Richemont spent billions building YNAP — then gave it away for a minority stake

Richemont entered luxury e-commerce in 2010 by buying a majority stake in Net-a-Porter, the online fashion retailer founded by Natalie Massenet. Five years later, Richemont merged Net-a-Porter with Yoox, an Italian fashion e-commerce platform it already owned, creating Yoox Net-a-Porter Group (YNAP). In 2018, Richemont bought out the remaining shares to take full control — paying €2.8 billion for the stake it did not already own. By then, YNAP was the world's largest luxury fashion e-commerce platform, combining Net-a-Porter, Mr Porter, and Yoox under one roof.

The business never delivered the returns Richemont expected. By 2022, YNAP was struggling against Farfetch and direct-to-consumer brand websites. In August 2022, Richemont announced a plan to sell a 47.5% stake to Farfetch in exchange for Farfetch shares — no cash changed hands. Richemont took a €2.7 billion impairment charge on YNAP that same quarter, admitting the business was worth billions less than it had paid. In 2023, YNAP posted a €1.46 billion loss. Then Farfetch itself collapsed in December 2023, rescued by Coupang in a $500 million deal. The YNAP sale to Farfetch was terminated.

With no buyer and mounting losses, Richemont sold YNAP to Mytheresa in October 2024. The deal closed in April 2025. Richemont received 33% of the combined group's equity — no cash payment. A decade of investment in luxury e-commerce, beginning with the Net-a-Porter acquisition and the Yoox merger and culminating in the €2.8 billion buyout of minority shareholders, ended with Richemont holding a minority stake in a smaller competitor. The newly formed parent company, LuxExperience B.V., operates Net-a-Porter, Mr Porter, Yoox, and Mytheresa as a combined entity.

The YNAP case is the largest single write-down in Richemont's history and one of the most expensive corporate experiments in luxury e-commerce. Richemont's thesis — that owning the online retail channel was essential in the digital age — was correct in principle. But the cost of acquiring and integrating two platforms, the competitive pressure from Farfetch and brand-owned DTC, and the eventual collapse of the Farfetch deal meant that the investment never came close to earning its cost of capital.