Prada Group could make new acquisitions soon

«Prada is always on the lookout for acquisition opportunities», said yesterday Lorenzo Bertelli, marketing director and head of corporate social responsibility of the group founded by his parents, Patrizio Bertelli and Miuccia Prada. But what acquisitions are we talking about? Bertelli's intervention occasion was the presentation of the renovated Torgiano factory, acquired by the group back in 2001, and whose expansion is part of broader efforts to strengthen the supply chain on which the group will accelerate in the near future. «Investments in industrial plants amount to around 70-80 million per year, excluding potential acquisitions to integrate suppliers and essential skilled workers for our brands», said the group's CEO Andrea Guerra, referring to the strategy, started almost ten years ago, of heavily investing in its suppliers (knitwear factories, tanneries, textile plants, and so on), bringing, as in the case of the Torgiano factory, the various stages of knitwear production in-house and avoiding the increasingly burning problem of luxury outsourcing. But are the acquisitions being discussed limited to factories only? For some, no.

At this moment, in the luxury landscape, Italy and its brands find themselves in an ideal position yet the industrial geography of the peninsula, so to speak, appears fragmented into different family groups that individually are strong but lack the colossal scale of LMVH and Kering (but also of mega-investors from Arabia, China, or Korea) to embark on campaigns to acquire entire brands, especially of a certain size. Lorenzo Bertelli's comments have certainly sparked some curiosity, considering both the particularly strong quarter that his family's group is going through and the fact that the aggregation of smaller suppliers and producers within an "open network," as Guerra defined it, which, besides paving the way for lucrative licensing contracts (the Zegna Group has several, for example), could indeed provide financial stability to venture into acquiring new brands, which usually come at multi-billion-dollar prices.