ABSTRACT
Luxury is one of the most globalized businesses in the consumer goods industries. A handful of multinational enterprises dominate the sector and control global sales networks. In 2013, the ten largest luxury goods companies had an aggregated 48.9 percent share of global sales of luxury goods (Deloitte 2015). The largest, the French conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton SA (hereafter, LVMH), had a share of more than 10 percent. Although 84 of the top 100 luxury companies are based in Western Europe and the United States, sales are global. The largest market remains the United States (78.6 billion USD of sales in 2015), with Japan in second place (20.1 billion USD), China in third (17.9 billion USD), South Korea in eighth (10.8 billion USD), the Middle East in ninth (8.1 billion USD), and Hong Kong in tenth (6.8 billion USD) (D’Arpizio et al. 2015). A second indicator of the globalization of the luxury industry is the high degree of standardization of goods and the existence of global brands (Jackson 2004; Jain 2007).
