What a Beijing brand reveals about Richemont’s future

When a company the size of Richemont mentions a competitor by name on an analyst call, it is worth paying attention. When it does so for the second year running, it is time to ask why. Laopu Gold, the Beijing-based fine jewelry brand built on traditional Chinese goldsmithing, is the brand Richemont returned to. During the group’s full-year results presentation last week, management acknowledged Laopu Gold’s continued success and noted that its rise shows Chinese consumers can still be moved by new brand narratives and fresh value propositions — even in a market where overall demand has been relatively stable and has not recovered to historical highs. The results themselves gave the group little to worry about. Full-year sales for the period ended March 31, 2026, reached 22.4 billion euros ($26.0 billion), up 11% at constant exchange rates. Jewelry — the division covering Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Buccellati — generated 16.5 billion euros ($19.1 billion), up 14% at constant rates, with a 30.5% operating margin. Double-digit growth came across every region. Those numbers, though, flatter a more complicated picture on the mainland. Richemont’s attention to Laopu Gold is not a polite acknowledgment of a scrappy upstart. Over the past two years, even as high-end consumption has come under pressure, Laopu Gold has continued to grow strongly — by leaning into cultural identity, heritage goldsmithing technique, and an aesthetic that manages to feel simultaneously ancient and contemporary. What Laopu Gold’s rise is really saying What management’s comments reveal is a more precise read of the Chinese jewelry consumer than the standard local-vs.-international framing suggests. Richemont’s position, as expressed on the call, is that consumers are not simply swapping European names for domestic ones. They are raising their standards — seeking brands that carry genuine craft credibility, cultural resonance, and a design language that still feels current. New narratives, in other words, can come from anywhere, including a century-old European house, if it can make itself feel newly relevant. That is the exact challenge Richemont’s maisons are now working against in China — and Buccellati is the most instructive example of how the group is trying to meet it. The Italian house has a formidable heritage: its signature goldwork technique, dating to Renaissance-era Milan, is among the most technically demanding in fine jewelry. In China, however, Buccellati remains relatively recent. It has not had decades to build the kind of accumulated brand memory that Cartier or Van Cleef & Arpels carry there. That combination — established craft, emerging recognition — gives the house room to write its story in China rather than simply defend it. Over the past year, Buccellati expanded the Étoilée line with colored pieces and introduced made-to-order high jewelry bags, moves that reinforce the house’s credentials while adding contemporary entry points. Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels are approaching the question differently. Both continued to refresh their signature lines during the year — Cartier across Love, Clash de Cartier, Panthère de Cartier and Santos de Cartier; Van Cleef & Arpels with new Alhambra pieces and its Flowerlace and Fleurs d’Hawaï collections — not to chase trend cycles, but to give existing clients reasons to re-engage and new buyers a point of entry. The underlying logic is that classics are not static assets. They need continuous tending to remain desirable. Cultural authority as a long-term play Behind the product cadence is a longer-term bet on cultural weight. Richemont has continued to invest in its workshops in Paris and Valenza, Italy, and has used craft training programs to preserve skills in high jewelry and decorative arts. L’École, School of Jewelry Arts, supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, drew significant audiences through jewelry-focused exhibitions over the past year. Cartier’s retrospective at the V&A Museum in London attracted 350,000 visitors. The contrast with the group’s watchmaking business in China is telling. While specialist watch brands carried out targeted store closures on the mainland during the year, jewelry posted double-digit growth across all regions. That divergence reflects where management sees Chinese consumer appetite moving, and where Richemont is choosing to concentrate resources. Competition in China, then, is not simply a fight for attention against local brands. It is a test of whether Richemont’s global maisons can keep renewing themselves locally — and whether deep history, correctly activated, still has the power to generate present desire. The open question Whether Richemont can sustain that pace is far from settled. Laopu Gold is not slowing down, and the broader pressure on the group’s European maisons is sharpening: Chinese consumers are now deeply fluent in the language of heritage and craft, and increasingly harder to impress with heritage alone. Closing watch stores while jewelry grows is a rational allocation of capital. But the underlying task — making 100-year-old brands feel essential to a Chinese consumer in 2026 — remains genuinely difficult, and one that will require more than product refreshes to resolve. Richemont has the fundamentals to compete. Sustaining the local renewal is a longer game, and one with no guaranteed outcome.

What a Beijing brand reveals about Richemont’s future

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What a Beijing brand reveals about Richemont’s future

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag