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PARIS ⁠— French contemporary label Maje has appointed Charlotte Tasset Ferrec as its new chief executive officer, effective Jan. 4, 2022.

Tasset Ferrec will succeed Isabelle Guichot after four years in the role. Guichot was appointed CEO of SMCP, the parent company of Sandro, Maje, Claudie Pierlot and De Fursac, in August 2021, and has continued running Maje since then, as well.

After joining SMCP, Tasset Ferrec will sit on the group’s executive committee. From May 2018 to September 2021, she served as CEO of Nina Ricci’s fashion and fragrance business at Puig.

Tasset Ferrec was instrumental in repositioning Nina Ricci. A few short months after her hire, she helped sign on buzzy young Dutch design duo Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh as the new artistic directors of fashion at the brand. This April, Nina Ricci said it was closing its historic flagship boutique, located at 39 Avenue Montaigne in Paris, as it pivoted to a digital-first strategy, in line with the collection becoming more accessible.

Prior to serving as Nina Ricci’s general manager, Tasset Ferrec was chief merchandising officer of women’s wear, lingerie, beauty and children’s wear at the French department store chain Printemps, starting in 2009. In that role, she accompanied the retailer’s renovations and helped to reposition the beauty and women’s fashion divisions in the luxury sphere.

Tasset Ferrec had also been a consultant at Arthur Andersen and Capgemini Consulting, before joining Gap France as commercial director and later Sephora as chief merchandising officer. She is a graduate of EDHEC Business School.

“During her extensive career in fashion, Charlotte has acquired an in-depth knowledge of retail, a strategic vision and a leadership, which are major assets to pursue the growth and expansion of Maje as a key global player in the affordable luxury market,” said Guichot, who remains SCMP’s CEO, in a statement.

Maje made news recently, in October, when it revealed the brand was co-creating an ’80s-inspired activewear capsule with Varley.

That same month, SMCP said it was confident in the company’s ability to reach 1 billion euros in revenues.

Group revenues rose 8.4 percent year-over-year on an organic basis to 271.7 million euros in the third quarter ended Sept. 30. Compared with the same period in 2019, sales were down 3.2 percent at constant exchange rates, versus a decline of 14 percent in the second quarter.

The Italian company donated 2.5 million euros to restore the site and marked the completion of the works with a dedicated tome to be released next month.

The brand and the Parco Archeologico del Colosseo, the institution ensuring the protection and valorization of the city’s central archaeological area, announced the completion of the restoration work of the Temple of Venus and Rome, one of the most iconic monuments of the Roman Empire.

The revamp was possible thanks to the donation of 2.5 million euros by the fashion house, which first pledged to sponsor the works in 2019, when it also held its couture show at the site to further mark its commitment.

The largest building of ancient Rome, the site stands out for its architectural design, which combined Hellenistic proportions with Roman construction techniques, creating an innovative configuration. The name nods to the two opposed worship cells defining the site: the cell facing the Colosseum was dedicated to Venus Felix, goddess and mother of Aeneas, progenitor of Augustus and therefore of the imperial family; the other facing the Capitol was dedicated to goddess Roma Aeterna, sacred personification of the city and its domain over the territories of the Empire.

Ratings moves come as turmoil in property sector threatens economic growth

Chinese property developers have been hit by record numbers of downgrades from international credit rating agencies this year, as Evergrande’s collapse fuels concerns over the health of China’s economy.

The downgrades come after Beijing introduced measures last year to cool an overheating property market and a liquidity crisis that is threatening to spread to more trusted borrowers.

Moody’s, Fitch and S&P downgraded Chinese developers’ ratings 43, 54 and 30 times, respectively, in 2021, compared to 6, 12 and 11 in 2020, adding further pressure on their ability to refinance offshore debt during a housing slowdown.

A Financial Times data analysis of the biggest borrowers shows that while riskier developers were subjected to significant downgrades in the past year, the ratings of investment grade companies were largely unchanged. Credit ratings of BBB- and higher are investment grade, while those below are high yield.

Buoyed by China’s rapid urbanisation, the country’s real estate developers are large borrowers domestically and overseas, and in Asia they make up a big portion of the region’s $400bn corporate high-yield bond market. They came under stress after Chinese president Xi Jinping’s government moved to constrain their leverage over fears of asset bubbles in the property sector.

Evergrande, the worlds most indebted developer with more than $300bn in liabilities, started unravelling this summer as it struggled to generate enough cash to service its debts and keep its vast empire of real estate projects running. It missed multiple international bond payments from late September and was finally declared to have defaulted by Fitch this month.

The liquidity issues at Evergrande, which is in restructuring talks, spread rapidly to other developers. Kaisa, another large borrower on international markets, failed to repay a $400m bond this month. Other developers Fantasia and China Modern Land have also defaulted in recent months.

Kaisa this week said it was in talks with bondholders on a restructuring plan and that it had hired as an adviser investment bank Houlihan Lokey, which is also acting for Evergrande.

S&P downgraded its ratings on Evergrande’s bonds from B+ in January to CC by September, before they were removed at the request of the company last week.

In early December, Fitch downgraded Evergrande to “restricted default” after there was no sign of payments on bond coupons it owed to investors following the end of a 30-day grace period. Fitch noted that “the company did not respond to our request for confirmation on the coupon payments”. Evergrande has yet to make any official disclosure on the payments.

Weakness across the developer sector has put the spotlight on China’s economy, which has struggled to maintain momentum this year following a rapid rebound from the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Land purchases have slumped and new home prices have fallen month-on-month for the past three months.

Concerns over the sector have also roiled high-yield bond markets in Asia. Effective yields on Chinese high-yield borrowers leapt in November to almost 30 per cent, their highest level since the global financial crisis. They are currently trading at 22 per cent, according to an ICE index, in a sign that panic across the market has receded.

However the crisis still has the potential to ripple over to more trusted borrowers. Shimao, a developer that had not been downgraded, was placed this week by S&P on a lower rating of B+ for “weakening funding access”. The company’s bond maturing next year collapsed to 59 cents on the dollar in December and is currently trading about 65 cents.

Analysts at Citi noted last week that the company was “trying to bolster confidence by slowing land bank acquisitions, reinforcing cash collections, disposing of non-core assets and raising capital through new share placements”.

But they added that as developers have “turned from a growth model to survival mode, declines look unavoidable for Shimao’s contracted sales and earnings”.

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Within weeks, Walter Reed researchers expect to announce that human trials show success against Omicron—and even future strains.

The achievement is the result of almost two years of work on the virus. The Army lab received its first DNA sequencing of the COVID-19 virus in early 2020. Very early on, Walter Reed’s infectious diseases branch decided to focus on making a vaccine that would work against not just the existing strain but all of its potential variants as well.

Walter Reed’s Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine, or SpFN, completed animal trials earlier this year with positive results. Phase 1 of human trials, which tested the vaccine against Omicron and the other variants, wrapped up this month, again with positive results that are undergoing final review, Dr. Kayvon Modjarrad, director of Walter Reed’s infectious diseases branch, said in an exclusive interview with Defense One.

Unlike existing vaccines, Walter Reed’s SpFN uses a soccer ball-shaped protein with 24 faces for its vaccine, which allows scientists to attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein.

“It's very exciting to get to this point for our entire team and I think for the entire Army as well,” Modjarrad said.

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The vaccine’s human trials took longer than expected, he said, because the lab needed to test the vaccine on subjects who had neither been vaccinated nor previously infected with COVID.

Increasing vaccination rates and the rapid spread of the Delta and Omicron variants made that difficult.

“With Omicron, there's no way really to escape this virus. You're not going to be able to avoid it. So I think pretty soon either the whole world will be vaccinated or have been infected,” Modjarrad said.

The next step is seeing how the new pan-coronavirus vaccine interacts with people who were previously vaccinated or previously sick. Walter Reed is working with a yet-to-be-named industry partner for that wider rollout.

“We need to evaluate it in the real-world setting and try to understand how does the vaccine perform in much larger numbers of individuals who have already been vaccinated with something else initially…or already been sick,” Modjarrad said, adding that the new vaccine will still need to undergo phase 2 and phase 3 trials.

He said nearly all of Walter Reed’s 2,500 staff have had some role in the vaccine’s nearly-two-year development.

“We decided to take a look at the long game rather than just only focusing on the original emergence of SARS, and instead understand that viruses mutate, there will be variants that emerge, future viruses that may emerge in terms of new species. Our platform and approach will equip people to be prepared for that.”

Chief Manfred Knof says government should sell its stake only ‘over the medium term’

Commerzbank’s chief executive has agreed that state support for the lender should eventually end but added it was an important boost to progress on a restructuring that will cut staff in Germany by a third.

Manfred Knof, who joined Commerzbank at the start of the year from Deutsche Bank, is aiming to cut one in three jobs at the bank in Germany by 2024 and to close almost half its branches.

Berlin bailed out Commerzbank in 2009 and remains its single largest shareholder with a 15.6 per cent stake. Knof was parachuted in after a boardroom battle that led to the resignation of both the chief executive and the chair in the summer of 2020.

Knof told the Financial Times that the government’s support for the restructuring had been “very helpful” for securing employee support.

Commerzbank has had high costs and weak revenue growth for years and has been hit hard by low interest rates. It is one of the most important lenders to Germany’s small and medium-sized companies, and finances one-third of the country’s exports.

New finance minister Christian Lindner, the leader of the pro-market Free Democrats, in the past has called for the full privatisation of the bank. He also campaigned on the wider promise of reducing the government’s influence in business and dialling down state ownership of private sector companies.

“Over the medium term, I support and approve the view that a private-sector bank like Commerzbank should not have the government as a shareholder,” Knof told the Financial Times. He added that he was focused on the “here and now” and praised workers’ representatives for their constructive approach to the restructuring.

In November, Commerzbank said it would make a small profit this year, despite more than €1bn in restructuring costs and a €200m hit from a botched IT project that was stopped by Knof.

The finance ministry declined to comment on the future of the government’s shareholding. “The handling of the government’s stake [in Commerzbank] is decided by the interministerial steering committee,” it said in a statement.

Knof told the FT that the restructuring was well on track. Some 5,200 employees have already signed voluntary redundancy agreements to leave the bank over the coming three years, from a target of cutting 10,000 jobs. By November, the bank had also ironed out the final details of a €1.9bn severance plan with unions.

“Many sceptics said that it would be impossible to strike a deal within just one year,” he said, adding that this pessimism was proved wrong thanks to the “massive commitment and discipline” from unions.

Knof said that the swift agreement was an “important message to the capital market and our stakeholder: the social partnership [between employers and employees] in Germany is working”. 

Germany’s new chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, in February backed Commerzbank’s turnround plan. “Everyone knows that something draconian needs to be done,” he said when he was finance minister.

At the moment, a sale of the government’s stake would leave taxpayers with heavy losses: it is currently worth just €1.3bn, some 75 per cent less than what the government paid for it more than a decade ago.