David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…True luxury is recession-resistant, but whatever LVMH is churning out may or may not be. Here's the thing that is an inarguable statement. Some percent of what LVMH makes is luxury. One minus that percent is not luxury. I don't know what those percents are, but they definitely have a class of things that they sell to people who are billionaires. If the market drops 50%, we'll still be billionaires or multi-hundred millionaires. That impacts their desire for something by approximately 0%. They won't go buy it at the same price or more and are completely insensitive to that. I think, again, you can probably look to the car industry as a really clear example of this. I haven't looked into it. I doubt Ferrari sales are impacted that much by recessions. Right. But someone who's going and considering buying a $400 Louis Vuitton clutch, I imagine that whether or not you currently have a $200,000 a year job or were laid off from a $200,000 a year job, pretty dramatically affects whether you're going to go buy that clutch. For the class that they sell to that is not wildly price-insensitive on everything, or if their stock holdings drop 50% becomes concerned and changes their behavior, that affects their business. I don't have a sense of how much is the completely price-insensitive, true luxury segment versus who falls into that more masstige segment. I'm conflating two things here. There's the masstige segment, but then there are also the products that they have that are actually ultra premium rather than being luxury, so people are going to evaluate them on the merits of how useful are they. I think luxury travel is actually ultra premium travel.…

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