Updated 6:10 p.m. ET March 23
The Estée Lauder Cos. and Puig are in talks to merge their businesses, the groups confirmed Monday.
“The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. confirms that it is in discussions regarding a potential business combination with Puig, in which the two companies would potentially merge their businesses,” the company said in a statement, released just after the stock market closed. “No final decision has been made, and no agreement has been reached. Unless and until an agreement is signed between the companies, there can be no assurances regarding the deal or its terms.”
In its own statement, Puig said: “No final decision has been made and no agreement has been reached. Unless and until an agreement is reached, there can be no assurances regarding the deal or the terms.”
Word of the talks sent shares of Lauder down 7.7 percent to $79.29 on Monday, not an unusual move since, if the company brought Puig on board, it would be assuming the risk of integrating the business. Lauder ended the day with a market capitalization of $28.7 billion on Wall Street.
The prospects of a deal has the market looking anew at just what the two companies own and how it could all fit together.
The Lauder portfolio includes Estée Lauder, Clinique, Deciem, Bobbi Brown and Tom Ford, among others, driving sales last year of $14.7 billion, a decline of 3 percent.
And Puig’s portfolio includes the fragrance and fashion brands Rabanne, Carolina Herrera, Jean Paul Gaultier, Nina Ricci and Dries Van Noten. There’s also Charlotte Tilbury, plus niche fragrance brands such as Byredo, Penhaligon’s and L’Artisan Parfumeur, as well as a dermocosmetics activity. Puig recorded net sales of 5.04 billion euros last year.
Puig and the Estée Lauder Cos. have many common traits. Each is family-owned, now run by a non-founding family member and is publicly quoted.
However, they have very different portfolios, with Puig more focused on fragrance and Lauder more centered on skin care and makeup.
The news of a possible merger comes less than one week after Puig announced that Jose Manuel Albesa had taken over the chief executive officer reins from Marc Puig, who had been running the Spanish beauty and fashion powerhouse since 2004 and stepped up to become executive chairman.
Puig long said that the next — or fourth — generation of Puig family members would not run the company, but instead be on the group’s governing body.
The partial withdrawal of the Puig family echoes moves by the Lauder family, which in 2024 ceded day-to-day management of the company when William P. Lauder departed as executive chairman. Stéphane de La Faverie became the company’s CEO in January 2025.
The differences in the Lauder and the Puig portfolios could make them a good fit.
Puig holds three of the top 10 fragrances worldwide with Rabanne, Carolina Herrera and Jean Paul Gaultier. In 2025, its fragrance and fashion division, which also counts among its brands Nina Ricci and Dries Van Noten, generated 3.65 billion euros, or 72 percent, of the group’s net revenues.
Carolina Herrera’s Good Girl fragrance.
Courtesy of Puig
Lauder has long been attracted to European fragrance brands, although has never bulked up its perfume activity. In 2021, it wound down its Aramis & Designer Fragrances division.
In October, Lauder did plant a flag in France, with the inauguration of La Maison des Parfum. And de La Faverie described fragrance as key to the Estée Lauder Cos.’ turnaround.
In November, Lauder made a minority investment in Xinú, a Mexican luxury fragrance lavel, marking the first time the company has invested in a Latin American brand. The New York-based company has also pursued fragrance through its licensing partnership with Balmain and just entered a new fragrance category with the introduction of the prestige women’s perfume Destin de Balmain.
While fragrance has been a source of growth for the company, with sales in the division up 6 percent in the fiscal second quarter, one source told WWD that Lauder has always coveted Puig’s fragrance capabilities.
Another part of Puig’s business believed to be alluring to Lauder is the Charlotte Tilbury brand.
Puig’s fourth-quarter 2025 sales, which grew 6.2 percent in reported terms and 9.8 percent on a like-for-like basis, were spurred by its makeup business thanks to Charlotte Tilbury. Puig acquired a majority stake in the brand 2020 and has subsequently upped its stake.
Makeup was Puig’s strongest-growing product segment in 2025. It represented 17 percent of group sales, with Charlotte Tilbury contributing most to that. Last month, Puig called the brand’s performance “exceptional.”
Charlotte Tilbury ranks first in prestige makeup in the U.K. and third in the U.S. It is underdeveloped distribution-wise and still has a wide runway.
For Lauder, makeup net sales decreased 1 percent in the second quarter, primarily driven by Estée Lauder, partially offset by MAC.
In the case of Puig, a merger with the Lauder would help expand the group’s reach in the Americas, which last year represented 35 percent of Puig’s net sales. It also would muscle up its skin care activity, which is the group’s smallest, making 11 percent of total sales.
A merger would also help the combined company compete with L’Oréal, which last year formed a long-term strategic partnership with Kering in beauty and wellness. That changed the stakes in the industry and what it takes to succeed.
Lauder has been on a wild ride since the pandemic, struggling due to an over reliance on China and travel retail, while its U.S. business failed to bounce back.
Under de la Faverie’s leadership, the company has been working to turn around its fortunes through its new Beauty Reimagined strategy and Profit Recovery and Growth Plan. But green shoots of recovery didn’t do the trick with investors when it released second-quarter results. Instead, they zeroed in on full-year adjusted earnings forecasts that were below some Wall Street estimates. It’s understood that investors were also still jittery about tariffs, with the company continuing to expect tariff-related headwinds to impact fiscal 2026 profitability by approximately $100 million, mostly in the second half.
Shares of Lauder, which has been publicly quoted since 1995 in New York, are down 15 percent year-to-date.
In the run-up to the recent succession at Puig, the company had gone public in Spain in May 2024. At the time, it was Europe’s largest initial public offering of the year and the largest in Spain since 2015. The IPO, which valued Puig at 13.9 billion euros, was multiple times oversubscribed, the company said at the time.
However, since the float, Puig stock has sunk 36 percent and closed up 3.6 percent for Monday to $15.57.
