00:00Estee Lauder, Pooj. Estee Lauder investors are very pleased, Pooj investors not so pleased.
00:05What happened? Does this make sense?
00:06Well, it seems to have come unstuck over Charlotte Tilbury, a change of control clause.
00:12Estee Lauder shareholders are very happy. They really didn't like this deal.
00:15Why didn't they like it?
00:17Estee Lauder's doing a lot of heavy lifting at the moment.
00:20A lot of cost cuts, reinvesting in its brands, revitalising its brands.
00:24Some of its peripheral names are on the block. It's trying to revive its big houses.
00:30It's a lot of work.
00:31And I think they felt that bringing in another load of brands like Charlotte Tilbury or Aban Fragrances was just
00:39a step too far.
00:40I mean, the Lauder argument was we're towards the end of this process.
00:45It will have a long closing and Pooj will be the next stage of growth.
00:49So if you take that, if you maybe think about that, then does it come back when Estee Lauder's further
00:55down the line?
00:56Or does someone else come in for Estee Lauder?
00:59I mean, the one that has been talked about is Unilever, but they've just done a deal to sell the
01:04rest of their food businesses to McCormick.
01:07Investors don't like that either.
01:08So it's got to make a good fist of that, have some credibility.
01:12So who could they be interested in? Sorry, Unilever?
01:14I don't think it would be Estee Lauder. People have talked about Pooj as well, but I think it's much
01:20more likely to be Estee Lauder than Pooj.
01:22But I don't think that's going to happen now because of the McCormick deal.
01:26I mean, so back to why this fell apart.
01:28I mean, what does it tell us about the difficulty of doing these deals that a change of control clause
01:32that Charlotte Tilbury had attached to her namesake brand is one of the things, at least, that made this difficult?
01:38I mean, it's always complicated when you've got these big, you've got these big, big name cosmetics brands.
01:45And she was one of the reasons why Estee Lauder wanted it.
01:48So we think over here that that Charlotte Tilbury is quite, not over, but it's quite, you know, mainstream.
01:55Everybody knows it. How much further has it got to go?
01:58In the U.S. it's still got a lot more growth.
02:01So it's probably quite an important part of the deal to get that over the line, to get the growth
02:06in the U.S.
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