What to Watch: Hermès May Be a Bellwether for China’s Luxury Rebound

PARIS — Hermès has fallen a long way from its highs this year. But the more interesting question for the luxury bellwether may not be whether the company is in trouble — it is whether investors have become too accustomed to it being exceptional.

The shares are down roughly 32 percent from their 52-week high of around 2,300 euros to about 1,570 euros, even though Hermès continues to outpace its rivals LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Kering.

Still, on Aug. 18, RBC downgraded the stock from “outperform” to “sector perform,” cutting its price target from 1,900 euros to 1,700 euros.

It’s less about the Hermès brand than about the extraordinarily high expectations now weighing down the market leader.

“The growth premium that justified its valuation premium vs the sector is converging,” said RBC Capital Markets analyst Piral Dadhania in the report, estimating that Hermès’ revenue and EBIT growth advantage over the luxury sector will narrow to about two percentage points from 2027, versus eight points in 2025.

While that still puts the Birkin bag maker ahead of the pack, RBC sees Hermès’ lead over the wider luxury sector slowing to a trot.

That raises a bigger question for Hermès and the luxury industry itself, particularly if the long-awaited Chinese luxury rebound scenario continues to look different from what investors once expected.

Deborah Aitken, senior luxury analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said she once expected China to become a much larger part of the global luxury market.

“Pre-COVID, I used to say that within five years China would be one-third of the market for luxury goods, and now it’s less than half that,” she said.

Aitken estimates that China is now around 15 percent of the luxury market and that the industry has “lost around 9 to 10 percent of the luxury market since 2019 from China.”

That does not mean Chinese consumers have stopped buying luxury. In fact, Aitken sees the market returning to growth.

“For me, I feel that the market is coming back; that we’re getting midsingle-digit growth,” she said.

Aitken expects the wider luxury market to grow 4 to 5 percent this year and next, but the recovery will look different from the rebound that followed the pandemic.

“We’re back in growth, and we are back in value because of pricing having been raised in the last three years from the luxury goods groups. But we’re not necessarily back to volume growth,” she said.

For Hermès, that could be particularly important. The brand has been one of the biggest winners of luxury’s post-pandemic “revenge spending” boom, but it is now operating from a much larger base.

“[For] Hermès, almost half of its sales are from the Asian markets. It’s one of the highest exposed of the traditional luxury peers,” Aitken said. “It’s only this year where it faces two very solid years of growth in Asia, and also the fact that it’s more than three times the size it was pre-COVID. So it needs a lot more volume” to make the comparison numbers.

Still, there is little evidence that Hermès itself has lost its shine in China.

“I don’t think that there’s brand fatigue on Hermès,” Aitken said. Instead, she sees a more discerning consumer, with spending increasingly spread across different price points and brands.

For Hermès, she described the current environment as “more of a sticky year, more of a difficult year in China for them.”

China is growing again, although not at the pace the analysts and shareholders had once expected. The company’s third-quarter results on Oct. 22 may offer a clue as to whether the luxury industry is in a reset.

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