MAM
Vinu Lal joins The Good Edge as director
Mumbai: Vinu Lal joins The Good Edge as director Vinu Lal, who has worked with several national titles in financial journalism, has been appointed as director for The Good Edge. As part of the agency’s expansion in the western region, Vinu will set up the company’s Pune office with a mandate to develop that region.
A journalist-turned-entrepreneur, Vinu was most recently country head for New York-based IIICorp Inc. Since 2020, he has been on a sabbatical with random content assignments with London-based Capital.com and Hong Kong-based Insurance Asia News. As a Pearson scholar, Vinu was attached to the Companies Desk at Financial Times, London where he filed several news reports during an internship programme in 2008. With over two decades of experience, Vinu was earlier head of corporate Communications for ING Vysya Bank, where he managed both internal and external communications as well as CSR communications. During his stint, the bank had tied up with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to light up select villages, prone to human-wildlife conflict, in the Gajapati district of Orissa using renewable energy solutions.
Prior to ING, Vinu was senior assistant editor for Economic Times in Bangalore, responsible for corporate news with a primary focus on mergers and acquisitions. He has also handled business news for The Times of India and Indian Express in Mumbai. During his career, he had also served as Head of India Coverage for the London-based Financial Times Group’s news agency Mergermarket (now owned by ION Group) for around five years, primarily reporting on corporate strategies and mergers & acquisitions in the technology and infrastructure segments. Having begun his professional career in Mumbai, Vinu during his mid-career relocated to Bangalore where he mostly spent time on media-based business intelligence products and is also a familiar face among media in both these markets.
Mumbai Press Club member since the late nineties, Vinu has been actively involved in several ad hoc projects initiated by the Club and continues to do so. Vinu has a Master’s in English from Gandhigram Rural Institute in Tamil Nadu and has done executive education from various institutes including the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
Brands
Estée Lauder to shed 10,000 jobs as new boss bets on digital shift
The cosmetics giant raises its profit outlook but stays silent on a possible merger with Spain’s Puig, as job cuts deepen and a three-year sales slump weighs on the turnaround
NEW YORK: Stéphane de La Faverie is not done cutting. Estée Lauder announced on Friday that it plans to eliminate as many as 3,000 additional jobs, taking its total redundancy programme to as many as 10,000 roles, up from a previous target of 7,000 announced a year ago. The company, which owns La Mer, The Ordinary, Tom Ford, and Aveda, employs roughly 57,000 people worldwide. The mathematics of what is now being contemplated is stark.
The fresh round of cuts is expected to generate a further $200 million in savings, bringing the total annual savings from the programme to as much as $1.2 billion before taxes. That money, De La Faverie has made clear, will be ploughed back into the turnaround.
A CEO in a hurry
De La Faverie, who took the helm in January 2025, inherited a company that had endured three consecutive years of annual sales declines. His response has been to move fast and cut deep. A significant portion of the latest redundancies reflects his push to reduce headcount at US department stores, long a cornerstone of Estée Lauder’s distribution model but now a channel in structural decline. In their place, he is accelerating the shift toward faster-growing online platforms, including Amazon.com and TikTok Shop, a pivot that is reshaping not just where Estée Lauder sells but how it thinks about its customers.
The numbers are moving in the right direction
Despite the pain, there are signs the medicine is working. Estée Lauder raised its profit outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, guiding for adjusted earnings per share in the range of $2.35 to $2.45, above analyst estimates and a notable step up from the $2.05 to $2.25 range it had guided for in February. Organic net sales growth is expected to come in at 3 per cent, the company said, at the high end of the range it set out in February.
The share price tells a mixed story. After De La Faverie took charge, the stock surged nearly 60 per cent, buoyed by investor optimism that a longtime company insider could finally arrest the decline. But 2026 has been rougher: the shares have fallen 27 per cent this year, weighed down by disappointing February results and the overhang of unresolved merger talks with Spanish beauty giant Puig Brands SA. The company gave no additional details about those discussions on Friday, leaving the market to guess.
Silence on Puig
The proposed tie-up with Puig remains the most consequential unknown hanging over Estée Lauder. A deal with the Barcelona-based group, which owns brands including Carolina Herrera and Rabanne, would reshape the global luxury beauty landscape. But with nothing new to say and a turnaround still very much in progress, De La Faverie is asking investors to trust the process.
Three years of sales declines, 10,000 job cuts, and a merger that may or may not happen. At Estée Lauder, the overhaul has barely started.
