The two companies share the same vision for innovation in the fashion industry

Paris – Lectra announces the signing of an agreement with the shareholders of the Belgium company Retviews to acquire 100% of capital and voting rights.

Founded in 2017, Retviews has developed an innovative technological offer that enables fashion brands to analyze real-time market data, in order to increase their sales and margins. Today, more than 30 brands use Retviews in France and Belgium.

“By uniting with Retviews, we confirm once again our ambition to help our customers to quickly enter the era of Industry 4.0. Thanks to artificial intelligence algorithms, Retviews’ offer enables brands to make the best decisions at every moment throughout the life cycle of a product, in order to optimize their collections,” says Daniel Harari, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Lectra. “We are delighted to welcome the talented teams of Retviews. Together, we will create synergies with Lectra’s current offer, develop their technology and market their solution to our fashion customers worldwide, thanks notably to our 32 sales and services subsidiaries covering more than 100 countries.”

“In a few months, Retviews has become the leader of automated benchmarking in fashion in France and Belgium,” states Loïc Winckelmans, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Retviews. “By joining forces with Lectra, we are convinced that we will benefit from its expertise to bring new innovations to fashion brands that will enable them to deliver products to the market that constantly meet consumers’ expectations.”

“Fashion companies are sitting on massive volumes of data that have tremendous value. They will only be able to exploit them by deploying artificial intelligence and big data,” says Lorenzo Pellizzari, Co-founder and R&D Director, Retviews. “With Lectra, we are going to enable brands to make a difference. We are looking forward to working on the development of new offers integrated with those of Lectra.”

The transaction involves the acquisition of 70% of Retviews for €8 million today. The acquisition of the remainder of capital and voting rights will take place in three times in July 2020, July 2021 and July 2022 for amounts of about 0.9 times 2020 revenues, 0.7 times 2021 revenues and 0.5 times 2022 revenues, respectively. These amounts will come from Lectra’s available cash, with no financing from the bank.

For more information, please visit www.lectra.com.