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LV's artistic director of watches and jewelry Francesca Amfitheatrof unveiled 11 themes with 100 pieces in Saint-Tropez.

PARIS — After the billion-year timeframe that shaped the Earth and its treasures, a century’s worth of seismic shifts inspired Louis Vuitton’s artistic director of watches and jewelry Francesca Amfitheatrof.

And the 100-piece opening chapter of the “Awakened Hands, Awakened Minds” high jewelry collection is shaking things up in its own right, with firsts that include fully traceable rubies, a yellow LV Monogram Star cut diamond and a tiara.

For the 11 themes unveiled Wednesday in Saint-Tropez, Amfitheatrof explored the 100 or so years that followed the French Revolution and end with the 1901 Universal Exposition.

“It was such an interesting time in France. Post Revolution, the abolition of the guilds allowed ateliers the freedom to work with anyone and therefore there’s this boom in creation [among] artisans,” she told WWD in an exclusive interview. “In a way, luxury is born and [becomes] available to whoever can afford it.”

The collection is articulated in two parts roughly covering five decades each, with Amfitheatrof alighting on traditional crafts, technological innovations from that era and the Eiffel Tower.

Bridging the gap is house founder Louis Vuitton, who opened his business in 1854.

“He was bang in the middle of it, one hand on the craftsmanship and the other on the expansion,” she continued. “There’s 50 years of incredible craftsmanship and [he] arrives in Paris when this is happening, setting up the company in the middle of the century because he also sees there’s this innovation, this awakening, this beginning of what becomes modern.”

Handcrafts inform the initial four themes, starting with Splendeur, where floral motifs with ruby centers and clusters of closed set diamonds are intricately layered and laid out to evoke carved woodwork.

Echoing the changes brought by artificial light — another idea underpinning Amfitheatrof’s designs — the 143 carats of juicy Mozambique gemstones in a rosy red close to prized, now-exhausted, Burmese ruby veins become near-fluorescent with a jeweler’s flashlight. More than 50 of them in cushion, pear, oval and octagonal cuts are used for a transformable high-collar necklace.

Most importantly, they are the first colored gemstones to come with an Aura blockchain-backed mine-to-jewelry certificate, thanks to a partnership between the Fura mine and the French luxury house.

The first Vuitton high jewelry tiara is the centerpiece of the Elegance set, inspired by the trembleuse jewelry technique, which sees motifs shimmying with the slightest movement.

“It’s such a French innovation, this idea that your diamonds tremble in the candlelight and seduce your viewers,” said Amfitheatrof, who gave it a novel spin through a mosaic of triangular shapes. “I thought it was a just a great, gentle way to modernize a very old technique [to] make it contemporary and part of the conversation today.”

Braiding and textile crafts are revisited in metal and gems for the six pieces billed Seduction. Its highlight is a collar necklace nodding to ribbons laced into an intricate pattern that required 4,276 hours, 590 elements and 8,000 stones — including a 12.92-carat octagonal step-cut Zambian emerald.

Also part of the set is a chatelaine-style necklace that hides a watch, developed in collaboration with the master watchmakers of La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton. Another timepiece hides under the weaving-inspired rounded bracelet dressed in a mosaic of diamonds and emeralds in the Phenomenal theme.

Then comes the second part, with seven themes representing the century’s advancements in science, engineering and technology.

A then-groundbreaking experiment proving the Earth’s rotation — still on display in Paris’ Panthéon monument — inspired the asymmetrical layering in the Gravité necklace, featuring three royal blue sapphires from Kashmir.

Optimisme, with its interlocking yellow gold and platinum construction mimicking folded metal to catch the light, embodies the optimistic, daring and playful spirit of the time, a major takeaway of the century’s innovations, according to Amfitheatrof.

Vision had the studio teams looking to railway tracks; sharply detailed repeating motifs in the Perception and Frequence designs hinted at mechanization.

And then there’s Victoire, which owes its volumes and structures to Paris’ ultimate symbol: the Eiffel Tower.

“I’m sure that people gasped at first when they saw [it],” Amfitheatrof said. “That’s something that is important to us: bringing that slight edge to high jewelry. You have to challenge yourself [as well as] our supporters, viewers and clients.”

Cue the necklace reaches down in a deep V that looks like a sketch of the tower hanging downward from the neck — with a removable 15-carat flower-cut diamond that can be worn on a ring.

In a further nod to her idea of beauty and engineering coming hand in hand is the use of the first yellow LV Monogram Star cut diamond on another collar necklace in the theme. “It is again this marriage of discovery, engineering and technology that allows us to [achieve] this cut today,” she added.

House ambassador Ana de Armas, who will soon star in the collection’s campaign, was among the first to take in the pieces and lauded Amfitheatrof’s “vivid, almost magical storytelling.”

“Discovering ‘Awakened Hands, Awakened Minds,’ I was captured not just by the story of 19th-century Paris but by the size of the jewels — each one like a world of its own,” the actress told WWD in an email.

And there is no stone that carries a bigger story in this collection than the Cœur de Paris, a 56.23-carat fancy deep brown-pink diamond in a square emerald shape best known as an Asscher cut. Its hue can go from pink to peach, depending on natural or artificial lighting.

Hailing from a mine in Borneo, one of the oldest diamond sources in the world, it’s a rare stone that Amfitheatrof felt deserved to “live and breathe and be” even when set at the heart of the eponymous masterpiece necklace.

But rather than a too-imposing design, she went for the unusual perspective of the Eiffel Tower seen from below, a design she described as having lightness and energy. The diamond takes pride of place in a rose gold structure that can be detached from the river necklace and worn as a brooch.

“The stone had such incredible cut that it was really important to let that live and breathe and be,” Amfitheatrof said.

Profitability is expected to be strongly weighted to the first half of the year

British Gas owner Centrica CNA 0.74%increase; green up pointing triangle said its performance in the year so far has been in line with expectations, while flagging second-half results will be hit by lower commodity prices.

The U.K. energy company said Wednesday that it expects its full-year adjusted earnings per share to meet analysts views of 15.8 pence to 21.0 pence, based on a company-compiled consensus of fourteen forecasts.

Centrica said its retail supply and optimization businesses are on track to perform within their medium-term adjusted operating profit ranges, two years ahead of schedule.

Meanwhile, its British Gas services and solutions unit is expected to deliver a better financial result than last year. In 2023, the unit booked 47 million pounds ($60 million) of adjusted operating profit.

Profitability is expected to be strongly weighted to the first half of the year, Centrica added.

Generative AI is shown to outperform financial analysts but the computer’s biped peers need not give up just yet

Analyst angst is real. You spend years sweating over some of the world’s toughest exams, with the odds stacked against passing, only to discover a computer can do the job better.

A draft paper found that generative AI, which mimics (or in this case apparently exceeds) human ability, outperformed financial analysts when it came to predicting the direction of future earnings — and by a comfortable 8 percentage point margin too, said Alex Kim, Maximilian Muhn and Valeri Nikolaev of the University of Chicago.

The real surprise was that the large language model trounced its biped peers without recourse to all the context that informs earnings — sectoral issues and economic backdrop, say, or changes of personnel.

Instead, it was simply fed stripped down and standardised balance sheets and income statements. Company names and years were anonymised: after all, even a basic model could crawl through news cuttings and “predict” that Nvidia will increase earnings this year. 

Analysts, in contrast, have plenty to peruse in order to inform their decisions: earnings calls, management discussion and outlook as well as knowledge of the sector and the environment in which it is operating.

ChatGPT’s secret sauce is chain of thought reasoning. The model learns to do the maths — operating efficiency, leverage ratio — and identify trends. These become the building blocks to work out whether future earnings will rise or fall next year.

Certainly some of this is basic stuff. Even 19th century calculators were capable of dividing numbers. Spotting trends is as easy as CMD-F: try plugging free cash flow into any number of tech newbies and check out all the negative numbers.

Yet ChatGPT’s record on the basis of slim pickings bodes well for a model furnished with more contextual data. Banks, hedge funds and wealth managers are already harnessing AI. Some fund managers are already incorporating genAI in investment decision making. Mostly, however, these complementary tools take over the grunt work: transcribing earnings calls, summarising data, analysing text, eliminating human error and saving copious amounts of time.

So analysts need not start packing their boxes yet. The model’s outperformance is not just a story of superior intelligence. The benchmark is the median forecasts: plenty of analysts do better.

In any case, as with most jobs, there will be room for humans alongside the machines. That at any rate is the view of the diplomatic ChatGPT, which concludes “A hybrid approach that leverages the strengths of both AI and human analysts often provides the most accurate and comprehensive forecasts.”

Europe’s carriers face tougher scrutiny from regulators as the market starts to thrive in wake of pandemic

Airline executives are no strangers to failed mergers in Europe. 

Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, notably made three failed bids to buy Aer Lingus in a campaign over nearly a decade. He finally gave up in 2015 after EU regulators insisted the deal would force up prices and cut choice.

But O’Leary’s experience has done nothing to reduce the appetite for deals among big airline groups in Europe, with two of the region’s leading carriers under close scrutiny in Brussels over consolidation plans.

Regulators have launched probes into deals by Germany’s Lufthansa and British Airways owner International Airlines Group (IAG), which were announced in the first half of last year.

Lufthansa agreed to buy a 41 per cent stake in ITA Airways, the successor to bankrupt Alitalia, for €325mn, while IAG agreed to purchase the remaining 80 per cent of Spain’s Air Europa it does not already own for about €400mn.

The main concern of watchdogs is that the airlines could use the acquisitions to boost already dominant positions, with passengers losing out because of higher fares and fewer airlines competing on routes.

“Regulators have seen airline deals make matters worse for consumers,” said a person with knowledge of the EU’s thinking. “They lead to less competition on routes that it is impossible to restore, less frequency of flights and less quality of service.”

Regulators, however, have not yet launched a probe into a third deal announced last October involving Air France-KLM.

The carrier is to take a 20 per cent stake in Scandinavian airline SAS in a rescue plan including private equity firm Castlelake and the Danish state.

Luís Rodrigues, the boss of Portugal’s TAP, thinks Air France-KLM has received less scrutiny because it has been working as a minority investor in a wider consortium and not seeking a full takeover of SAS.

The chief executive, whose own airline is about to be privatised — with Lufthansa, IAG and Air France-KLM all showing interest — added that the SAS deal was a potential model for a successful merger.

“Nobody is talking about it [the SAS deal] because it is a good example of how you go through without making a lot of noise,” Rodrigues said. Deals involving “100 per cent” acquisitions did not sit well with regulators, he added.

In general, the merger rationale for the airlines is obvious: They offer a way to scale up and access new routes in a market where opportunities for organic growth are limited because of ferocious competition from low-cost rivals in the short-haul market and capacity bottlenecks at key airports. 

Executives also believe that creating larger and more profitable airline groups is the only way to succeed when competing with the historically more profitable US market, which consolidated around four big airlines following the financial crisis, and deep-pocketed Gulf and Asian carriers. 

“We need consolidation because we are squeezed between the US, where they are much bigger, and the Middle East, where they are much richer,” said Rodrigues. 

Airlines typically offer to give up valuable airport take-off and landing slots to rivals to clear the way for deals.

But regulators in Brussels have told the Financial Times they will seek tougher concessions from airlines, amid concerns that historically some slots were not taken up, or not used on the routes originally planned.

“Some years ago, we were sure the slots solution was fine. Maybe the results are not there,” then EU antitrust commissioner Didier Reynders said in an October interview.

The crackdown by regulators follows increased prices and worries about the quality of services after the reopening of travel in the wake of the pandemic.

According to data published by the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, flying is becoming increasingly costly for consumers with average airline fares up 20 per cent to 30 per cent last summer compared with 2019.

The cost of living crisis and inflation has made regulators even more reluctant to wave through deals as consumers struggle with bills, say analysts.

“Regulators look to protect competition in the market. There may be a concern that previous consolidations have led to price rises and a reduction in choice,” said Alec Burnside, a Brussels-based partner at law firm Dechert who advised Aer Lingus during Ryanair’s attempted takeovers.

“Officials focus on the competitors who will remain in the market and whether they can be expected to maintain competition on prices and the routes they choose to fly.”

However, some industry figures worry about the fragmented state of the European market, particularly when compared with the US, which has fewer big airline companies.

There are also concerns over the way some national carriers in Europe have been propped up.

Despite some notable collapses in recent years, such as Alitalia and the UK’s Monarch and Flybe, few major airlines have been allowed to fail by governments because they are considered valuable strategic assets.

Even where consolidation has happened, airlines have kept national carriers’ brands and management teams. 

The airlines and national governments, however, are not about to give up on their deals as they step up lobbying.

Italian officials, including Giancarlo Giorgetti, the minister for economy and finance, have met EU regulators multiple times to discuss the Lufthansa deal in an attempt to win them over.

Remedies to get regulatory backing for Lufthansa could include handing over airport slots, traffic rights and planes to a competitor. “If you offer enough, it can be cleared,” said an EU official.

EU officials stress all airline deals are different and scrutinised on their merits. Brussels could support the Lufthansa proposals, people familiar with the probe added.

The German airline said it was in constant exchanges with the EU to try and win support for its agreed purchase of a stake in ITA, adding that it was confident the commission would approve it as soon as possible.

As for the IAG deal, the company said this month that it was in talks with airlines including Ryanair, Avianca and Volotea over giving up some routes to bring regulators onside.

“We are in the middle of the process, talking to the commission and presenting remedies . . . we are working with the commission to try to address the concerns they have . . . but if the remedies make sense for us we will go ahead,” IAG’s chief executive Luis Gallego said on an earnings call this month. 

But IAG may have to do more after Brussels said the removal of Air Europa as an “independent airline” risked having “negative consequences” for consumers.

Regulators want one network carrier to replace Air Europa in contrast to IAG’s plan to have one carrier taking long-haul routes and another the short-haul flights.

There are also question marks over the US consolidation experience with the industry under growing scrutiny as passenger satisfaction drops and prices rise on some routes, which European regulators will no doubt have noted.

The European industry has started to thrive, too, with some groups announcing record profits as passengers return to the skies after the pandemic, weakening the argument for consolidation.

“It was bad before [to get an airline merger cleared], it is even worse now,” a person familiar with the EU’s thinking warned.

US activist investor wants share price to reflect $180bn value of Japanese tech conglomerate’s investments

Elliott Management has rebuilt a substantial stake in SoftBank and is pushing the Japanese tech conglomerate founded by Masayoshi Son to launch a $15bn share buyback.

The US-based activist fund’s position is worth more than $2bn and it has engaged directly with SoftBank’s senior management over the past two to three months, according to people familiar with the matter.

The fund has swooped on SoftBank at a time when the gap between the combined value of the company’s assets and its market valuation has never been wider. After a self-declared period in “defence mode”, SoftBank has a strong balance sheet and billions of cash on hand, which its founder wants to use in pursuit of artificial intelligence deals.

Son has built his current growth strategy around a roughly 90 per cent stake in UK chip designer Arm, whose surging stock market price has lifted SoftBank’s net asset value to a record $180bn. While the conglomerate’s shares have risen by more than 50 per cent so far this year, its current market capitalisation stands at around $90bn. Its shares jumped as much as 5.5 per cent on the news of Elliott’s stakebuilding, in late trading in Tokyo on Wednesday.

According to people familiar with the demands being made by Elliott, the activist fund believes that a $15bn share buyback would deliver an immediate boost to the share price and act as a sign of Son’s confidence in his strategy.

Elliott’s investment is the second time it has targeted Son’s company and is the fund’s latest strike in the Japanese stock market. It previously took a position in Toshiba and holds a large stake in Dai Nippon Printing, the trading house Sumitomo Corporation and the country’s largest listed real estate developer, Mitsui Fudosan.

The firm’s last investment in SoftBank involved building a stake of about $2.5bn in early 2020, while pressing for a $20bn share buyback and governance changes. It had a similar focus on the substantial discount between the value of SoftBank’s asset portfolio and its market capitalisation.

At the time, SoftBank’s investments had a different shape — with a 25 per cent stake in ecommerce giant Alibaba and a heavy focus on high-risk private market investments made by its $100bn Vision Fund. 

Today, SoftBank is built around Arm, with its two Vision Funds increasingly focused on returning cash and a greater proportion of investments publicly listed.

The group’s loan-to-value ratio — net debt as a proportion of the value of its holdings — has also dropped to 8.4 per cent, a level that group chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto described in May as “maybe too low to be honest, too safe” and compares with over 20 per cent at the end of 2021.

Elliott had almost completely sold down its stake in SoftBank by early 2022, after it lost confidence in Son’s ability to close the valuation gap, according to people familiar with the situation at that time. 

However in 2020, SoftBank did embark on a ¥4.5tn — then worth $41bn — plan to dispose of assets and launched a ¥2.5tn share buyback programme while Elliott held its stake.

The firm’s position is being led by London-based Elliott senior portfolio manager Nabeel Bhanji, who was behind the previous Elliott stake building and has been instrumental in the group’s investments in Tokyo, including at Toshiba where he joined the board.

Elliott and SoftBank declined to comment.

Private capital group spots opportunity to purchase discounted holdings from investors seeking exits

A US private capital group has raised a record pool of cash to buy stakes in existing venture capital funds at large discounts, spotting a “massive and growing opportunity” after investors became overexposed to start-up bets amid a frenzy of investment activity in 2020 and 2021.

New York-based StepStone Group has closed a $3.3bn fund to buy stakes in existing VC funds from pensions, sovereign wealth investors, family offices and wealthy individuals. The fund is more than 25 per cent larger than its prior pool targeting venture fund stakes, which had been the industry’s largest.

The fundraise comes as many investors who ploughed record amounts of money into start-up investments when interest rates were low are now looking for ways to trim their exposure amid a dearth of initial public offerings and takeover activity, creating an opportunity for StepStone and others to buy at large discounts.

John Avirett, a partner at StepStone, said in an interview with the Financial Times: “There is a massive amount of [investment] that is still stuck in mature venture funds . . . It is north of $1tn and growing year by year, especially if you have IPO markets that are not open. It is a massive and growing opportunity set.”

Brian Borton, another partner at StepStone, added: “Over the past two years, discounts have averaged in the low 30 per cent to [a fund’s] net asset value.”

StepStone is a specialist in buying stakes in private investments such as corporate buyouts and direct lending funds, managing nearly $160bn in assets. In recent years, it has prioritised the VC industry, spotting liquidity challenges faced by large institutions.

During an era of rock-bottom interest rates, the venture capital industry’s overall assets under management increased from $600bn in 2014 to $3.3tn presently, according to PitchBook. About half that investment is stuck in funds raised between 2010 and 2018, which ordinarily would have been exited through IPOs or the sales of start-ups to larger technology groups.

But after a swift rise in interest rates beginning in 2022, there have been few IPOs and technology-oriented takeover activity has fallen sharply, declining more than 50 per cent in 2023, according to US law firm Cooley. That has left venture investors with limited options to sell down their holdings and caused their investors to increasingly exit by selling their fund stakes at large discounts to new buyers.

StepStone has in recent years purchased stakes in venture funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Yuri Milner’s DST Global, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Partners and Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, according to securities filings. It has also made direct purchases of investments in start-ups including UK digital bank Monzo.

Borton said StepStone increasingly believed many tech companies, especially those selling recurring software subscriptions, had adjusted to higher interest rates. He conceded funds raised at the end of a decade-long bull market in valuations in 2020 and 2021 would continue to face challenges and potential writedowns.

“We are generally on the other side of the correction,” said Borton, who added that deals done in 2020 and 2021 “still need to be worked through”.

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