LVMH acquires Hublot!

So, it seems that my preferred watch brand, Hublot, is joining LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), i.e. the Group which owns my preferred champagnes (among others: Dom Perignon, Veuve Clicquot, Krug and Ruinart!) and my preferred perfumer (Guerlain)!

Indeed, the LVMH Group has just announced yesterday the acquisition of the Swiss watchmaker Hublot. You perhaps remember, I have just published some news about Hublot for about 14 days.

 

 

From the official press release

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s leading luxury group, announces
that it has signed an agreement to acquire the Hublot group, a top of the range
watchmaker enjoying very strong growth.
LVMH will acquire Hublot from Mr Carlo Crocco, who founded the group in 1980, and a company controlled by Mr Jean-Claude Biver, who has managed Hublot since 2004. [...]

Having grown at a rapid pace since 2004, the brand achieved net revenue of more than CHF150 million in 2007 with an excellent profitability. A very significant increase in revenue is expected in 2008.
Today, Hublot has a very selective and efficient distribution network which is limited to 300 stores worldwide. [...]

Jean-Claude Biver, the architect of the success of the Big Bang collection and the recent strong growth of Hublot, commented: “I am delighted that Hublot will be able to benefit from LVMH’s support and strategic leadership in the luxury goods industry and so maximise its growth potential in the years to come. I am happy to be pursuing this adventure and to be able to contribute to the development of LVMH’s watchmaking division alongside Philippe Pascal.”

 

Some extracts of the official presentation

 

 

 

Some information about the acquisition

 

The Hublot company was founded in 1980 by Carlo Crocco, who owned 80% of the shares, 20% being acquired by J.-C. Biver, when he joined Hublot as CEO in September 2004.

The acquisition price was not published but, based on different interviews and articles, it seems that the deal looks like the following:

• J.-C. Biver remains the CEO of Hublot, assisted by Ricardo Guadalupe as Managing Director.
• acquisition price = between 450 and 500 million CHF, i.e. 2.2x of the expected revenues 2008 (220 million CHF) and/or 12x of the projected operating profit of 2008
• 5-years objectives: doubling the revenues
• expansion market =  Asia
• willingness to continue to produce only 60% of the demands!

 

Conclusion

 

Let's see now how this merge will work, and especially if Mr. Biver, the current CEO of Hublot, will stay at his position. He has recently stated in one of his interview, that he was not able to block the acquisition of Hublot by another company because he hasn't reached the level of shares which would has allowed this control... On the other hand, it seems that he has some guarantees concerning his freedom and the one of his team.

And, it is funny to observe that Mr. Biver is one of the top5 worldwide collector of Château d'Yquem, Château which is owned by ..... LVMH!

Maserati GranTurismoS

I had the chance to see the new GranTurismoS model from Maserati some days ago.

An incredible mix of Italian design, power of the brand, aggressiveness, passion and luxury. AND the sound of the fantastic V8. Some pictures below (from the Maserati website):

Wow, good to dream some minutes :-)

(I know, from an ecological point of view, not very good...)

Montreux Jazz Festival - Alicia Keys

As usual (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007), we are going to the Jazz Montreux Festival this year. We will have the chance to listen to Alicia Keys (seems to be already sold-out):

Nine-time Grammy Awards winner Alicia Keys is back in Montreux after the release of her 3rd album: As I Am. Her 2004 show already seduced the audience of the Auditorium Stravinski. Since 2001, she has sold over 20 million albums worldwide. One of the few artists who can capture an old-school vibe and make if feel refreshingly new, Alicia tackles this feat once again with this new album.

The program this year is absolutely fantastic! Some examples:

• Al Jarreau
• Buddy Guy
• Gilberto Gil
• Herbie Hancock
• Katie Melua
• Leonard Cohen (!)
• Paul Simon
• Quincy Jones
• Robert Cray
• ....

If you cannot find something interesting in this program, you should perhaps buy new ears ;-)

Cobol is the future...if you agree or not!

via Ed Cone

Okay, I am a bit provocative ;-)

Cobol is surely not the development language you want to program with as Software Engineer today.

On the other side, one figure remains in my mind since more than 12 years. In 1995, there were more than 80 billion (billion, not million) SLOC (single line of code) developed in Cobol worldwide and in production. 80 billion! People thinking that you can get rid of these in the midterm are just....wrong ;-)

It was funny to read this post of Ed this morning:

And the hot new tech job is...COBOL programmer?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, but readers of this post about antiquated Pentagon systems are crowing about demand for old-school skills.

Says a commenter who goes by "Sing": I do not know any young programmers that are interested in learning COBOL, but I do know a lot of older programmers that are looking forward to the inevitable jump in salary.

A recent report claimed that 65 percent of core systems at surveyed companies in the insurance industry were written in legacy code, including COBOL. And a computer science prof I spoke with says the skills crunch is for real, with big iron outlasting the folks who know what to do with it.

Related: Vint Cerf says, "Over time the bits we accumulate that represent value will not be able to be interpreted. We have to maintain the meaning of the data we accumulate."

I am working in the Insurance Industry for a while and I personally think that much more than 65% of the legacy systems are written in Cobol... My perception is that we are near a 80-85% level, at least... Perhaps more the case in Europe? Could be!

Flickr video

I have started to play a bit with the new flickr video extension. An example below from my travel to St Barth (with my htc touch cruise):

Some information about the new service:

• only the pro accounts can upload videos
• each video file must be smaller than 150MB or 90s
• formats supported: AVI, WMV, MOV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, 3gp
• video player based on Flash

Not bad ;-)

Nice interviews from Jean-Claude Biver, CEO of Hublot

I like more and more (high-end) watches. The role of the brand, the incredible high technological sophistication - but still manually produced and 100% mechanical ! -, the emotion generated by this kind of watches...

I have discovered in the last time three great brands, quite different from each others: Hublot, Panerai, and U-Boat. I have published an article about Hublot last year.

As the BaselWorld Show is now taking place in Basel / Switzerland (the biggest luxury conference in the world), a lot of interviews and reports are going on in the media. A good opportunity to listen to Jean-Claude Biver, the CEO of Hublot, who is very well-known in the high-end watch industry because of his huge success with BlancPain (he successfully re-launched this company and its brand in the 1980's, before sending it to Omega and being integrated in the Swatch Group) and now with Hublot. A visionary, full of energy and ideas, very people-oriented. So, a lot to learn here on leadership ;-)

So, first, in the last "Bilanz" newspaper (April 2008, in German), you can find a great interview of Mr. Biver. He is giving the some business figures concerning Hublot in this interview:

• 2004:
  • revenues: 26 mio CHF
  • loss: 2.4 mio CHF
  • number of watches produced: 11'900
• 2007:
  • revenues: 177 mio CHF
  • profit: 28 mio CHF
  • number of watches produced: 24'900
• 2008 (forecast):
  • revenues: 250 mio CHF
  • profit: 40 mio CHF
  • number of watches produced: 33'000

I was also happy (and not surprised) to read that Mr. Biver's preferred watch is the "Big Bang 44mm All Black" model, which is actually absolutely fantastic!

During our last stay in St Barth beginning of this year, I also had the chance to see the Hublot Saint Barth special model. But I cannot find any information or picture online for this model. Arrrgggg :-)

Another interesting interview, this time a video in English with Mr. Biver, for the Herald Tribune. Quite funny. He is explaining that Hublot is offering a piece of his own cheese to its guests at BaselWorld! And, somebody saying that his four passions are his family, watches, cheese and wine, cannot be a bad guy ;-)

Impressive figures from the Linux kernel development

via 451 CAOS Theory

Great post about some impressive figures from the Linux kernel development.

• There have been almost 10,000 patches in each recent quarterly Linux kernel release.
• Releases include work from ~1,000 developers and ~100 companies.
• Since 2005, Linux has had more than 3,600 individual developers and more than 250 companies contributing to the kernel.
• The individual development community has tripled in the last three years.
• The top 10 developers have contributed 15% of changes, and the top 30 developers have contributed 30% of changes to the kernel.
• Linus Torvalds is 27th on the list of contributors with most changes over the last few years. He has 495 to his name.
• More than 11,500 or 14% of kernel changes have come from developers with no commercial entity backing their Linux development.
• Another 13% of changes come from developers with ‘unknown’ commercial affiliation.
• When we get to actual companies, Red Hat leads with 9,351 kernel changes, or 11.2%. Next is Novell with 8.9%, IBM with 8.3% and Intel with 4.1% of kernel changes.
• More than 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work.
• From the 2.6.11 kernel to the 2.6.24 release (1,140 days), there were an average of 2.8 accepted patches applied to the Linux kernel tree per hour.
• An average of more than 3,600 lines of code is added to the Linux kernel tree every day.
• Since 2005, the kernel has grown at a steady rate of 10% per year.

Gosh, if this is not showing the incredible health and dynamism of the Linux community!

cross-posted on the innoveo blog.

Music I am listening to...

I have just bought 3 CDs in the last days. Three CD in 3 completely different styles, but the three are really great. Highly recommended!

 

 

If you should chose one, buy Duffy! Absolutely great. She is coming from Wales. A mix between Motown and Carmel (your remember her?), with a profound "Black" voice and groove. I love her music!

Twitter client - Twhirl

I was mostly using the web interface of twitter till last week.

I was searching for a good twitter windows-client and after a while, I have found that twhirl has a very good echo everywhere. It is also the first Adobe AIR application that I am using.

And, just after some successful days of usage, I have read that Seesmic is acquiring twhirl! Cool. More information about the acquisition by Loic.

My twitter account is didierbeck.

Convincing TelePresence system from cisco!

Beginning of this week, Nick and I were able to assist to a business meeting with some people in Amsterdam - Holland, based on the last TelePresence system from Cisco. Below a picture taken just before the conference start in Zurich.

This experience, I must say, was absolutely great! You really feel the presence (good product name ;-) of the other participants thanks to the high-quality video (1080p), the fact that the 3 screens are reproducing the real size of the participants, and because of the quality of the sound (CD quality). The oval form of the table with each half-part on each side of the table is also a good idea.

More information: cisco TelePresence 3000 (pdf).

Below another picture from cisco. You see the both parts and a presentation projection just below the table (another good idea!).

Cross-posted on the innoveo blog.