Valutazione comparativa delle principali società Europee nel settore del lusso: che dire sul settore delle assicurazioni?

The thesis focuses on the luxury goods industry. An overview of the market and of its trends is provided, along with a schematic presentation of eleven European companies in the field, operating worldwide. According to the size in terms of revenues and enterprise value, positioning in the market, portfolio diversification and perception by the consumers the companies selected were grouped, into three clusters: Luxury Conglomerates, Luxury Brands, Premium Lifestyle Brands. The scope of the thesis aims at understanding how different companies are evaluated within the market. The multiples, plausibly the quickest and comparable proxy that allows to focus on key statistics, was adopted as valuation method. The analysis focused on the comparison of three comparable multiples: EV (Enterprise Value)/Sales, EV/EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), EV/EBIT ((Earnings Before Interest and Taxes). The thesis aims at figuring out if companies that belong to a cluster tend to be valued higher or lower than the ones that belong to another cluster. Consequently, comparisons were not between single company multiples, but by contrast, between the average multiple of the cluster to which the company belongs to, computed for each year of the timeframe FY2014-2019. In order to compare the average multiple of the clusters in more fiscal years and understand if there is any temporal evidence behind the differences that the cluster may or not feature between each other in terms of multiples, a six years period was analysed.