Fiskars paid €151.5M for Georg Jensen — year one brought an 80M kroner loss

Georg Jensen, the Copenhagen silversmith founded in 1904, had spent a decade under Bahrain-based Investcorp, which sold it in September 2023. The buyer was Fiskars Group — the Finnish maker of Fiskars scissors and Royal Copenhagen porcelain, building a luxury division it called Vita. The price was a debt-free, cash-free enterprise value of €151.5 million; the deal completed on 1 October 2023.

The first year under Fiskars went the wrong way. Revenue fell from DKK 811 million in 2022 to DKK 684 million in 2023, a drop of 16%. The bottom line flipped from a DKK 167 million profit to an DKK 80 million loss — reported in July 2024. Management blamed the cost of living squeezing demand across the brand's markets.

The loss was not a one-off shock but a continuation: Georg Jensen had already run deficits in the late 2010s under its previous owner. Fiskars had paid a premium multiple for a brand whose sales were already shrinking, betting that its own luxury portfolio expertise could stabilise a house that ten years of private equity ownership had not.

The brand Fiskars bought is a mid-sized luxury business: roughly 1,200 people, 28 own stores and some 2,050 dealers worldwide, selling jewellery, silverware, watches and home pieces.