Hugo Boss reports surging sales in Q4 and 2023

Hugo Boss’s Q4 results on Tuesday showed just how well the company was doing last year as its revitalised brands went from strength to strength.

Let’s look at some of the proof of this. To start with, currency-adjusted group sales grew 13% to €1.177 billion with all brands, regions, and channels contributing to the performance. 

Profit on an EBIT basis rose 17% to €121 million, its preliminary figures showed. 

And for the year as a whole, those sales were up an even better 18% to a record €4.197 billion while EBIT jumped 22% to €410 million. As mentioned, those are preliminary figures with its final results due on March 7.

Now, we could be uncharitable here and point out how sales and profits jumped by a smaller amount in Q4 than for the full year. But even so, the size of the jumps for sales and profits in Q4 are enough to highlight the strength of the company.

“We ended 2023 on a high note, making it a record year for Hugo Boss,” said CEO Daniel Grieder. “The double-digit top- and bottom-line improvements in the important final quarter are all the more remarkable considering the current challenging global market environment. With our strong brand momentum and the ongoing successful execution of our ‘CLAIM 5’ strategy, we have laid a robust foundation for continuing our market-share-winning trajectory and making further progress in becoming one of the top 100 global brands.”

So what exactly happened in Q4? The company said it built on the strong business performance of the first nine months of 2023 and continued its broad-based growth trajectory across both brands, all regions, and all channels. 

The Boss and Hugo labels were “fuelled by the successful execution of several marketing, product, and distribution initiatives as part of the company’s ‘CLAIM 5 growth strategy,” we’re told.

Both brands saw double-digit uplifts and grew their market shares worldwide. In the three-month period, currency-adjusted sales for Boss Menswear were up 13% year on year, while revenues for Boss Womenswear and for Hugo expanded by 14% each.

And this is interesting — it reported “robust growth across all regions with particular strength in the Americas”. Plenty of high-end companies have reported tough times in the US market lately so Hugo Boss’s strength there must be particularly pleasing. Americas sales actually rose 18% currency-adjusted.

The firm said revenues in EMEA came in 7% above the prior-year level against a particularly strong comparison base, “reflecting solid sales increases in key markets such as Germany and France as well as double-digit improvements in emerging markets”. 

And revenues in Asia/Pacific surged by 33% on strong double-digit sales improvements in both China and South East Asia & Pacific.

It added that momentum in physical retail and its digital business continues. The digital business “successfully continued its double-digit growth trajectory from previous quarters, with currency-adjusted revenue growth of 26%”. 

This performance was driven by double-digit sales increases across all digital touchpoints, including its hugoboss.com webstore and digital revenues generated with partners.

And physical stores’ revenues rose 12%, “driven by both store productivity improvements as well as additional selling space”. 

In physical wholesale, currency-adjusted revenues were up 5% year on year, with all three regions contributing to growth, while sales in the license business increased by 15%, led by double-digit growth in the important fragrance business.

Those full-year figures mentioned earlier “marked another important milestone” for the firm towards achieving its 2025 financial aims, which the company raised in mid-2023. By 2025, it’s targeting revenues of €5 billion and EBIT of at least €600 million, representing an EBIT margin of at least 12%.