The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.

The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. is an American manufacturer and marketer of prestige beauty products, operating more than twenty brands — including Estée Lauder, Clinique, La Mer, M·A·C, Tom Ford Beauty, Jo Malone London, Le Labo, and The Ordinary — across skin care, makeup, fragrance, and hair care in approximately 150 countries and territories, generating $14.3 billion in net sales in fiscal 2025. Founded in 1946 by Estée and Joseph Lauder and still controlled by their descendants through a dual-class share structure that concentrates roughly 84% of voting power, the company spent the decades after its 1995 IPO building a portfolio of aspirational brands and riding the expansion of prestige beauty in China and global travel retail.

That growth model has now cracked. Revenue has fallen 19% from its fiscal 2022 peak, dragged by a collapse in travel retail, persistent weakness in China, and a wave of acquired-brand impairments that obliterated reported earnings in fiscal 2025. A new CEO, Stéphane de La Faverie, is responding with the most sweeping restructuring in the company's history — cutting up to 10,000 jobs, roughly a sixth of the workforce — under a plan called "Beauty Reimagined" that bets the franchise can restore double-digit operating margins even at a lower revenue base. The central question this file turns on: whether the cost reset repairs the economics without hollowing out the brand equity and innovation engine that made these businesses worth a premium in the first place.