After the Paris market closed on September 23, the board of Christian Dior said it had been told of a plan by the Arnault family group. The family holding company Agache would absorb its subsidiary Financière Agache, then merge into Christian Dior. Dior would convert into a société en commandite par actions, a partnership limited by shares, and take the name Agache. The new company would hold 49.76 percent of LVMH's capital and 65.55 percent of its voting rights directly. Its general partners would be a vehicle called Agache Commandité and Bernard Arnault himself, who would also serve as managing partner. A footnote caps the general partners' annual financial rights at three million euros.
Three million euros a year is the price of the steering wheel of a company worth about 200 billion euros. That trade is the whole design of the form. Arnault has watched it work from the losing side.
The Wall
On October 23, 2010, LVMH disclosed that it owned 14.2 percent of Hermès, built partly through derivatives that had let it avoid declaring the position as it grew. By 2014 the stake had reached 23 percent. At almost any other listed company, a holder that size would have been negotiating for board seats.
Hermès had been a partnership limited by shares since 1990. Its general partner, Émile Hermès, a company owned by the founder's descendants, decides who the executive chairmen are and can dismiss them, and in return carries unlimited liability. Shareholders supply capital and vote at general meetings. They do not choose who runs the company. In December 2010 the family closed the remaining door by pooling 50.2 percent of the shares into a private holding with a first right of refusal whenever a family member wanted to sell.
The wall held. On September 3, 2014, after a French court intervened, LVMH agreed to distribute its 23 percent stake to its own shareholders and not to buy Hermès shares for five years. The distribution went through on December 17, 2014, and left the Arnault family with less than 10 percent of Hermès. Three years later the family spent part of what remained. In 2017 it bought out most of Christian Dior's minority shareholders, offering 172 euros in cash plus 0.192 of a Hermès share for each Dior share. The last trace of the raid became currency for tightening the family's grip on its own chain.
The Chain
Arnault adopted the form that beat him in July 2022, when he converted Agache from a European company into a partnership limited by shares. Control went to Agache Commandité, whose capital is held equally by his five children. That change sat one level above the market. The plan announced on September 23 carries the same form down into the listed company.
Before the mergers, Agache owns all of Financière Agache, which owns 96.00 percent of Christian Dior's capital and 6.77 percent of LVMH's. Dior holds the bulk of the remaining family stake in LVMH. Afterward one listed company would hold substantially all of it. The release puts the family's total at 50.33 percent of LVMH's capital and 66.27 percent of its votes.
The gap between capital and votes comes from LVMH's own bylaws. A registered share held by the same owner for three years carries two votes. The bylaws say the right survives inheritance, a gift to a family heir, and a transfer to the company that absorbs a shareholding company in a merger. The plan is a chain of mergers, and the double votes pass through that clause to Agache SCA intact.
The Price
Turning Dior into a limited partnership changes what its outside shareholders own, so French rules require the controller to offer them an exit. Outsiders hold 2.44 percent of Dior, worth about 1.63 billion euros at the September 22 close. The family proposes to pay 95 percent of Dior's net asset value, calculated by looking through to LVMH's one-month average share price. On the illustrative figures in the release, that comes to 469.05 euros a share against a net asset value of 493.74 euros, a premium of 27.3 percent over Dior's September 22 close of 368.40 euros. That figure includes the 6.05 euro interim dividend Dior will pay on December 3. Dior finished September 23, before the release, at 365.20 euros.
The premium measures the discount the market had been charging. At 368.40 euros, Dior traded about 25 percent below the value of the LVMH shares behind it. The family is offering to close most of that gap for the few holders still outside.
The 469.05 figure will move. The price is fixed five business days before a December shareholder meeting, using the average of the month before that date. The average in the release, 423.18 euros, covers August 24 to September 22. LVMH closed September 23 at 396.90 euros, about 6 percent below it. If LVMH held that level into December, the same formula would pay roughly 440 euros, still about 20 percent above Dior's September 23 close. For a Dior holder, the offer works as a position in LVMH's share price over the next ten weeks or so with a 5 percent haircut built in.
There is no squeeze-out. Holders who do not tender stay on as limited partners of Agache SCA. They will elect a supervisory board, which the release says will include independent members. The managing partner answers to the general partners. The rules for appointing and replacing the management will be set out in an information document filed with the AMF, France's market regulator, one month before the December meeting.
The Succession
Arnault was born on March 5, 1949, and is 77. LVMH has already moved his deadline twice. In 2022 its shareholders raised the age limit for the chief executive from 75 to 80. On April 17, 2025, they raised the limit for the chairman and chief executive from 80 to 85, with 99.18 percent of votes in favor. An age limit that the controlling family can amend with its own votes is a courtesy. It says nothing about who comes next.
A partnership limited by shares answers that question in a different room. Under the French commercial code, unless the articles say otherwise, a new managing partner is appointed by the shareholders' meeting with the agreement of every general partner. One of the general partners of Agache SCA will be Agache Commandité, owned in five equal parts by the Arnault children. Whatever those five siblings agree among themselves becomes a veto over who runs LVMH, exercised inside a private company that outside investors cannot vote in.
The form can be undone, at a price. Lagardère was a partnership limited by shares until June 30, 2021, when its shareholders approved conversion into an ordinary joint-stock company after a public fight with the activist Amber Capital. The general partners gave up their rights in exchange for ten million new shares, and Arnaud Lagardère stayed on as chairman and chief executive. That exit needed large outside holders with a reason to push. At Christian Dior the family group already owns all but 2.44 percent of the shares before the offer opens. Nobody outside it has the votes to push.
Dior opened on September 24 at 429 euros, 17.5 percent above its pre-news close, and was near 427 an hour later while LVMH gained about half a percent. That left Dior about 9 percent below the illustrative 469.05 euros and about 3 percent below the roughly 440 euros the formula would pay at LVMH's price that morning. The market valued the offer off LVMH as it traded, minus a small spread for the wait until the offer opens in early 2027, and gave no credit for LVMH climbing back to the 423.18 average in the release. The rest of the calendar is set by the release. A first shareholder meeting, to be called within days, will vote on turning Dior from a European company into an ordinary société anonyme, a step the law requires because it offers no direct conversion from the European form into a partnership. The information document arrives around November, and its rules on replacing the management are the nearest thing to a public succession plan LVMH has published. The December meetings then vote on the conversion, and the offer price is fixed days before.
Hermès taught Arnault that a partnership limited by shares cannot be bought from the outside. He is now betting that one cannot be split from the inside either.