Once Sweden’s Top Company, H&M’s Struggling to Sell Its Rebound Story
The global apparel market is worth $1.9 trillion. It’s also ferocious — and H&M is trying to find its spot in it
H&M’s Daniel Ervér at the company's headquarters in Stockholm.
Photographer: Erika Gerdemark/BloombergFrom a conference room atop H&M’s headquarters in the heart of Stockholm — with its brown-toned wood and clean lines giving the space a distinctly Scandinavian feel — Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ervér speaks of reviving the one-time Swedish highflyer. What he’s up against is a credibility problem.
Eight years ago, after a record quarterly sales drop, Hennes & Mauritz AB’s then CEO Karl-Johan Persson, a scion of its billionaire founding family, had gathered shareholders in the historic Stockholm concert hall Cirkus for its first — and only — capital markets day to reassure them that things would get better. They didn’t. Just weeks after the event — where Persson had cut a dapper figure, tie-less, in a white shirt and an Arket suit — the company dumped more bad news: roughly $4 billion in unsold garments and a 62% drop in operating profit.