This brand will disappear: the five stores in the Pyrénées-Orientales will close

In poor financial health, theViaSanté Mutualist Optics will definitely disappear. In the coming months, the nine stores of the optical and hearing brand founded in 1973 – including five in the Pyrénées-Orientales – will lower the curtain.

The brand will definitely disappear

This is very bad news for employment. The dissolution of Optique Mutualiste ViaSanté, made official following a general meeting organized this Thursday, June 27, 2024, will leave a forty employees on the tile. Most in the Pyrénées-Orientales, the historic cradle of the activity, where the entity has five stores: two to Perpignanone to capstanone to Argeles-sur-Mer and one last one to meadows.

Optique Mutualiste ViaSanté also has points of sale in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne), Carcassonne (Hear), Rodez (Aveyron) and Périgueux (Dordogne). All of them, including those in the Pyrénées-Orientales, should close permanently at the end of the month of september.

“Despite ongoing efforts to commercially revitalize the company and control its cost structure, Optique Mutualiste VIASANTÉ is facing recurring and worsening economic difficulties: it is recording structurally deficient results since 2018, due to a very insufficient flow of customers in stores and down 33% over the period 2018-2023”, explains the management in a press release sent to Perpignan News.

“A structurally deficit economic situation”

Caught financially, the structure claims to have “tried everything to find a buyer with the critical size it lacks”.

After two months of study, a mutualist candidate finally gave up on this acquisition in the face of the economic situation which would have required a complete restructuring in the new group. To go further and consider a solution, including outside the world of mutual insurance, Optique Mutualiste VIASANTÉ called on a firm specializing in acquisition operations in the optical and hearing sector. The study by this firm confirmed the diagnosis, namely that of a structurally deficit economic situation.

In the absence of viable recovery prospects or takeover by a player in the optical and hearing sector, the general meeting of Optique Mutualiste ViaSanté has taken the decision to dissolve the structure. “The remaining financial capacities will be primarily devoted to the social support of employees,” concludes the management.

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