Louis Vuitton Hit a Record, Dior's Operating Profit Fell 59% in Two Years — Too Early to Pin It on a 'Trust Crisis' Alone

Same LVMH, two brands that once both crossed ₩1 trillion in Korean revenue — and three wildly diverging years. Louis Vuitton Korea, covered in our previous piece, posted 2025 revenue of ₩1.8543 trillion — a third consecutive record year. Dior, right next door within the same group, went the exact opposite direction. A company that first crossed ₩1 trillion in revenue in 2023, with a 29.8% operating margin, fell back below that mark in 2024 and 2025, landing at ₩773.9 billion in revenue and a 16.7% margin by 2025. On an operating-profit basis, it went from ₩312.0 billion in 2023 to ₩129.2 billion in 2025 — down roughly 59% in two years. That fact itself is clear. The question is "why." Several incidents did rattle trust in the brand — a subcontractor labor-conditions controversy (June 2024), a data breach (occurred 2025, fined by regulators in February 2026), a repair-trust dispute (2026) — but when you line up exactly when each of these happened against the actual results, "trust collapsed, so results collapsed" turns out to be too simple a story. This piece lays out that timing gap plainly, and looks at several possibilities beyond the trust narrative that could explain the decline.

Scope of this analysis: This piece focuses on Christian Dior Couture — bags, ready-to-wear, and jewelry. Parfums Christian Dior, which handles fragrance and cosmetics, is a separate division within LVMH with a different sales and distribution structure, so its results aren't combined with Couture's here.

Dior's Place Within LVMH — Global Results

Like Louis Vuitton, Dior doesn't disclose standalone revenue or operating profit. It sits inside LVMH's "Fashion & Leather Goods" division alongside Louis Vuitton, Celine, Loewe, Fendi, Loro Piana, Givenchy, Rimowa and Berluti, so the figures below represent the whole division, not Dior alone.

Metric	2023	2024	2025
Revenue	€42.17B	€41.06B	~€37.77B
Revenue growth (organic)	+14%	~0%	Declining
Recurring operating income	€16.84B	€15.23B	~€13.21B
Recurring operating margin	39.9%	37.1%	~35.0%

In Q2 2026, Dior rebounded faster than Louis Vuitton

Metric	Q1 2026	Q2 2026
Fashion & Leather Goods organic growth	-2%	+1%
LVMH group organic growth	+1%	+3%

In Q2 2026, this division posted organic growth (+1%) for the first time in seven quarters. On the earnings call, LVMH said both Louis Vuitton and Dior returned to growth in Q2, with Dior posting the slightly higher growth rate of the two (brand-level figures weren't disclosed). Behind the rebound: the debut collection from new creative director Jonathan Anderson, a positive early response to the new Cigale bag, and new store openings — the Bamboo Pavilion in Tokyo and a new boutique in Osaka. Some reports also cited double-digit growth in the US and Japan, though since LVMH doesn't regularly disclose brand-level regional revenue, that figure should be treated as directional at best. Either way, one thing is clear: the notion that global Dior is "still in freefall" simply isn't accurate, at least as of Q2 2026.

Dior Korea — Two Straight Years of Steep Decline

The global picture shows signs of a rebound. The Korean entity's picture is different. The figures below are from the audited financial statements of Christian Dior Couture Korea Ltd.

Metric	2023	2024	2025
Revenue	₩1.0456T	₩945.4B	₩773.9B
Revenue growth	+12.4%	-9.6%	-18.1%
Operating profit	₩312.0B	₩226.6B	₩129.2B
Operating profit growth	-3.6%	-27.4%	-43.0%
Operating margin	29.8%	24.0%	16.7%
Net profit	₩238.6B	₩172.7B	₩101.1B
Net margin	22.8%	18.3%	13.1%

One thing needs to be said clearly here. This table reflects confirmed results only through 2025. Fiscal year 2026 hasn't closed yet, and Dior Korea, as a privately held foreign subsidiary, doesn't disclose quarterly results the way a public company would. In other words, there is currently no way to confirm Dior Korea's 2026 revenue or operating profit. That's exactly why the various 2026 incidents covered later in this piece can't be used as evidence that "results kept worsening into 2026" as well.

Store Count Held Up Even Through the Downturn

Even as results collapsed, Dior Korea's store footprint itself didn't shrink. Even amid declining results, Dior operates at 25 addresses across Korea — including its top department-store locations and standalone flagships — with 14 addresses in Seoul alone. The footprint is concentrated in Korea's top-tier department stores — Lotte (Main, Jamsil), Shinsegae (Main, Gangnam, Centum City, Daegu), Hyundai (Apgujeong Main, The Hyundai Seoul), and Galleria (Luxury Hall, Gwanggyo) — and Dior also operates standalone flagships beyond department stores, like House of Dior Seoul and Dior Seongsu (pictured). That said, "address" and "store" aren't quite the same thing — some department stores carry separate addresses for women's, men's and jewelry boutiques, so 25 addresses shouldn't automatically be read as 25 independent locations. Nor can this number alone tell us whether the footprint grew or shrank relative to the past — there's no comparable historical store-count figure to check it against.

The cost structure is worth examining too. 2025 gross profit fell sharply to ₩400.4B from ₩540.3B the year before, while SG&A (₩271.2B, including ₩115.0B in rent and ₩33.0B in advertising) didn't shrink nearly as much — advertising spend actually ticked up slightly from the prior year. Fixed costs like store rent and brand-building spend like advertising aren't easy to cut, so when revenue turns down, profit collapses far more steeply. Maintaining store operations and ad spend does show the company is continuing to invest in the Korean market. Whether that reflects a deliberate long-term strategy that accepts short-term pain, cost rigidity from long-term leases, or a global investment mandate from headquarters isn't something public data alone can settle.

The Incidents Around Dior — Lined Up Against the Calendar

There have certainly been several incidents that touched on trust in Dior. But it's worth carefully working out exactly when each happened, and how that lines up against the 2025 results period (January–December 2025).

June 2024 — Italian subcontractor labor conditions and the "€53 wholesale price" controversy (timing overlaps with 2024 results) Reuters reported on an Italian police raid of a Dior bag subcontractor. The investigation uncovered poor labor conditions and undocumented hiring at some of the subcontractors producing Dior products — the subcontractor had reportedly employed undocumented workers, running the factory around the clock with no days off. On top of that, the subcontractor's wholesale price (€53, about ₩78,700) spread through public discussion simplified into "the bag's total production cost." Strictly speaking, that €53 is closer to a bare assembly-and-delivery price, excluding materials, design, distribution and marketing. This incident's timing overlaps with the 2024 results period, so an effect can't be ruled out — but with no data on domestic sales shifts or consumer surveys, the actual size of that effect can't be confirmed either.

Occurred January 2025, fined February 2026 — data breach A breach that occurred on January 26, 2025 wasn't recognized by Dior until May 7. Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) found that Dior had violated its safeguard obligations (access controls, access-log reviews) and, without justifiable cause, missed the statutory deadline (72 hours under Korea's Personal Information Protection Act) for reporting to authorities and notifying affected users (notification came May 12). That investigation has already concluded — the PIPC finalized its ruling on February 11, 2026, fining Dior Korea ₩12.236 billion plus an administrative fine of ₩3.6 million, with roughly 1.95 million people's personal information found to have been exposed (Tiffany, another LVMH brand, was sanctioned in the same ruling). Breaking the timeline into three stages — ① the breach itself (January 2025) ② consumer awareness and media coverage (from May 2025) ③ the regulatory ruling (February 2026) — and how the fine flows into which fiscal year's expenses is a separate question that would need to be checked against the financial statements. Since the breach became known to consumers only from May 2025 onward, the window in which it could have affected full first-half 2025 results was limited. How much it affected second-half purchasing behavior is also hard to confirm, since brand-level quarterly revenue isn't disclosed.

May 2026 — complaint to Korea's Fair Trade Commission over "fake repair" allegations (timing doesn't align with 2025 results) Dior allegedly told customers their luxury bags were being sent to Paris headquarters for repair, when they were reportedly handled by a domestic repair shop instead — leading to a complaint filed with Korea's Fair Trade Commission, with the case later transferred to Seoul Namdaemun Police Station in June for investigation. No judicial finding has been reached, so this can't yet be characterized as "fraud." And more to the point, this incident surfaced after 2025 results had already been tallied — it cannot be a cause of the 2025 revenue decline (-18.1%); it should instead be read as a new risk that could weigh on future recovery.

Lined up this way, few of the trust-related incidents can directly explain the steep 2025 decline (-18.1%). The subcontractor labor-conditions controversy overlaps with the 2024 decline in timing, but explaining the larger 2025 drop requires looking at other factors as well.

What Else Is Worth Looking At Beyond Trust

Other luxury brands reportedly held up better in Korea over the same period. Louis Vuitton Korea alone moved in exactly the opposite direction in 2025 — revenue +6.1%, operating profit +35.1%. But it's hard to turn that directly into a contrast of "Louis Vuitton kept trust, Dior lost it." The two brands differ in their signature product categories (Louis Vuitton centers on travel leather goods and monogram canvas; Dior skews more toward women's ready-to-wear and leather goods), customer base, and store composition, and the data breach hit both LVMH groups, so that alone can't explain the gap in results. If anything, this comparison suggests something closer to: the mere existence of a trust controversy doesn't determine results by itself — brand equity and product competitiveness likely determine how well a brand absorbs the shock of that controversy.

Base effects can't be ignored either. Dior Korea's revenue went from ₩186.7 billion in 2019 to ₩328.5 billion in 2020, ₩613.9 billion in 2021, roughly ₩930.5 billion in 2022, and ₩1.0456 trillion in 2023 — a roughly 5.6x surge in four years, driven by marketing built around BLACKPINK's Jisu and pandemic-era revenge spending. Some of the pullback that follows a run-up of that magnitude may simply be a natural reversion, regardless of brand trust.

Other candidate factors worth naming include:

• Consumer polarization: high-spending customers may have concentrated further into top-tier houses with stronger resale value and status — Hermès, Chanel, Louis Vuitton
• Product portfolio mix: recent luxury growth has been led by jewelry and watches, a category where Dior, weighted more toward women's fashion and leather goods, may be at a relative disadvantage
• Product freshness fatigue: repetition of established bag styles and a long-tenured creative regime may have bred some fatigue (the positive reception to Jonathan Anderson's 2026 arrival connects to this point too)
• Price-to-value perception: repeated price increases may have pushed more consumers to ask "is Dior really worth it at this price"

Overall Assessment — Multiple Causes, Not a Single Verdict

To sum up: reducing Dior Korea's earnings decline to "the result of a trust crisis" makes for an appealing single sentence, but it isn't accurate. The subcontractor labor-conditions controversy overlaps in timing with the 2024 decline, but the sharper 2025 drop and the 2026 incidents are difficult to tie to results on a timing basis. The more accurate picture, as of now, looks like this:

• Confirmed annual results in Korea: clearly deteriorated through 2025
• 2026 Korea results: no public data exists (judgment reserved)
• 2026 Korea brand risk: repair-dispute investigation ongoing; data-breach fine already finalized (₩12.236 billion) — the fact that this penalty is finalized, not pending, makes the existence of trust risk more concrete, not less
• 2026 global Dior: early signs of a rebound, credited to the Jonathan Anderson effect
• Bottom line: the incidents that shook trust are real and are clearly weighing on brand equity — but there isn't enough evidence to explain the decline through 2025 by these incidents alone. Consumer polarization, product portfolio mix, and base effects together make for a more accurate picture.

Practical Implications

• Luxury retail/MD teams: Even within the same group and the same country, results can move in opposite directions, as this comparison shows — but that gap shouldn't be reduced to a single trust narrative. Look at each brand's product portfolio, customer base, and growth base over the past three to four years together.
• VIP/CRM teams: It remains true that trust management at post-purchase touchpoints — like a data breach or a repair-trust dispute — can affect brand equity. But it's also worth factoring in that the effect on actual sales may lag the incident by at least a quarter or two.
• Analysts/investors: Don't prejudge results for a fiscal year that hasn't happened yet based on events that have already occurred. It's also important not to equate store expansion with revenue growth — Dior Korea kept adding stores even as operating profit was cut nearly in half.
• PR/brand communications teams: The fact that trust issues recurred at different levels — the 2024 subcontractor controversy, the 2025 data breach, the 2026 repair dispute — is itself reason enough to audit the organization's risk-management framework, independent of any causal link to results. The principle that proactive transparency reviews are cheaper risk management than reacting after the fact still holds.

Conclusion

Louis Vuitton Korea and Dior Korea, under the same LVMH parent, in the same Korean market, over the same three years, produced opposite results. That contrast itself is a clear fact. But concluding that Dior's decline happened "because of a trust crisis" is a separate claim. The subcontractor labor-conditions controversy overlaps in timing with the 2024 decline, but the sharper 2025 drop and the 2026 incidents are hard to tie together causally. Consumer polarization, product portfolio mix, and the base effect from pandemic-era hypergrowth all need to be considered together to understand Dior Korea's three years more accurately. And what Dior Korea's actual 2026 scorecard looks like — nobody knows yet.