Louis Vuitton, Dior Power LVMH’s Sales

PARIS—LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE said surging revenue at its biggest fashion brands, Louis Vuitton and Dior, propped up the luxury-goods company’s results during the fourth quarter, offsetting other businesses such as Champagne that have fizzled during the pandemic.

The Paris-based conglomerate on Tuesday said revenue in the quarter fell 3% to €14.3 billion ($22.4 billion). Sales at its fashion and leather-goods division—where Louis Vuitton and Dior account for most of the revenue—rose 18%. Revenue for all of 2020 fell 17% to €44.7 billion. Net profit for the entire year was down 34% at €4.7 billion.

The results show how some of the marquee brands of luxury fashion have gained market share during the pandemic. Louis Vuitton, the world’s top-selling luxury brand, Dior and Hermès have posted strong sales growth since boutiques were allowed to reopen after lockdowns in March and April. Smaller brands—both inside and outside LVMH—have lagged behind.

Drawn by the performance of Dior and Louis Vuitton, investors have sent LVMH’s shares to near record highs, brushing aside concerns about the future of the luxury business during and after the pandemic. The company’s market capitalization is now €260 billion, solidifying the place of Bernard Arnault, LVMH’s chief executive and controlling shareholder, among the ranks of the world’s wealthiest people.

Jean Jacques Guiony, LVMH’s chief financial officer, said Louis Vuitton and Dior had a strong pipeline of new products that they continued to roll out despite the lockdowns. The brands also maintained fashion shows in reduced formats and continued digital-marketing efforts when others were forced to pull back drastically. Dior, for example, held a closed-door fashion show for its cruise collection in Lecce, Italy, in July, while rival brands pushed the unveiling of new collections until later in the year.

“We did it when nobody else was talking,” Mr Guiony said. “It was really Dior and Vuitton taking the bulk of the customers’ attention.”

Mr. Guiony said that Fendi and Celine—two of LVMH’s midsize fashion brands—also gathered momentum toward the end of the year. Marc Jacobs managed to turn a profit in 2020 for the first time in years, Mr Guiony said, though that came after a wave of layoffs at the American brand.

LVMH’s performance also benefited from strong consumption of Hennessy, the world’s top-selling cognac brand. Sales in the U.S. surged, LVMH said, bolstered by large government stimulus payments to consumers. Global cognac volumes were down only 4% for the year and rebounded in the second half, the company said.

That helped offset the poor performance of LVMH’s Champagne division, which includes brands such as Veuve Clicquot and Dom Pérignon. With weddings and birthday parties cancelled because of social-distancing rules, consumers had little reason to sip a glass of bubbly, pushing down Champagne sales by 19% for the year.

LVMH just completed its purchase of the American jeweller Tiffany & Co. at the start of this year, after the pandemic nearly cancelled the $15.8 billion deal. Mr Arnault pulled the plug on the merger in September before deciding to see it through after Tiffany agreed to a small discount.

The acquisition could be riding a tailwind: Jewellery sales in the final months of last year were one of the bright spots in the global luxury business, Mr Guiony said.

“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”

That ad copy is from the voice-over of a July Meta Platforms META -3.38%.

spot that’s been part of a public-relations blitz to position Meta as the humanist AI company. The message was undercut by the ad’s inclusion of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a brooding 1972 song about an impending apocalypse. But this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg left no ambiguity, publishing a 6,500-word manifesto—about 10 times the length of this newsletter—with a title that echoed the ad: “The Future is for Everyone.”

That seems to be Meta’s new tagline. In light of sinking public opinion and the company’s thousands of lawsuits from states, school districts, parents, and users, Meta’s public relations have been defensive. This push represents a return to offense, with a chance to distinguish Meta’s approach to AI from other labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX SPCX +9.65%.

“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”

Zuckerberg frames what sort of future we build with AI as the central issue of our time. “We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question,” he says. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”

The flood of words belies the situation on the ground in mid-2026. Americans, at least, have a love-hate affair with social media. A November Pew Research Center poll reported that 71% of U.S. adults used Facebook, and 51% used Instagram. Worldwide, 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every day.

But in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in July and August, 61% of respondents said they wanted more government oversight of social media, and two-thirds supported laws to keep children under 16 years old off the platforms. When it comes to Meta in particular, in the 2026 Axios Harris 100, an annual poll about corporate reputation, Meta placed 96th out of 100. It’s only above two other social media companies, Chinese ultracheap retailer Temu, and Spirit Airlines, a defunct air carrier. Regarding ethics, Meta came in last, and it was only ahead of TikTok in trust.

The steady drip of headlines in the teen social media trials isn’t helping. Last week, Meta lost a judgment in New Mexico state court that raised their liability in that relatively small jurisdiction to nearly $1 billion dollars. On Wednesday, jury selection began for a federal case with four states suing Meta over addictive product design, and false marketing that said its platforms were safe for teenagers. In July, Meta claimed that the states are asking for a total of $1.4 trillion in damages, in addition to design changes in the apps. This is part of a multidistrict litigation, where thousands of federal trials with social media defendants are coordinated in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ district courthouse in Oakland, Calif.

There is a separate such group of thousands of cases in California state court, mostly with individual plaintiffs. The steady drip of bad headlines from the courts will continue unless Meta decides to settle en masse.

Meanwhile, in the second quarter, Meta booked “$2.40 billion of charges related to legal proceedings,” according to its quarterly filing. That may be just the beginning.

Zuckerberg spent 6,500 words getting his utopian message out, but I can sum it up in two: Trust us. The evidence is that Meta has a long way to go to win back that trust.

Louis Vuitton, Dior Power LVMH’s Sales

Big fashion brands bolster results, while Champagne revenue falls amid pandemic.

Meta is betting on a human-first AI future, but growing legal battles and declining public trust are putting Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to the test.