Coty announces acquisition of leading global digital marketing platform Beamly

Business Wire via ITWeb,

New York, 19 Oct 2015

Coty (NYSE:COTY) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Beamly, a cutting-edge digital marketing firm based in New York and London. Beamly's main focus is on driving audience growth and engagement for consumer brands in digital media. While Beamly is active across all digital media including online video, its core capability suite centres around social media, where it has consistently outperformed marketplace benchmarks. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

While Beamly will continue to expand campaigns across non-Coty clients, the acquisition will provide a significant step change in Coty's own digital engagement capabilities. Specifically, Coty and its licensors will benefit from Beamly's suite of social data benchmarking, content creation, content optimisation and consumer engagement tools to deliver Coty's brand strategies. The Beamly team will work closely across Coty's in-house marketing organisation to provide enhanced digital marketing campaigns across consumer segments.

Beamly will continue to be led by CEO Jason Forbes, and will be supervised by Camillo Pane, Executive Vice President, Category Development on behalf of Coty. The Beamly New York team will be based in a dedicated section in Coty's New York office, while the London team will remain in their current headquarters.

"The acquisition of Beamly will address the accelerating consumer shift in time spent from traditional media to real time digital and social media channels," said Pane. "Jason and his team have proven capabilities and a proprietary platform that successfully targets and engages millennial consumers. Further, Beamly will help us to accelerate the growth of our e-commerce business, and be a positive contributor as Coty advances toward becoming a highly focused, pure-play leader and challenger in Beauty."

"We have seen our platform disrupt vertical CPC/CPV benchmarks by 9x," said Forbes. "With Coty, we will enjoy the scale to accelerate product innovation, expanding across clients in a 'mobile first' marketplace."

Forward-looking statements

Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect Coty's current views with respect to the completion of the Beamly acquisition. These forward-looking statements are generally identified by words or phrases, such as "opportunity", "potential", "could", "intend", "will", "would" and similar words or phrases. Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted due to risks and uncertainties including inaccuracies in our assumptions in evaluating the transaction, difficulties in integrating Beamly into Coty and other difficulties in achieving the expected benefits of the transaction. More information about potential risks and uncertainties that could affect Coty's business and financial results is included under "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in Coty's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 30 June 2015, and other periodic reports Coty has filed and may file with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. Coty assumes no responsibility to update forward-looking statements made herein or otherwise.

Coty

Coty is a leading global beauty company with net revenues of $4.4 billion for the fiscal year ended 30 June 2015. Founded in Paris in 1904, Coty is a pure play beauty company with a portfolio of well-known fragrances, colour cosmetics and skin and body care products sold in over 130 countries and territories. Coty's product offerings include such power brands as Adidas, Calvin Klein, Chlo'e, DAVIDOFF, Marc Jacobs, OPI, philosophy, Playboy, Rimmel and Sally Hansen.

For additional information about Coty, please visit www.coty.com.

Beamly

Beamly is a cutting-edge digital marketing firm based in New York and London. The world's leading social discovery and engagement platform, Beamly's proprietary end-to-end product suite includes social data benchmarking, content creation, content optimisation and consumer engagement tools. Beamly is headed by ex-Time Warner Cable Executive CEO, Jason Forbes. The company is based in New York and London, and is backed by BskyB, Comcast, NBCUniversal, Viacom, and Network TEN.

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Contacts

Coty
Investor Relations
Kevin Monaco
212-389-6815

Media Relations
Jessica Baltera
212-389-7584

Beamly Media Relations
Sarra Mander
+44 207 434 550

Coty announces acquisition of leading global digital marketing platform Beamly

Transaction will provide Coty with a step change across digital marketing capabilities.