Benetton, the founder’s farewell for a 100 million euro hole

The entrepreneur: "I trusted and I was wrong. Unfortunately there will be sacrifices to make"

ROME – Benetton is in crisis due to a100 million euro hole. The group’s failure to achieve its 2023 targets was expected but certainly not of this magnitude. The founder Luciano Benetton announced it in an interview with Corriere della Sera, which he decided to tell the company. “I trusted and I was wrong. I was betrayed in the true sense of the word. A few months ago I understood that there was something wrong. That the photograph of the group that the top management repeated to us in the boardrooms was not real “, explained Benetton. “Only in the following months were some problems mentioned, but in a tenuous way. Everything seemed under control. Then – continued the entrepreneur – in one of the council meetings in the following months the bomb exploded. They present suddenly a dramatic budget hole, a shock that leaves us breathless, we will be around 100 million“. And now? “We need to look ahead, a plan for the future will be made in the next few months, we have wasted four years and this makes everything more difficult not having the magic wand. Unfortunately there will be sacrifices to be made“.

In 2012 Luciano Benetton left the company “healthy, with a turnover of 2 billion and a profit”, recalled the group’s founder. Words that are also confirmed in the words of the unions. “It has always been Luciano Benetton who intervened to settle the debts, who never made the price of the crisis fall heavily on workers. For this reason he is loved and respected by the workers”, declared Gianni Boato, general secretary of Femca Cisl of Treviso, who concluded: “As a union we extend our hand to Benetton and invite it to involve the workers and the great know-how present in the company at all levels in strategic choices“.