Luxottica CEO discusses China retail chain acquisition (LUX 2Q05 conf call quotes)

Italy-based Luxottica Group (ticker: LUX) which sells prescription frames and sunglasses worldwide recently acquired China's Xueliang Optical. Here are CEO Andrea Guerra's comments about the Xueliang acquisition and plans to shift manufacturing to China  (from management's Q2 2005 earnings results conference call):

On the acquisition

....Then moving to China, some days ago, we announced the first acquisition in mainland China, Xueliang, Beijing, 80 stores -- 79 stores all in Beijing, all in Beijing, all centrally located in Beijing. We are happy. This is a good chain; it's a premium-brand chain, well-run and in the Chinese capital. We are really getting organized in order to be ready by, we hope by the end of the year, to be able to run this new chain as well.

....We are looking to other parts of China, to other regions of China, to understand how is the best to operate.

On moving manufacturing to China

....In terms of China, in China plants, our plan is always the same; that is we said that, in the next couple of years, we will be able to move our mix of sales from a -- from 85 to 15 Italian manufacturing/Chinese manufacturing to a 70/30, which means that we will not decrease significantly our production in Italy, but on the other side, we will follow growth more from our Chinese plant. This is why we are now starting the doubling of the Chinese facility in the south that we own.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)

LUX chart.

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