Billionaire Johann Rupert's Cartier opens first New Zealand boutique

Cartier has opened its first New Zealand boutique, on Auckland's Queen Street, extending the reach of the jewellery house that has driven most of the recent gains in South African billionaire Johann Rupert's fortune.

The store at 66 Queen St opened quietly on 31 July and launched officially on Wednesday. It is Cartier's eighth in Oceania and takes the brand past 270 stores worldwide.

Rupert controls Compagnie Financière Richemont, the Swiss group that owns Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Montblanc and Chloé. He holds 10.18 percent of the equity but 51 percent of the voting rights, through a dual-class structure of 6.26 million A shares and 522 million B shares a stake that gives him unchallenged control of a company that recently crossed CHF100 billion in market value.

Jewellery is what is working. Richemont's jewellery houses, led by Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, lifted sales 14 percent to €16.5 billion ($17.8 billion) against group revenue of €22.4 billion ($24.2 billion), up 11 percent at constant currencies. The group overtook Walmart this year to become the second-largest watch and jewellery seller in North America, on $3.62 billion of sales.

Forbes valued Rupert at about $17.4 billion in August, after a run attributed largely to record Cartier and Van Cleef sales.

Richemont now has Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Montblanc trading within the same stretch of Queen Street an unusually dense cluster for a market of five million people, and a sign the group sees Auckland as underserved rather than saturated.

The boutique's design nods to Cartier's Parisian origins while housing New Zealand work, including a hand-carved tōtara piece by Māori carver Steve Solomon and hand-blown glass by Isaac Katzoff.

"We are proud to establish a permanent Maison presence in Auckland, creating a destination where our clients can discover the entire Cartier universe," Cartier Oceania managing director Thomas Crye told The Post.