Analyst: Before we get to the 2026 view, can you set the baseline for me? What share of the store's business was actually Chinese?
Expert: Depends what you mean by Chinese, and I'm not being difficult, it matters. Mainland passport holders travelling in, or ethnically Chinese buyers including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, plus the ones living here in France? Those behave completely differently.
Analyst: Mainland travellers.
Expert: Right. So pre-2020 the figure everyone quoted at network level was about a third of European retail revenue, more in a good year, and it moved depending on which house you sat in. For my store I can be tighter than that, because we had the tax-refund file. Mainland passports were forty-one percent of transactions in 2019. Sorry — thirty-nine. Forty-one was 2018. I mix those two up constantly, it's thirty-nine for 2019, I'd go with that. And it's an undercount either way, because not everyone claims the refund, especially someone buying one small thing on the way to the airport.
Analyst: And the shape of it?
Expert: Coaches, mainly, which everybody's forgotten about already. Three or four a week, more in golden week, and an operator would put thirty-odd people through the door inside ninety minutes. Independent travellers on top. And then the ones buying for other people, which is really its own separate business and probably where you want me.
Analyst: Say more about that last one.
Expert: A woman comes in and buys four of the same wallet in four colours. She's not buying four wallets. She's got a list open on her phone. We all knew. There was an entire economy in it — fly over, buy at the European ticket, claim the refund, carry it home, sell into the domestic market on the spread, because the mainland price was materially higher. The group's official position was that this didn't happen. Internally we ran per-customer purchase limits specifically to manage it. So. Draw your own conclusion.
Analyst: What killed it?
Expert: Price harmonisation. The houses closed the Europe-to-China gap on purpose, that was deliberate, nobody should pretend otherwise. And — sorry, the other one. Customs. Enforcement was already tightening at the mainland airports before 2020 and it got considerably less pleasant for those people afterwards. Spread narrows, risk goes up, business dies.
Analyst: So when travel reopened in 2023 and into 2024, the expectation internally was that all of this restarts?
Expert: That was absolutely the expectation. Everybody was modelling a snapback. I was modelling a snapback. I was wrong, and I was wrong for a reason I'd like to flag, because I don't think I've heard it said properly anywhere. I was thinking about whether they were allowed to travel. I should have been thinking about where they'd travel to.
Analyst: Meaning?
Expert: They went to Japan.