Puig plummets on the stock market after breaking with Estée Lauder

BarcelonaThe market punishes Puig for broken talks for the merger with Estée Lauder. The Catalan multinational of premium beauty has plummeted more than 13% on the day after the talks ended without an agreement. At Friday's market close, the stock fell to 15.18 euros, after closing on Thursday evening at around 18 euros. With this move, the titles of the perfume multinational are moving further away from the price of the stock market debut it undertook in 2024, around 24.5 euros. Estée Lauder shares, on the contrary, show a strong recovery: around 12 noon in New York, two hours after the start of the session, they were up 9.4%, to 86.3 dollars.

Analysts consulted consider that Puig's stock market crash is within the forecasts that could be made given the failure of a merger of this nature. "We have returned to the value where we were before all this," highlights Jaume Puig, general director of GVC Gaesco, to the newspaper ARA: at the beginning of January, it should be remembered, the premium beauty firm was trading below 15 euros per share, at a time of clear slowdown in the perfumery, fashion and cosmetics sector.

Charlotte Tilbury and 24.5 euros per share

The various pieces of information that have emerged during the talks between the two giants pointed to the contract between Puig and the British makeup brand Charlotte Tilbury as one of the points of friction. As the North American agency Bloomberg reported, the acquisition agreement for the London-based firm would include a clause that would allow positions to be renegotiated in the event of a takeover like the one the Catalan family was exploring with Estée Lauder. "This could have caused the Americans to back down," considers Renta 4 analyst Pablo Fernández de Mosteyrín.

However, the expert doubts that Charlotte Tilbury's potential hole has been "the key to everything." The price of the operation would also be, in the eyes of the market, a loophole in the integration project. In the negotiations, Puig's shares would be valued at between 18 and 19 euros, an amount that "left investors very unhappy," according to Fernández de Mosteyrín. Especially those who accessed the shareholding in the initial public offering (IPO) of 2024, when the Catalan company entered the stock market with a value of 24.5 euros per share. "The operation, strategically, made sense, but I want to think that this difference has led Puig to push harder," reasons the expert.

The CEO of GVC Gaesco, on the other hand, has long focused on shared governance. He recalls, in statements to the newspaper ARA, that the two involved are "100% family" companies, with two dynasties – the Puig and the Lauder families – accustomed to concentrating authority. In the analyst's opinion, the potential integration of the two businesses was viable if there was "a clear separation of functions". "That Estée Lauder handled the skincare part and Puig the perfumes. If that were the case, it could have been done," he argues. The failed negotiation, in his opinion, is proof that "no agreement was reached on defining what each one did and what the other did".