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The Founder's Notes

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The template only earns its keep if you actually put two cases next to each other.

This is the reason every teardown answers the same questions in the same order. Put a luxury house beside a console platform and the differences stop being vibes — one is refusing sales to protect a price, the other is selling below cost to collect a toll, and both are defending a moat.

Luxury · Euronext: MC

LVMH

A family-controlled holding company that owns seventy-five luxury houses, runs each as its own maison, and earns most of its profit from two of them.

Technology · NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon

Runs a near-breakeven retail operation at enormous scale, and earns essentially all of its profit from renting out the two things that operation forced it to build — computing capacity and shelf placement.

The thesis in one line

LVMH is not a luxury company. It is a machine for buying names other people made and refusing to sell them back.
The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Watch it
Own it

Moat

Wide

Brand · Scale economics · Distribution

Wide

Scale economics · Network effects · Process power · Switching costs

Porter's five forces

Competitive rivalry
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitutes
Buyer power
Supplier power
Competitive rivalry
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitutes
Buyer power
Supplier power

Headline figures

Revenue
€80.8B
Share of profit from one division
~74%
Maisons
75
Arnault family voting rights
~64%
Net sales
$638B
AWS share of operating income
~58%
Retail operating margin
~5.4%
Third-party share of units
~60%

Unit economics

€100 of LVMH group revenue, FY2025

The group spends more on selling the object than on making it. That is not waste; it is the product. What you are buying at avenue Montaigne is the store, the campaign and the queue, and the €33 of leather and labour is the cheapest part.

One $50 third-party item sold through Amazon

Amazon captures roughly 38% of the sale price and carries none of the inventory risk. The seller took the risk, paid for the warehouse, and then paid again to be found in a search of Amazon's own catalogue.

What would change her mind

If Fashion & Leather Goods posts two consecutive quarters of positive organic growth with the division margin steady at 35% or above, the cycle has turned and the multiple is fair. If instead the margin keeps sliding while revenue stabilises, the group has been protecting profit with price and the customer has noticed — and that is worse than a downturn.
If AWS revenue growth falls below 15% for two consecutive quarters while segment operating margin also declines, the cloud business is being commoditised rather than merely contested, and the capex is being spent defending share rather than buying growth. That combination — decelerating growth and compressing margin at the same time — breaks the thesis outright. A single weak quarter on either measure alone does not.

No mechanisms in common

These two share no tagged mechanism, which usually means the comparison is about contrast rather than pattern — a useful thing to know before you start writing.