13,000 feet or more. Over several hours, the animals are directed into an enclosure. The animals are restrained and sheared, then released to return to the peaks and plains.

The vicuña is one of four South American camelids. A domesticated vicuña is known as an alpaca, a separate, fluffier species that can grow seemingly unlimited amounts of fibre and can even die, smothered by the weight of its coat, if not sheared regularly. Alpaca fibre is fine but not as fine as that of its wild counterpart. The guanaco is a more muscular, wild species, with coarse hair. A domesticated guanaco is a llama; its fiber is also used, but it’s rough, making it relatively undesirable and cheap.

Loro Piana calls vicuña “the fiber of the gods.” But vicuña’s fame is more closely associated with royalty. Philip II, a 16th century king of Spain, reportedly had linens made out of vicuña, as did the Inca, as the head of the Inca Empire was known. “Vicuña wool, because it was so esteemed for its fineness, was all for the Inca, who then ordered it delivered to his royal-blooded relatives,” the historian Inca Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1609. “Others could not wear that wool under penalty of death.”

What remains in place in Lucanas today is a stark sense of who can wear vicuña and who cannot. “I’ve never had a vicuña garment,” Barrientos says, “because they are banned.” Papias Sosaya, a Lucanas resident who specialises in holding vicuñas during shearing, says that “as a Lucanino, as a Peruvian, I would love to wear a garment made of vicuña wool. But it is totally banned.”

It isn’t in fact banned, but the perception persists, perhaps because Lucanas’ role in the trade is so strictly limited. The community’s leaders say they lack the resources to buy the machinery necessary to weave vicuña, a notoriously tricky fibre to spin into yarn because of its short length and small diameter. (Vicuña has a diameter of less than 13 microns, versus 15 microns for fine cashmere.) Without that specialized technology, communities such as Lucanas are unable to move up the supply chain.

When vicuñas were placed under protection in 1969, a majority of the Peruvians who shared territory with the animals were illiterate Quechua speakers. The poverty rate in the mountains exceeded 80 percent; most people were subsistence farmers. While Peru has made significant economic strides since, the Andean regions remain the poorest in the country. In 2018, when Peru last calculated detailed poverty rates, 41 percent of the population of the village of Lucanas and the surrounding district was poor, meaning an individual lived on less than $91 a month.

Peru’s vicuña population, having fallen to about 10,000, recovered in the 1980s, at a time when the country’s Southern Andes were terrorised by a bloody war between government forces and Maoist insurgents known as the Shining Path. Around 70,000 people died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Indigenous citizens. The head of the Shining Path was captured in 1992, which ended the fighting and helped enable Peru’s government, then led by President Alberto Fujimori, to allow vicuña fibre sales to restart.

The government put out feelers for international interest, the prize being a monopoly on the vicuña market for the next decade. Loro Piana won as the main investor in a three-part conglomerate. In 1994 the first legal shearing of vicuñas in decades was done in Lucanas, with Fujimori in attendance. The next year, Peru granted Indigenous communities the exclusive right to shear and sell vicuña fiber, as long as the animals were found within their territories. Loro Piana and others would have to enter into commercial agreements with communities to access the vicuña. For a while.

On Sept. 24, 2000, as his government collapsed from graft allegations, Fujimori issued a decree giving companies the same rights as peasant communities to shear vicuñas found on their property. Now, companies could buy land in the Andes and shear the animals there. Records show that Alfonso Martinez, head of the government office created to regulate the new vicuña market, pushed for the change behind the scenes, writing in one memo that it was “indispensable.” Soon after Fujimori’s decree, Martinez left the government and set up a company that worked as an intermediary between Indigenous communities and corporate buyers. In 2007, Loro Piana hired him as chief executive officer of its Peruvian operation.

Martinez, who died in 2019, got to work turning Fujimori’s decree into practice. Property records show that Loro Piana bought 4,942 acres (2,000 hectares) of barren land near Lucanas for $160,000. The company’s application for a vicuña shearing permit gives a sense of its goals. Loro Piana proposed creating a 12.5-kilometre (7.8-mile) fence around its property, which would ensure that the vicuñas wouldn’t leave and get sheared by somebody else. The fence would also ensure that the animals reproduced at a maximum rate, enabling the population to grow by as much as 50 percent a year. The company’s application listed some disadvantages, including the loss of genetic diversity and lower life expectancy.

The fence, which formally places vicuñas in “semi-captivity,” is controversial; wildlife experts say it goes against the principle that vicuñas are wild animals, even if their cage is ample. Loro Piana’s application to shear the vicuñas on its land was approved in 2010. The area had few of the animals, but the government agreed to supply some, making Loro Piana the first company to be able to shear vicuñas without paying Indigenous communities for the fiber.

As the vicuña population at Loro Piana’s property grew, fiber prices in Lucanas fell, from $420 per kilo in 2012 to $330 in 2022, according to official figures from Serfor. Roberto Carlos Sarmiento, the Lucanas community president, says the contract for 2023 established a price of $280.

Loro Piana has consistently bought all the fiber Lucanas can produce, but production has fallen along with the price, for reasons that are unclear. In 2012, the village sold 1,877 kilos. Ten years later, the figure was 460 kilos. The village’s vicuña revenue fell in that period by about 80 percent — from a high of $788,526 to $151,974. In the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, there was no vicuña roundup and no money.

In the early 2000s, Pier Luigi Loro Piana, one of the two brothers then leading the company, had appeared committed to paying a higher price. “If one year I say, ‘I have too much wool and I don’t buy from you this year,’ everything would fall apart for them, so we support them by buying constantly at around $400 per kilo,” he told the Telegraph. “If you never try to cheat them, you get a lot of advantages and privileges.” The brothers sold their company to LVMH in 2013, becoming billionaires in the process.

Capturing vicuñas for shearing is a laborious process steeped in history. The most recent roundup in Lucanas was in June, on a clear day under a blazing sun. Barrientos, Sosaya and other residents walked for miles on the high plain to gather vicuñas and drive them toward a central corral. Peruvian peasant communities have an elected president who can decide how to use and redistribute community resources; in Lucanas, the rule is that community members must work for free in the roundup, while outsiders can be paid, usually about $20 a day.

Barrientos says she resents the lack of payment, but she also greatly enjoys experiencing how fast and agile the vicuñas are, how different from her usual herd of sheep. “When I see a vicuña? I feel happy, happy. It moves swiftly. It runs fast and far. You can’t catch up to it,” she says. “They say that when I was born, my parents rubbed my little feet and hands against a vicuña, so that I could run like one.”

Each animal’s wool is stored separately. Loro Piana is the sole buyer of vicuña fiber from Lucanas and much of the rest of Peru.

Newly shorn vicuñas after the 2023 chaccu. If these animals are caught again this year, they will be released — vicuñas can be sheared only every other year.

To capture vicuñas, Peruvians partake in a ritual called the chaccu, a Quechua word that’s been used by Spanish chroniclers since the 16th century to describe how Incas would catch, shear and release the animals. The basics of the chaccu have barely changed since.

“They encircle a huge area of countryside, until they come together from all sides,” wrote José de Acosta in a book published in 1590. “They tend to shear these animals, and from their wool they make covers or blankets that are very regarded.” Garcilaso de la Vega noted that the shearing was done “every four years, leaving three years in between, because the Indians say in this amount of time the vicuña wool grows all it can grow.”

Nowadays, vicuñas are captured once a year and sheared every two. A consequence of the faster turnaround is that the average weight of wool sheared per animal has fallen over time; it’s now at about 150 grams per animal, down from 250 grams in 1994. Vicuñas have golden and white fur, but only the golden fibres are usually sheared. Vicuña garments are often sold in this original color, without being dyed.

At the 2023 chaccu, a set of fit, young people started running to push the vicuñas in one direction. Another group of people that included Barrientos held a rope tied with plastic flags. Steadily, the two groups converged. For the first 3 miles there were virtually no vicuñas to be seen, but as they were pressed into a smaller and smaller space, the animals had no choice but to gather. Eventually, hundreds of them walked into an enclosure. Those whose wool was too short to be shorn were released. The shearers needed two days to get through the rest of them, meaning some of the vicuñas remained caged overnight without food or water.

Adult vicuñas weigh up to 110 pounds (50 kilograms), and holding them is a two-person job. People like Sosaya walked into the cage and grabbed vicuñas, laying them on their sides and restricting their legs. Other people held the animals’ necks. Vicuñas are afraid of humans and will often kick and bite. Sosaya and his group took shots of a local liquor called cañazo before going in. Grabbing vicuñas is a task not often done sober.

“These animals are really very savage. They don’t trust anything,” Sosaya said. “To grab the vicuñas, the first person goes toward the head and grabs it, and I go toward the tail, and I go under it and hold the tail and the legs. Why? So that it’s not kicking around or hitting another vicuña, or maybe one of us.”

After shearing, the buzzed vicuñas were simply flipped so they could land on their feet. They looked around, flinched at the nearby humans and ran off. In a year they’ll be captured again.

At a UBS conference, the Estée Lauder Cos. CEO Fabrizio Freda detailed his plans to put the beleaguered company back on a path to growth.

Fabrizio Freda has revealed more details of his plan to revive the Estée Lauder Cos. as it continues to tread water amid struggles in Asia and at home.

Speaking at a UBS conference Thursday in New York City, the longtime chief executive officer of the beauty company, fleshed out four pillars that the company’s Profit Recovery Plan will be based on. The plan is expected to drive incremental operating profit of $1.1 billion to $1.4 billion.

The first is product mix, which involves pushing more high end products like La Mer and Tom Ford in certain markets, namely China, since this is what is performing well.

While many parts of the business have been struggling, Jane Hertzmark Hudis, Lauder’s executive group president who was speaking alongside Freda, said: “Luxury is growing and luxury skin care in the market is strong. La Mer grew very strong double digits in calendar year 2023.”

The second pillar is on pricing, with Freda admitting that there was too much discounting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We have plans to reabsorb these discounts correctly without impacting volume,” he said. “This is one pillar which is creating more value for every sale we do.”

Lauder became very promotional to clear out excess inventory in its Asia travel retail business, which was hit hard during the pandemic and failed to bounce back, with Jefferies analyst Ashley Helgans previously noting that “it’s almost conditioned the consumer in China to only buy Estée Lauder brands when they’re on promotions because they assume at some point they will be on promotion.”

The third pillar is called operational excellence, which entails maximizing the use of the companies’ factories. A new factory in Japan, which started producing skin care products this year, should improve conditions, but lead times have been up to six months, meaning that Lauder was hindered when it came to quickly adapting its stock to emerging trends.

The final pillar is leverage, with a focus on rightsizing the business, including reallocating resources into the sources of growth in the company.

During its second-quarter earnings released last month, the Estée Lauder Cos. added a restructuring element to its Profit Recovery Plan, reducing its 62,000-strong global workforce by between 3 and 5 percent as part of the plans. As of yet, it is not yet known which departments will be impacted.

On China and Asia travel retail, Freda stressed that despite all the issues the company is facing in these markets, they will always be extremely important to its strategy due to their sheer size.

Net sales decreased 14 percent year-over-year in Europe in the second quarter, which includes Asia travel retail sales. Net sales in Asia Pacific were down 7 percent.

While Freda conceded that there will not be another China in terms of growth, emerging markets he sees the most opportunity in include India, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil and Turkey.

Starter prestige brands such as MAC tend to perform best in these markets, according to Freda. More recently, The Ordinary has had much success.

“The Ordinary is an extraordinary brand asset to better penetrate emerging markets,” he said. “Just as an example, we launched The Ordinary in India and it’s among the top brands and is doing super well in a every emerging market where the brand is launched.”

With valuations low and the pressure to perform high, fashion, luxury and lifestyle companies are rushing to leave the public markets behind and seek backers to take their companies private. But the clock is ticking, and there's not much time left to act.

LONDON — Few things can match the high that comes from ringing the opening bell to mark a company’s stock market debut — except perhaps the enormous sigh of relief that comes when that company is delisted.

When companies go from public to private they do it quietly — there are no rounds of applause, selfies, videos or staff members shaking giant foam fingers and screaming “woo-hoo.” Owners breathe out, take their time to make changes, and may even look to relist their companies, but only when the time is right.

Now, with a slowdown in consumer demand and inflation and high interest rates squeezing valuations, publicly listed companies ranging from Tod’s to Superdry to Soho House are eyeing the exit door, and looking to return to private ownership.

Whether they need to restructure or raise more money, they’re hoping to make their fixes away from the glare of the public markets.

Amid all the market volatility, the stock exchange “can be a terrible place to live” right now especially for creative brands, family-run firms, or companies that are restructuring,” said Alice Wells, managing director of Lempriere Wells, an investment bank specializing in consumer M&A.

“When the market is unstable, it can be punishing for some companies. You lose access to liquidity and to capital, and it’s just not worth it anymore. This is especially true for creative businesses that need to be thinking for the long term,” Wells added.

According to a recent report from S&P Global, private equity public-to-private deals hit a 16-year high in 2023, chiefly because stock market valuations have been so low. Private market valuations look high by comparison, and companies across a variety of industries have been taking advantage of that disparity to jump out of the public markets and into private equity hands.

Fashion and lifestyle companies, some of which are now trading at a wide gap from the peak levels seen in the past 10 to 15 years, have begun to wonder whether delisting might be their best option. And they’re looking to private equity for help.

Tod’s has already confirmed its intention to delist via a deal with private equity giant L Catterton, while Superdry’s founder and chief executive officer Julian Dunkerton is looking for backers to help him take the troubled high street retailer private. According to the latest stock market filing, he has until March 29 to make an offer or abandon his efforts.

The loss-making Soho House confirmed last month that it’s mulling a “take-private” deal, and has formed a special committee to explore strategic options.

Swatch Group is also in the mix. Luca Solca of Bernstein recently wrote that taking the Swiss giant private would be cofounder, CEO and chairman Nicolas Hayek’s “lifelong dream.”

Late last year, José Neves was said to be in talks to take Farfetch private, but in the end it was too late. Farfetch, which was fast running out of money, was eventually placed into administration, and later sold to Coupang.

Industry sources have suggested that Burberry could be next. They argue that pulling out of the London Stock Exchange would give the company the freedom to restructure without facing the scrutiny of the public markets.

Companies have different reasons for going private.

David Belhassen, founder and managing partner of Neo, a private equity firm that specializes in fashion and lifestyle brands, said that in some cases, such as Tod’s, “the market doesn’t recognize a company’s value for whatever reason — whether that’s fear, or the perception that it’s not doing well.”

“Tod’s has been doing very, very well lately, but the market hasn’t recognized that,” so the owning Della Valle family decided to take matters into their own hands, Belhassen added.

Tod’s revealed earlier this week that fiscal 2023 profits more than doubled to 50 million euros, while sales grew almost 12 percent to 1.12 billion euros.

As reported last month, the Italian group is planning to return to private ownership through a 1.4 billion euro deal with an L Catterton affiliate backed by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

Tod’s move didn’t surprise analysts. The company had already tried, and failed, to go private two years ago, and is now determined to chart a course beyond the stock market’s borders.

Bernstein’s Solca said that in a “polarizing and consolidating luxury industry, it makes sense for Tod’s to become part of a much bigger galaxy” by teaming with an LVMH-backed affiliate.

Gabriel Debach, market analyst at eToro, believes a delisting will allow Tod’s more freedom and flexibility to enhance all of the brands in its stable, which also include Fay and Hogan. In addition, he said, private ownership will give the company more operational autonomy, and allow it to pursue medium- and long-term objectives “beyond the short-term scrutiny of the stock market.”

Like Solca, Debach views Tod’s determination to delist as a reflection of the luxury market’s current dynamics, where bigger, multibrand groups, such as LVMH, Kering and Compagnie Financière Richemont dominate.

“Growing competition and the trend toward an increasing concentration could make it difficult for a company such as Tod’s, with a market capitalization of about 1.3 billion euros, to compete with the major conglomerates,” Debach added.

Swatch Group, owner of watch brands including Omega and Breguet as well as the core Swatch label, could well be next.

In a report published last month, Solca said the shares are trading at “rock bottom multiples” and described the company as “the epitome of the undermanaged business with high potential, and therefore a very appetizing target for the industry consolidator LVMH.”

The watchmaker’s shares are down about 35 percent over the past year, giving it an enterprise value of 8.8 billion Swiss francs, or about $10 billion, factoring in the company’s debt.

That has Swatch trading at 1.1-times revenues and 5.6-times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to S&P Capital IQ. That pales in comparison to luxury giant LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, which is trading at 5.3-times revenues and 16.2-times EBITDA.

Solca and his team ran a “back of the envelope scenario,” and found that going private would also give Swatch the opportunity “to drive down any incurred debt rather rapidly.”

The Bernstein report also highlighted Swatch as a reluctant stock market player with a disdain for investors, noting that a change of ownership would transform the company’s prospects. If things remain as they are, “one could see the Swatch Group share price go nowhere, especially if Chinese middle class demand continued to be lackluster,” the report said.

Another hypothetical case is Burberry. Although analysts aren’t speculating, or crunching the numbers, industry sources have told WWD that selling to private equity and delisting is a possibility.

It would certainly make life easier for management, which has been engineering a strategy shift in a perfect storm of market conditions, including a normalization in luxury demand, and more cautious spending by Chinese consumers.

In January, Burberry told the markets that adjusted operating profit for the 2024 financial year would land somewhere between 410 million pounds and 460 million pounds, below previously stated guidance.

A few months earlier, Burberry had already warned the markets that full-year profits would be lower due to the slowdown in demand for luxury goods worldwide.

Despite all the challenges, CEO Jonathan Akeroyd said he was confident that Burberry could make all the necessary changes and hit its 4 billion pounds revenue goal in the medium term.

Akeroyd acknowledged the wider economic backdrop is making the task more challenging.

“Clearly luxury demand has slowed, but we are still in the very early stages” of the repositioning, he said following the Christmas trading update in January. “It’s very early days, and we have a long way to go. We’re focused on execution, and we’re very confident in our strategy.”

Burberry, which has a market capitalization of 4.54 billion pounds, has given no indication that it plans to delist. The company declined to comment for this story.

An industry source with knowledge of Burberry said there is nothing officially happening at the moment with regard to a take-private deal.

“Bankers are pitching the idea, but there is no mandate or process in place, and it would be a very tough deal to get done,” the source said, adding that it would take billions of pounds of equity and a consortium of sponsors, rather than a single one, to get any deal over the line.

“While not impossible, it’s long putt to be sure,” the person said.

The clock is ticking — for everyone — as it’s only a matter of time before stock markets begin to stabilize and luxury share prices bounce back.

Shares in the sector are already showing signs of life. Since Jan. 1 Richemont shares are up by 29 percent; Moncler Group by 20 percent; LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton by 17 percent, and Kering by 5 percent, although the big banks have warned investors not to get too excited yet.

Neo’s Belhassen believes there is only a small window for brands to get delistings done before valuations rise further.

Belhassen said that some companies should probably have made the move six months ago “because the markets were even more difficult, so it’s kind of the last chance right now,” he said, adding that inflation is coming down; interest rates might drop soon, and China will come back at some point.

He’s not the only one anticipating the return to a more bullish market.

In a recent report, EY said that global IPO activity could rebound in the second half, following a lackluster 2023, which saw a 33 percent decline, year-on-year, in funds raised.

“Although we may not see a rebound in IPO activity in 2024, there are reasons to be positive,” said Scott McCubbin, EY’s IPO leader for the UK & Ireland.

McCubbin believes the fundamentals of the London Stock Exchange in particular remain strong, “and pent-up demand for IPOs suggests we are likely to see an upturn in the market in the second half of [2024] as economic challenges continue to ease,” pointing to better days ahead.

SpaceX is continuing to make progress on the development of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, with the third test flight Thursday accomplishing considerably more than the previous two tests.

The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southeastern Texas at 8:25 a.m. local time. Although SpaceX has been developing Starship for years, this is only the third time the company has attempted an orbital mission.

After liftoff, Starship proceeded through a nominal — aerospace speak for normal — ascend. All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster performed as designed, and the two stages separated around 2 minutes 45 seconds into the mission. Critically, the launch vehicle nailed a novel stage separation technique called “hot staging,” where the upper stage (also called Starship) lights its engines to push away the Super Heavy booster. The hot-staging technique was performed for the first time, ever, during the second Starship test flight last November.

From there, the Starship upper stage continued its ascent to orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk congratulated the team on X, saying, “Starship reached orbital velocity!”

The booster executed what’s called a boostback burn to adjust its trajectory as it aimed to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico — Falcon 9’s booster performs the same maneuver to vertically land back on Earth — but its engines failed to relight for the landing burn phase. The Super Heavy was subsequently lost.

The company nailed another new milestone after it opened Starship’s payload door for the first time. This capability is crucial for SpaceX’s plans to rapidly deploy many hundreds of next-generation Starlink satellites. Another demonstration, a propellant transfer demo, was also completed, though the company did not go into the results of this test.

Propellant transfer is a crucial part of the company’s plans to return humans to the moon for NASA. As part of SpaceX’s plans for that NASA mission, the company has settled on a mission architecture that could include more than a dozen Starship refueling trips.

Being able to refuel the vehicle is also necessary for a future Mars mission.

Starship continued on its coasting phase, but after around a half hour the company said it wouldn’t attempt to relight the engines to proceed with the test. SpaceX didn’t elaborate on the livestream why it decided not to continue.

Instead, they let gravity do its work, and the Earth’s powerful gravitational forces pulled Starship back through the lower atmosphere. Ultimately, mission controllers failed to reestablish communications with Starship, leading SpaceX’s Dan Huot to announce that they had lost the ship: “No splashdown today, but again just it’s incredible to see how much further we got this time around,” he said.

DÉCRYPTAGE - Le holding de l'ex-patron de Publicis a fait une offre pour la société de marketing numérique étranglée par sa dette.

C’est une histoire de restructuration d’entreprise comme la France en connaît malheureusement si bien. Celle d’un ancien fleuron national, Solocal, asphyxié par une dette qu’il traîne depuis le début des années 2000. Avec, en guise de créanciers, des hedge funds anglo-saxons devenus par la force des choses les principaux actionnaires de la société. Et une poignée de professionnels des situations à haut risque : l’administratrice Hélène Bourbouloux ou l’avocat associé chez Gibson Dunn Jean-Pierre Fargès, qui œuvrent depuis l’été dernier à sa quatrième restructuration en huit ans. L’ancien éditeur des célèbres Pages jaunes, reconverti dans le marketing digital à destination des petites et moyennes entreprises, joue aujourd’hui sa survie. Le temps presse puisqu’il doit rembourser en 2025 une obligation de 175 millions d’euros, après avoir manqué déjà des échéances de paiements de ses intérêts. Désormais, ses 2300 collaborateurs retiennent leur souffle avant la possible arrivée d’un nouveau propriétaire des lieux : Maurice Lévy.

L’offre formulée par l’ancien patron de Publicis et sa famille à travers leur holding Ycor, qui abrite des sociétés spécialisées dans le marketing digital et la data (Weborama, Proximedia…), vient en effet de recevoir le soutien de la direction de Solocal. Elle prévoit, entre autres, un apport de 40 millions d’euros d’argent frais via des augmentations de capital et une réduction massive de la dette de Solocal, située aujourd’hui autour de 240 millions d’euros. « Ycor contrôlerait alors 76 % du capital de Solocal », explique un analyste d’Oddo BHF. Les créanciers convertiraient une partie de leurs obligations en titres nouveaux. Quant aux actionnaires actuels, ils seraient complètement dilués en détenant moins de 1 % du tour de table. Une nouvelle configuration qui sonnerait alors la fin de l’aventure boursière de Solocal, dont la valorisation tombait jeudi sous la barre des 7 millions d’euros. Une situation impensable pour ce groupe, issu de l’ex-monopole public de France Télécom, qui valait 6 milliards d’euros en 2006…

«Depuis des années, Solocal souffre d'un sous-investissement chronique»

« Chercher simplement à se refinancer aurait été suicidaire, note Arnaud Marion, ancien administrateur de Solocal de 2016 à 2018. Solocal doit se débarrasser une bonne fois pour toutes de sa dette, et passer d’une vision purement financière à une vision stratégique afin de faire évoluer l’entreprise grâce à un nouvel actionnaire de contrôle. » C’est l’Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) qui a obligé Solocal à sortir du bois en début de semaine, alors que les discussions avec Maurice Lévy avaient débuté il y a quelques mois de cela. En face du publicitaire français, l’offre des créanciers obligataires, qui doit également être étudiée par le tribunal de commerce de Nanterre, prévoit un apport important de liquidités exclusivement en dette. « N’oublions pas que, malgré ses difficultés, Solocal a toujours été rentable, mais cet argent lui aura seulement servi à payer les intérêts de sa dette », rappelle Arnaud Marion.

L’un des péchés originels de Solocal remonte à 2006, au moment de la distribution d’un dividende exceptionnel de 2,5 milliards d’euros aux actionnaires. Ce dernier ayant été financé, pour deux tiers, par de la dette… Empêtrée au fil des années dans d’innombrables remboursements d’intérêts (à des taux supérieurs à 10 %), l’entreprise a fini par rater plusieurs virages stratégiques. Ses restructurations financières successives ayant, par ailleurs, entraîné de coûteux honoraires. « Depuis des années, Solocal souffre d’un sous-investissement chronique causé par une dette trop importante », reconnaît auprès du Figaro son directeur général, Cédric Dugardin, qui a démarché de nombreux hommes d’affaires français depuis son arrivée à la tête du groupe en décembre. « Je suis convaincu du fort potentiel de Solocal. Le nombre de manifestations d’intérêt reçues le démontre clairement », abonde le dirigeant.

Solocal, qui compte toujours le fonds américain GoldenTree comme premier actionnaire (25 % du capital), affichait en 2023 un chiffre d’affaires en baisse de 10 % sur un an à 359 millions d’euros. Dans un contexte macroéconomique chahuté, la société souffre du ralentissement des investissements dans la publicité digitale. « Les prochaines semaines s’annoncent très importantes pour l’avenir de l’entreprise », conclut Cédric Dugardin. S’il finit par l’emporter, nul doute qu’un nouvel actionnaire comme Maurice Lévy tirera parti des nombreux atouts restants de Solocal : ses 215.000 PME et TPE clientes, sa myriade de données sur les restaurateurs ou les médecins, ses logiciels numériques, et son armée de commerciaux à travers le pays. Dans l’espoir, peut être, d’offrir une nouvelle vie au joyau français…