Inside the Financial Engineering of Club Med’s IPO

Skift Take Club Med wants to grow from 69 resorts to about 85 without owning the next wave, and its new financial structure helps explain why. Club Med was founded in 1950 and helped pioneer the all-inclusive resort model, spending the decades since becoming the most recognizable name in that business. The company now being sold to public investors in Hong Kong is different: a brand and operating system that mostly does not own its resorts, attached to a growth plan that adds no resorts it will own. How Club Med got that shape, and who decided it, is inside the filing. Fosun, the Chinese conglomerate controlled by Guo Guangchang, bought Club Med in 2015 after an 18-month bidding war against Italian investor Andrea Bonomi. The decade that followed tested the owner more than the brand. Guo briefly disappeared from public view in late 2015 while assisting Chinese authorities with an investigation. In 2019, Thomas Cook collapsed with Fosun as its largest shareholder; Fosun Tourism Group then bought the Thomas Cook brand and related assets from the liquidators for £11 million. The pandemic pushed Fosun’s tourism b