A sea serpent. Announced by rumor for months, but still invisible, the arrival of the French luxury group LVMH as premium partner of the COJO Paris 2024 briefly resurfaced on Thursday April 20. Time for some nice words. Before diving back in and disappearing.
Surprise: Bernard Arnault himself took up the subject. The CEO of the group, now at the forefront of the richest people on the planet, confirmed the existence of “ discussions » with the organizing committee to join the Olympic and Paralympic adventure, less than 500 days from the deadline. He did it almost in spite of himself, in response to a question from a shareholder during the LVMH annual general meeting.
« The contract you are talking about is not signed, he explained. It is under discussion and like any discussion, it may end with a signature or not. » It’s difficult to be more enigmatic.
Asked by the media to provide some clarity to his father's comments, Antoine Arnault, the eldest son of the family, also image director of the LVMH group and general director of the Christian Dior SE holding company, confirmed the existence of negotiations. But he also refused to speak of the signing of a partnership contract with the COJO as a certainty.
« We will continue to negotiate, it may take 15 days or it may take six months, he carefully explained. A negotiation is always complex, especially with foreign organizations or companies, there are a lot of legal issues, discussions in all directions. »
Nothing very new under the sun. According to several corroborating sources, LVMH has been discussing with the COJO for months, but not only with it. The discussions were extended to a much wider sphere: the entire planet. Translate, the IOC. The French group is tempted by the Olympic adventure, but it envisages it on a larger scale than just national marketing.
Problem: the partnership contracts signed by the OCOG only concern national rights. For the rest of the world, the ball is in the IOC's court. The body reserves the exclusivity of its international rights to partner members of the TOP program, engaged for a period often much longer than a single Olympics. LVMH is not one of them.
The part is not simple. Its complexity explains the length of the three-party negotiations between the OCOG, the IOC and Bernard Arnault's group. LVMH would like to be a little more than a single national partner, but without immediately integrating the narrow circle of the IOC TOP program. The diversity of its brands does not help matters, the watchmaking sector, in particular, being already contractually reserved on a global level for the Swatch group, via its Omega brand.
In any case, the possible partnership between the COJO and LVMH would only concern a few of the group's many brands. Louis Vuitton, for example. Dior, too.
Antoine Arnault confided this on Thursday April 20: the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, Friday July 26, 2024 on the Seine, constitutes “ one of the elements of the negotiation. "" Doing an event like this in the open air, which is not in a stadium, which is in the heart of a city, it will probably be the most watched spectacle in the history of television, in the history of the Games, he suggested. This is obviously something we are very interested in."
In the meantime, time is passing and the arrival of a sixth premium partner – BPCE, Orange, EDF, Sanofi and Carrefour are already there – is still awaited. In its report submitted last July, the OCOG Paris 2024 audit committee underlined this without nuance: “ Signing an additional Tier 1 contract (Premium Partner), for an amount at least equal to the average of contracts already signed, is an imperative necessity. Without this signature, the desired objective seems unattainable. »
At the end of last year, the OCOG proudly announced that it had achieved nearly 80% of its marketing objectives. To a question of FrancsJeux, Tony Estanguet had recognized that a first-tier partner was among the most advanced negotiations, and therefore the closest to success.
Since then, radio silence. The words of the Arnault family, Thursday April 20, allow us to consider all the options. The best and the worst.
