LVMH Growth Booms as Customers Spend Big on Luxury Items The world’s largest luxury goods conglomerate LVMH has seen rocketing demand for its luxury items continue into 2022. LVMH, which owns brands from Fendi to Hennessy Cognac and Sephora, said on Thursday that its fourth-quarter sales growth accelerated, hitting €20.02 billion overall. The growth was primarily led by the group’s largest earners, Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. Louis Vuitton and Dior propelled a 28% increase in sales of fashion and leather goods — LVMH’s largest division — on a like-forlike basis. The group said revenues for the business in 9 www.ceotodaymagazine.com MONTHLY ROUND - UP Meta is Building the World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer, Says Zuckerberg Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced his company is building what he claims will be the world’s fastest artificial intelligence supercomputer amid plans to build the metaverse. In a blog post, Zuckerberg said that the metaverse, a concept that combines the physical world with the digital world via virtual and augmented reality, requires “enormous” computing power. Meta’s AI supercomputer, nicknamed the “AI Research SuperCluster” (RSC), is already the fifth fastest in the world, according to the company. Meta researchers have said they expect the RSC to become the fastest computer of its kind when it is completed in the summer. While the metaverse is still years away from becoming a reality, it is a key part of Meta’s plans for the RSC. “Designing and building something like RSC isn’t a matter of performance alone but performance at the largest scale possible, with the most advanced technology available today. When RSC is complete, the InfiniBand network fabric will connect 16,000 GPUs as endpoints, making it one of the largest such networks deployed to date,” wrote Zuckerberg in the blog post. “Our long-term investments in selfsupervised learning and in building next-generation AI infrastructure with RSC are helping us create the foundational technologies that will power the metaverse and advance the broader AI community as well.” the last three months of 2021 came in 51% above their 2019, pre-pandemic level. All LVMH divisions posted double-digit growth percentage-wise. The fastest pace was marked by the specialised distribution division which hit a 30% rise in revenue over the quarter as consumers flocked to stores amid the holiday period. LVMH pointed to the United States as its best-performing single country for sales, with the nation accounting for 26% of the total seen in 2021. LVMH’s billionaire CEO Bernard Arnault said strong momentum continued for the group at the start of 2022.
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