Acquiring Made in Italy: The Drivers of M&A in Italian Luxury — Evidence from Golden Goose, Versace and Valentino

Between 2020 and 2026 the Italian luxury sector went through an exceptional wave of acquisitions. Three deals stand out. Golden Goose was bought by an Asian investment consortium led by HSG, with Temasek among the investors. Versace was bought outright by Prada from Capri Holdings. And Kering took a 30% stake in the holding company that controls Valentino, with options over the rest. This thesis asks why each kind of buyer acquires, and what happens to the brand afterwards. It compares three types of acquirer: financial and sovereign-linked investors, Italian industrial consolidators, and international luxury conglomerates. Three questions guide the work. What drives each buyer? How is value created or destroyed, both financially and in terms of brand equity? And how do governance and integration after the deal affect the brand's autonomy and identity? Luxury makes this difficult in a specific way. The value of these houses lies in things no contract can transfer: reputation built over decades, and craftsmanship spread across thousands of small suppliers rather than owned by the company itself. That is what makes Italian brands attractive to buyers, and fragile when they change hands. The three deals are studied as comparative cases, using company accounts and transaction documents, against a framework that matches each type of buyer to five ways value can be created. The findings are that the buyer's type sets out what it can contribute, the target's condition decides what is needed, and the structure of the deal decides whether that contribution can be delivered at all. Where the buyer gained operating control, the expected mechanisms appeared. Where it did not, most of them were simply out of reach.