Jerome Lambert took an unlikely career step down from Richemont’s CEO to leading one of its 29 brands—he said he just wanted to return to ‘the job I loved’
We’ve seen boomerang CEOs and bosses shift to board roles. But in Jerome Lambert’s case, moving on looked more like a return to his roots as he went from leading sprawling watch major Richemont to overseeing a single brand under the Swiss company.
Lambert spent nearly six years as group CEO at the watchmaking giant until last May. He was then made group COO in June 2024 and, from January, was appointed CEO of Richemont’s Jaeger-LeCoultre brand.
While examples abound of boomerang CEOs who return to the top job after departing, such as Volvo’s CEO Hakan Samuelsson and UBS’ Sergio Ermotti, Lambert’s slide from the apex of the corporate pyramid to a lower rung in the hierarchy is uncommon.
But he says it’s a job he volunteered for.
“This opportunity is both a privilege and a homecoming to the craft and heritage that have shaped my career,” Lambert said of his return when it was announced in November.
He was the financial controller and CFO at Jaeger-LeCoultre prior to his first stint as its CEO, a role he held for 11 years between 2002 and 2013. He also worked at another Richemont brand, the luxury stationery and bag maker Montblanc.
“It was a privilege to be able to ask Richemont’s new CEO [Nicolas Bos] if I could come back to the job I love for a second time,” Lambert told the Financial Times in an interview published Tuesday, ahead of the annual Watches and Wonders trade show in Geneva.
To be sure, Lambert’s role change came amid a broader reshuffle within Richemont’s brands following the retirement of Cartier CEO Cyrille Vigneron. Louis Ferla, previously chief at Vacheron Constantin, took over Vigneron’s role. Nicolas Bos, meanwhile, went from being CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels to leading Richemont.
Lambert previously had to navigate the ebbs and flows in luxury watch and jewelry demand amid the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2019, the first year he presided over Richemont, the company’s sales and profit rose 27% and 20%, respectively.
That figure softened before recovering in 2021 when a shopping spree drove luxury profits to record highs. The following slowdown impacted Richemont, too, but the company has begun showing early signs of recovery thanks to strong Asia performance.
The story was slightly different over the 11 years that Lambert last led Jaeger-LeCoultre, one of Richemont’s specialist watchmakers with nearly 200 years of history and 400 patents. During the 2000s the company honed its focus on affordability while respecting its nuanced horology.
Lambert took a classic watch line like Reverso, introduced in 1931, and introduced versions with innovative twists, including the display trio watch, Reverso Grande Complication à Triptyque.
While it looked like Lambert had moved on from Jaeger-LeCoultre, it’s clear Richemont wants him to shepherd the brand like back in its glory days.
According to a February report by Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult, the Jaeger-LeCoultre underperformed the Swiss watch market last year. It slipped from 10th to 14th in the list of the top 20 Swiss watch brands by sales from 2017 to 2024.
Lambert’s return is set against a different backdrop than before—but in a good way, he notes.
“Being a rare, old watch is no longer sufficient to express value. Because of that, I believe we are all being pushed to new boundaries in terms of offering greater value,” he said. Lambert added that watchmaking is no longer gatekept in one or a few countries, opening up more doors than earlier.
Representatives at Richemont didn’t immediately return Fortune’s request for comment.
Lee Seung-gun—or “SG” for foreigners unfamiliar with Korean pronunciation—has a classic startup founder story that mixes tenacity, repeated failure, ultimate success…and dental care.
It started in 2011, when Lee left a Samsung-owned private hospital to start Viva Republica. “I started as a dentist, like all the other Asian children whose parents want their kids to be neurosurgeons or dentists,” he says with a laugh.
“When I was 29 or 30, I had no dream. I just wanted to be a famous dentist,” he remembers. But he soon grew restless with just helping people on an individual scale. “To create impact at scale, I quickly realized that I had to focus on technology.”
His push into entrepreneurship had a difficult start. He devoted 150 million won of savings—about $105,000—towards his new venture. “For the first five years, I failed eight times,” he says. He reels off a couple of what he calls “rubbish ideas”: Social media, a voting app.
A Bloomberg report from 2018 noted that, one point, Lee had just 20,000 won ($14) in the bank, and was pleading with the families of employees to let them keep working without pay.
Then, he found an idea that worked: a money transfer service. “Toss was another stupid idea, but we were crazy enough to do it, because we had nothing to lose,” he says with a smile. “And here we are.”
Almost 15 years after its founding in 2011, Toss is now part of a larger fintech “super app,” a single platform that combines banking, insurance, stock trading, and money transfer services.
South Koreans have an average of five bank accounts and four credit cards—which means a lot of different financial accounts to juggle. Lee thinks that’s why Toss has proved so popular, as Koreans have “more occasions to check their finances.”
Viva Republica is now one of Korea’s most prominent startups, worth about $7 billion after a 2022 funding round. The company boasts backers like GIC, Paypal, and Qualcomm Ventures. Lee has also become one of South Korea’s newest billionaires, according to a 2021 estimate from Forbes.
The Toss platform claims to have close to 30 million registered users, which would be equal to around 60% of South Korea’s entire population. Over half of the company’s 25 million monthly active users visit the app at least 10 times a day.
“Our monthly active userbase is actually a little shy of that of Instagram [in Korea],” he boasts.
Super-app success
Asia is covered in super-apps, where platforms like Tencent’s WeChat include services like messaging, payments, food delivery, news, games, and more. Finance is a popular service for budding super-apps, even for non-finance companies, with Singapore’s Grab and Sea, and Indonesia’s GoTo among Asian platforms with fintech divisions.
Super apps keep users on a single platform, rather than sending them off to another company. That allows for cross-promotion, resource sharing, and other support between various services. It also makes it harder to switch to another platform: If everything you ever need is on one app, why would you try something else?
Yet super apps have not taken off in the West, even as the model wins fans like X owner Elon Musk, who hopes to turn his social media network into a financial services platform.
Lee’s theory is that super apps are a better fit for the Asian internet, which initially lacked much of the digital infrastructure that underpins U.S. startups.
In the U.S., a new startup can rely on a plethora of other companies that provide supporting services. In Asia—even in wealthy countries like South Korea—those companies just don’t exist. That means a platform like Toss, or its more established Big Tech peers Naver and Kakao, had to build those services itself.
“When we launched our flagship money transfer service, it was loved by so many users, so we were able to grow very fast. We quickly realized that all the other vertical sectors of finance were not covered by other players,” he explains. “There has been a huge void in the Korea market, so we were able to capture those opportunities.”
Startup milestones
Viva Republica hit a key milestone last year, when it reported its first annual profit since its founding over a decade ago. The company reported a net profit of 21.3 billion Korean won ($15 million) for 2024, compared to a 216.6 billion won ($152 million) loss the year before. Revenue also jumped 43% to hit 1.96 trillion won ($1.4 billion).
Lee says the first-ever profit is due to a focus on growing revenue rather than building market share. “Unlike other fintech players, user growth doesn’t really correlate with revenue. Most of our revenue doesn’t come from users, but instead from our business customers,” attracted to Toss’s point-of-sale program, or its advertising opportunities.
“For the next three to five years, it’s going to mostly be a story around acquiring more business customers,” he says.
Viva Republica’s profit also came from strong growth in Toss Securities, the platform’s stock trading service. Lee notes its the only service that charges users a fee, and contributes about 20% of the platform’s total revenue.
He added that Toss Securities, after its launch in 2021, grew quickly due to the Toss superapp.
“It took Robinhood two years to get two million securities accounts,” Lee says. “We achieved that in five days.”
Toss has higher penetration among younger Koreans, with as many as 90% of those in their twenties using the platform. Lee says that while there aren’t a lot of differences between Toss’s younger and older users, one major divergence is that newer generations are more open to investing in foreign stocks, primarily in the U.S.
Now that Viva Republica has found a profitable business model, is the company on a path to a public debut, the next big milestone for a startup?
Lee says that Viva Republica plans to go public “in the near future,” but declined to give specific details on timing and location.
According to local media, Viva Republica is considering a U.S. IPO, abandoning plans to list in South Korea late last year. The company reportedly believes that Korean equity markets won’t properly value a fintech platform like Toss. (Lee declined to share details when pressed.)
Shares in competing fintech services KakaoBank and KakaoPay have lost around 70% and 80% of their value since their respective 2021 IPOs.
Market confidence
Korean equities often suffer from low valuations—sometimes dubbed the “Korea Discount”. Analysts blame the threat posed by nearby North Korea and poor corporate governance among the country’s chaebols, the massive conglomerates that dominate the economy. The country considered passing market reforms that would unlock value, similar to what was successfully pursued by its neighbor Japan.
Yet reforms have stalled due to a more pressing political crisis.
In December, then-President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to impose martial law. After widespread protests from the public and the opposition, Yoon withdrew his declaration just a few hours later.
Lawmakers quickly suspended and impeached Yoon, spurring months of political instability. Things are now starting to come to a close after the country’s Constitutional Court upheld Yoon’s impeachment, formally removing him from office—the second time a president has been removed in less than a decade. Korea will hold snap presidential elections in early June.
Still, Lee thinks the crisis shows South Korea’s strengths. “I’m gaining more confidence in the market,” he says. “Everything was done by the constitution, and the process was peaceful.”
“This is the tipping point where we really need to focus on economic growth, not only from businessmen, but from politicians as well,” Lee continues.
South Korea is grappling with disillusionment amongst the young, frustrated with high levels of debt, unaffordable housing, and more limited social mobility. That’s partly why many have turned to retail trading in stocks, or even more speculative assets like cryptocurrencies.
The East Asian country, a major exporter, is also frantically negotiating with the U.S. to alleviate tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, including 25% auto tariffs and 26% “reciprocal tariffs.”
When asked whether uncertainty more broadly is affecting confidence among individual Koreans, Lee points to growth in Toss’s ads business last year as proof that the country’s economy is still strong.
And he remains bullish on South Korea as an attractive market for anyone that wants to get into fintech.
“Despite its limited population,” Lee says, “the Korean market is massive.”
The interview was conducted in collaboration with Fortune Korea.
President Donald Trump said he plans to be “very nice” to China in any trade talks and that tariffs will drop if the two countries can reach a deal, a sign he may be backing down from his tough stance on Beijing amid market volatility.
“It will come down substantially but it won’t be zero,” Trump said Tuesday in Washington, following earlier comments from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the tariff standoff is unsustainable. Trump added that “we’re going to be very nice and they’re going to be very nice, and we’ll see what happens.”
Trump also said he didn’t see the need to say he’d “play hardball” with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and that during discussions he wouldn’t raise COVID-19, an issue that is very politically sensitive in Beijing. The White House recently launched a website that suggested the virus came from a lab in China, irking the nation’s diplomats.
Trump’s comments come as U.S. stocks and Treasuries have been battered since he rolled out sweeping tariffs on April 2, later announcing a 90-day reprieve for most nations. The 145% duties Trump placed on China this year remain in place, though he’s made exceptions for computers and popular consumer electronics.
“Trump is panicking due to the markets plummeting and still very high U.S. Treasury yields,” said Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief Asia Pacific economist at Natixis. “He needs a deal and quick. China does not need to offer anything big in such circumstances.”
China hasn’t officially responded to Trump’s pledge to play “nice” but the media outlet Cailian called it “a sign that Trump is already softening stance on his signature tariff policies.”
Beijing indicated earlier this month that it wants to see a number of steps from the Trump administration before agreeing to any discussions, especially reining in disparaging remarks by members of his cabinet.
Other conditions include a more consistent U.S. position and a willingness to address China’s concerns around American sanctions and Taiwan, according to a person familiar with the Chinese government’s thinking, who asked not to be identified.
Beijing also wants the U.S. to appoint a point person for talks who has the president’s support and can help prepare a deal that Trump Xi can sign when they meet, the person said.
Beijing had earlier expressed displeasure with comments Vice President JD Vance made about “Chinese peasants,” with one diplomat calling them “ignorant and disrespectful.”
Politics8 years ago