Remy Cointreau

Rémy Cointreau is a 300-year-old French spirits house with three businesses bundled under one ticker. About 71% of revenue comes from Cognac — almost entirely Rémy Martin VSOP, XO, the Louis XIII tier and the Club bottling — and 22% from Liqueurs & Spirits, where Cointreau triple-sec, The Botanist Islay gin, Bruichladdich and Port Charlotte single malts and the Greek brandy Metaxa sit. The rest is partner brands. The group is controlled by the Hériard-Dubreuil family via the Andromède holding with 65% of shares and 73% of voting rights — one of the tightest family locks in the European luxury complex.

The stock has lost roughly 72% from the late-2021 peak of 215 EUR. Two shocks compounded: a US destocking cycle that began in mid-2023 when bars and retailers worked down covid-era inventory, and the Chinese anti-dumping investigation on EU brandy launched in January 2024 that added 30-39% provisional duties on Cognac from October 2024. FY/2025 (ending March 2026) closed with reported organic sales down 18%, COGNAC volumes down 24%, and EBIT margin compressed from 27% to 18%. Management cut the dividend by half and pushed the FY/2030 target from 4 B EUR revenue to a vaguer mid-term recovery message.

The interesting setup is what the family did and what specialist consumer funds are doing. The Hériard-Dubreuils have not sold a share since the 2008 financial crisis. In March 2026 Andromède publicly stated it would buy back any treasury shares the company tendered, signalling that the family treats the current valuation as a generational entry. On the institutional side, Comgest (Paris, long-term quality) lifted from 4.1% to 5.3% during Q1/2026 — its largest single-stock add of the quarter — and Lindsell Train held the position roughly flat at 2.8% despite redemptions in its UK funds. The pushback is on the sell-side: nine of the seventeen brokers covering RCO have a Hold or Sell rating, citing the China cognac duty as a multi-year overhang.

At 62 EUR per share the market cap is 3.1 B EUR and the EV is 4.65 B EUR. On normalised mid-cycle EBITDA of 350 M EUR (vs FY/2025 trough of 290 M and FY/2021 peak of 535 M), EV/EBITDA is 13.3× — historically cheap; the ten-year range is 14-26×. On the FY/2027 consensus EPS of 2.55 EUR, forward P/E is 24×. The cleaner valuation is replacement cost of cognac inventory: Rémy holds roughly 4.2 B EUR of aged eaux-de-vie at book — at the EV today, you are paying barely above book for one of two true XO-grade Cognac houses.

1. June 4, 2026: FY/2025 full-year results and FY/2026 first-quarter trading update — the first hard read on whether the cognac volume trough is behind.
2. September 2026: EU-China summit and follow-on bilateral talks on EV-versus-brandy duties — any progress would unlock a multi-week re-rating across French spirits.
3. Q4/2026 calendar: Western year-end is roughly 30% of annual cognac sales — gifting and on-premise demand here is the cleanest read on US consumer health for high-end spirits.

I see Rémy Cointreau as the most asymmetric setup in the European consumer-luxury complex today. The downside is bounded by 4.2 B EUR of irreplaceable aged inventory and a family that has refused every approach since 1990. The upside is that two of three negative drivers — US destocking and China duties — are policy-and-cycle, not structural. If you believe Gen Z permanently abandons brown spirits, this is a value trap; if you believe the 1998 and 2008 cognac cycles repeat, the stock is back at 130-150 EUR within 36 months. I would size it as a 2-3% position in a long-only book and add on any clean cognac-volume-stabilisation data point.