the luxury e-commerce sector

Hi,
Most of what's below comes from the article : "the luxury e-commerce war heats up" from the New York Times (Nov 29, 2020).

While the luxury sector has been slow to adopt e-commerce, there has been a clear acceleration since Covid.
According to Bain, the share of online sales in the sector globally went from 12 % in 2019 to 23 % in 2020.

Most of the global luxury groups (all ?) are still looking for a clear online strategy.
While these groups are usually very profitable, they are still losing money with their e-commerce business.
They probably prefer to fully control their distribution, but they begin to realize that they need to partner with specialists to develop their online business.
For example, the global leader, LVMH, has created its own platform in 2017 (24 Sevres) but is struggling to get traction.
Richmont has chosen another strategy, by acquiring a leading luxury e-commerce group in 2018 (YNAP) but is still struggling to make money.
In November 2020, Richmont decided to partner with Alibaba to co-invest 1.1 bn in Farfetch.
As of today, Farfetch and YNAP are considered as the 2 leaders in the Western luxury e-commerce sector.

Also interesting to note that so far, Amazon struggle to develop in the luxury market, as most of the brands are reluctant to be sold on Amazon (for quite obvious reasons). Anyway, Amazon has not given up and is still developing strategies to penetrate this market.

This is really an interesting time for a company like Cettire as all the brands want to develop an e-commerce strategy, but the market is not yet clearly structured.
In this kind of situation, the leaders tends to buy stakes in different companies, as they are not sure what company will dominate the market.
Given the share of Chinese consumers in the luxury sector, it is not surprising to see that Alibaba has decided to invest in Farfetch.