CEO and main shareholder of the world leader in luxury, Bernard Arnault is granting a nice promotion to the fourth of his five children. He created a division dedicated to LVMH watch brands (Tag Heuer, Hublot and Zenith), and entrusted its management to Frédéric Arnault, 29, for two months. A graduate, like his father, of the École Polytechnique (class of 2014), the latter joined the family group in 2017, after an early career at McKinsey and a stint at Facebook’s artificial intelligence research center.
At LVMH, he cut his teeth by taking charge of Tag Heuer’s connected watches, under the aegis of Stéphane Bianchi, then CEO of the brand, who was his mentor. Appointed director of strategy and digital in 2018, this excellent pianist (like his mother, concert pianist Hélène Mercier-Arnault) and very good tennis player, was promoted to CEO of Tag Heuer in July 2020. He successfully rose in range of the house, which produced more than 400,000 pieces last year. Since 2020, the average selling price has doubled, exceeding 3,000 Swiss francs, and turnover has increased by half.
Now in charge of not one, but three brands with a total turnover of 1.7 billion euros, Frédéric Arnault will continue to work alongside Stéphane Bianchi, CEO of LVMH’s watches and jewelry division since mid -2020. In his new role, he will spend more time in Paris, near his father. “I will work more closely with him on strategic projects,” he told the Financial Times.