A new crop of Chinese gold jewelry brands are attracting investor interest in the wake of Laopu Gold Co.’s breakout success.
Bloomberg
Hangzhou-based Borland, a gold jeweler specializing in traditional Chinese goldsmith technique known as “filigree”, said this week it has raised more than 100 million yuan ($14 million) from investors including Kering Ventures, the startup investment arm of Kering SA, and Shunwei Capital, a top Chinese venture capital firm co-founded by billionaire Xiaomi Corp. chairman Lei Jun.
Kering said the small minority interest in Borland through Kering Ventures enables the company to “participate in the development of a rapidly growing brand in the particularly buoyant 24-karat gold jewelry segment”.
Separately, Dayone Capital in recent days announced a strategic investment worth more than 100 million yuan in Lamchiu, a maker of hand-crafted bespoke pieces based in the northwest Chinese city of Lanzhou.
China’s high-end gold jewelry boom has been fueled by the surprise rise of Laopu, which has defied the weak performance seen among Western luxury rivals in China. Laopu’s revenue in the first half of 2025 soared more than 250% year-on-year to 12.4 billion yuan, on top of 168% sales growth the year before.
“Laopu has shown the market that this niche sector can continue to break out, and rising gold prices also help lift the overall buzz,” said Richard Lin, a consumer analyst with SPDB International Holdings Ltd. “The rising investment and financing enthusiasm for the heritage gold segment is clearly driven by confidence in the category’s long-term growth potential.”
Heritage gold jewelry refers to gold pieces rooted in Chinese culture and traditional goldsmith techniques, including filigree work. With stores in top-tier malls, Laopu’s clientele overlaps — and increasingly threatens — stalwarts from Hermès International SCA to Richemont-owned Cartier.
Still, while Borland and Lamchiu have official stores on e-commerce platforms like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Tmall and JD.com Inc., both have a limited physical presence — Borland operates just three mall outlets and Lamchiu, despite more than 1 million followers on ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok-like Douyin, has only one Lanzhou storefront.
Borland said it will use the new funding to expand distribution and boost supply chain resilience. Dayone has formed a team to help Lamchiu with similar tasks.
China’s HongShan Capital Group (HSG) has sent a 2.5 billion euro ($2.91 billion) offer to private equity Permira to buy Italian luxury sneaker maker Golden Goose, with the aim of signing the deal by Christmas, daily la Repubblica reported on Friday.
Golden Goose is known for its luxury sneakers – goldengoose.com
Details still need to be defined but the offer gives the luxury group an enterprise value of 10 times the core profit expected by the end of the year, debt included, the newspaper said. Golden Goose’s revenues totalled 655 million euros in 2024, with an adjusted core profit of 227 million euros.
HSG has asked veteran fashion industry executive Marco Bizzarri to become Golden Goose’s future chairman, la Repubblica said, adding that the Chinese private equity aims to expand Golden Goose’s directly-managed stores, particularly in Asia, and plans to list the group in the medium-term.
Last year the Venice-based company, which sells sneakers for more than 500 euros a pair, shelved plans for an initial public offering on the Milan Bourse, citing market volatility caused by political uncertainty in Europe.
IKEA plans to source more products from factories in the United States, the Swedish furniture group’s top supply chain executive told Reuters, as President Donald Trump‘s tariffs drive up the cost of importing bookcases, mattresses and sofas.
IKEA logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 11, 2025 – REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
This marks a big shift for IKEA after the share of the company’s US-made products declined over the past decade. Inter IKEA, the brand franchiser, used to have a factory in Danville, Virginia, but shut it in 2019 and moved production back to Europe.
IKEA’s push to source products closer to where it sells them aims to support the retailer’s expansion in the US, its second-biggest market, and the wider region, where it has stores in Canada, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia, with plans to open in Costa Rica and Panama.
“We are designing our supply chain network to be much more resilient, robust, and responsive,” Susanne Waidzunas, Global Supply Manager at Inter IKEA said in an interview with Reuters, adding that the company’s stores in North and South America are very dependent on furniture being shipped in, with long lead times.
“The closer we can build, the faster we can react from a supply perspective, both when it goes up in demand but also when it goes down,” said Waidzunas. The plan to produce closer to US consumers predates this year’s tariff hikes and is part of a global initiative.
But the timing is now beneficial: IKEA prides itself on low prices but was forced to increase them on some products in the US to offset the tariff impact. The retailer’s sales have declined for two years running as it lowered prices to attract inflation-weary shoppers.
SBA Home, a Lithuanian supplier to IKEA, is ramping up its first US factory in Mocksville, North Carolina, a $70 million investment supported in part by Inter IKEA. The factory will make products for IKEA like top-selling KALLAX shelves.
Jurgita Radzevice, CEO of SBA Home, said manufacturing capacity at the largely automated factory, which is expected to produce 2 million pieces of furniture a year, is steadily increasing.
IKEA depends more on imports in the US than elsewhere. Just 15% of IKEA products sold in US stores are made in-country, down from 19% in 2014. In Europe, 70% of the products IKEA sells are made in the region, while the equivalent figure for Asia is 80%. Its top sourcing countries are China, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, and Poland.
Producing in the US is more expensive, Waidzunas said, but shipping products across the world is also more costly and more unpredictable now than before the COVID-19 pandemic. IKEA plans to buy more from existing US suppliers, which include Ohio-based Sauder Woodworking, and look for new suppliers particularly of bulky items, aiming, for example, to source most of its mattresses in the US.
London property giant Shaftesbury Capital has announced that “following the completion of a number of important initiatives Andrew Price, executive director will be stepping down from his role at the end of this year to pursue other opportunities”.
Andrew Price – Shaftesbury Capital
Price joined the business in 2001 and has “undertaken a number of significant investment, asset management and leadership roles”.
Following the Shaftesbury and Capco merger and the sale of the Fitzrovia portfolio he led the operations team “to achieve efficiencies across the portfolio and drive the enhancement of sustainability initiatives”.
CEO Ian Hawksworth said that he “made a significant contribution to the company over many years. He leaves with our thanks and best wishes for the future”.
There was no hint of where he’s off to next.
The news comes less than a month after the company said Michelle McGrath, also an executive director, would be stepping down from her role to pursue other opportunities. She too will leave at the end of the year.
Shaftesbury Capital was created in 2022 as two of London’s major landlords merged to form an entity that now controls huge swathes of Soho, the West End and Covent Garden. Its properties have been among the most buoyant in recent periods and in an update earlier this month it talked of being “busy and vibrant through this important trading period, with high occupancy, footfall and sales volumes”.