At Kering’s Capital Markets Day in Florence, chief executive officer Luca de Meo upheld his reputation for trenchant remarks and insights, often punchy and sometimes blunt.

Here is a sampling:

“Everyone in our industry talks about luxury. For me, beyond the word desirability, the word that truly matters is excellence. Luxury is a perception; excellence is a discipline. Luxury can be claimed. Excellence must be earned every day, in every detail, across the entire value chain.”

“In a nutshell, a model that worked for a decade is no longer effective. For us, growth will come first on gaining share, restoring pricing power and executing better than our peers. This is first, a market share game, independent of any upside on a market rebound.”

“We have been relatively bad in integrating small brands. Brioni was profitable before Kering acquired it. Then when it arrived in the group, it didn’t work anymore. So there is a problem there, but we’ll fix it.”

“Sustainability is, my opinion, a non-negotiable execution discipline across all decisions, from design and collection planning to sourcing, operations, capital allocation and governance — with measurable KPIs and no tradeoffs accepted between sustainability and performance.”

“We have been focusing a lot on VICs over the last 10 years. I think we need to go back to the core of the luxury, which is people with money that maybe are not spending.”

“Follow the client, follow the product, follow the money. These are the three fields of application for AI. I’m a believer [in using AI]. I believe in it because I already did it in organizations that were resistant to such kinds of transformation… I can see the impact on the way the system is working because of technology.”

“Having long-term partnerships with a very selected number of retailers, in a qualitative way, is a good thing. It’s a way to feel the pulse of the market — what is working, what is not working.”

“I come from my industrial perspective on things.”

“I know what it means to neglect the power, the innovation power of China. Before the [automotive] executives here in Europe understood how powerful the Chinese automotive industry was, it was too late.”

“Kering was too extreme on having a headquarters that was full of compliance people, lawyers, bean counters, etc., and not many people really having an impact on the business.”

“One of the advantages of the deal we did with L’Oréal was to actually free some bandwidth and organization capacity.”