Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's crazy. And then part two of the plan. Arnault and Lazard starts selling off all the old textile assets and industrialist assets. He doesn't want to run these, he wants Dior. All together, the biggest win here is they sell literally the disposable diaper division of Boussac, which is called Peaudouce, which is soft skin in English. They sell that for $400 million alone, and then the rest of the textile operations, they offload. They ultimately sell everything except Christian Dior and the famous Bon Marche department store in Paris that was within the group. In total, they make over $500 million selling off these assets. If Arnault were an LBO guy, if he were John Kluge, he would be like, oh, hell, yeah, mission accomplished. They took $15 million of his own equity, turned that into multiple hundreds of millions of dollars and a cash flow stream from Dior, this is a win. He would go start KKR or whatever French equivalent in Europe and build that, but that's not what he wants to do. No. Do you know how much of Dior he owned at this point? I think at this point, he's formed Groupe Arnault, which is his family office. You can think of Groupe Arnault as Bernard's personal wealth. They owned some percentage, but not all of the Boussac-Dior holdings at this point. The Boussac entity itself, I think, had been renamed Agache after the Willot initial bankruptcy. Groupe Arnault owns a majority stake in Agache, which owns a majority stake in Dior. Dior and Bon Marche are the only assets left. There are four levels of Russian doll of legal structure here.…

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