LVMH shares jumped more than 12% on Friday morning, after the world’s largest luxury group posted higher-than-expected sales for 2023 and raised its annual dividend.

The owner of Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon and Hennessy, as well as brands including Givenchy, Bulgari and Sephora, on Thursday night reported sales amounting to 86.15 billion euros ($93.34 billion) for 2023, exceeding consensus forecasts and equating to 13% organic growth from the previous year.

Organic revenue was up 10% in the fourth quarter.

The result was boosted in particular by 14% annual growth in the critical fashion and leather goods sector, along with 11% growth in perfumes and cosmetics. Wines and spirits meanwhile posted a 4% decline.

“Our performance in 2023 illustrates the exceptional appeal of our Maisons and their ability to spark desire, despite a year affected by economic and geopolitical challenges,” Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH, said in a statement.

“While remaining vigilant in the current context, we enter 2024 with confidence, backed by our highly desirable brands and our agile teams.”

After a boom during the pandemic, the luxury sector endured a rough end to 2023 as challenging geopolitical and macroeconomic conditions weighed on consumer spending, particularly in the U.S. and China.

LVMH in April 2023 became the first European company to surpass $500 billion in market value, but a share price decline over the last six months allowed it to be eclipsed as Europe’s largest company by Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk.

British luxury brand Burberry earlier this month issued a profit warning in response to slowing demand, as the balloon in high-end spending that peaked during the pandemic loses air. At the time, the news sent Burberry shares plunging and dragged down the wider sector.

Yet luxury stocks broadly advanced on Thursday as investors took heart from LVMH’s reassuring results. Burberry’s own shares were up 1.7% Friday morning.

Javier Gonzalez Lastra, portfolio manager of the Tema Luxury ETF, told CNBC on Thursday that investors are trying to gauge where the bottom of the earnings cycle revision is for the luxury sector. He predicted that earnings are “likely to get tougher” through the first half of 2024 because of last year’s unusually high annual comparisons.

Arnault, however, is pinning some hope on LVMH’s partnership with the Paris 2024 Olympics, which he said “provides a new opportunity to reinforce our global leadership position in luxury goods and promote France’s reputation for excellence around the world.

Black Friday e-commerce spending popped 7.5% from a year earlier, reaching a record $9.8 billion in the U.S., according to an Adobe Analytics report, a further indication that price-conscious consumers want to spend on the best deals and are hunting for those deals online.

“We’ve seen a very strategic consumer emerge over the past year where they’re really trying to take advantage of these marquee days, so that they can maximize on discounts,” said Vivek Pandya, a lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights.

Black Friday’s spending spike reflects a consumer who is more willing to spend than in 2022, when gas and food prices were painfully high.

Pandya noted that impulse purchases may have played a role in the Black Friday growth since $5.3 billion of the online sales came from mobile shopping. He noted that influencers and social media advertising have made it easier for consumers to get comfortable spending on their mobile devices.

Still, shoppers are price-sensitive, managing tighter budgets due to last year’s record inflation and interest rates. According to the Adobe survey, $79 million of the sales came from consumers who opted for the ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ flexible payment method to stretch their wallets, up 47% from last year.

The best-selling categories of Black Friday, the Adobe report found, were electronics like smartwatches and televisions, along with toys and gaming. Meanwhile, home-repair tools underperformed. Pandya said top sellers directly correlated to whichever products had the best discounts.

Adobe gathers its data by analyzing one trillion visits to U.S. retail websites, 18 product categories and 100 million unique items. It does not track brick-and-mortar retail transactions.

A Mastercard analysis of this year’s Black Friday sales found that in-store sales rose just over 1% versus online sales, which grew by over 8% compared to last year.

“I do think the paradigm has changed around the in-store Black Friday experience, the long lines and things like that,” said Adobe’s Pandya.

Consumers are “more in the driver’s seat” when they are online shopping, he added, because it is easier to make side-by-side price comparisons and secure a better price.

Retailers are aware of the rise of deal-hunting consumers and want to capture as many of them as possible. Companies like Best Buy and Lowe’s have both announced higher discounting levels. Other retailers like Target and Ulta Beauty have rolled out pop-up promotions that offer 24-hour discounts on certain brands and items.

Black Friday kept the momentum going from the day before on Thanksgiving when online sales totaled $5.6 billion, according to a prior Adobe analysis.

Adobe expects the spending strength to hold over the weekend and through Cyber Monday with the biggest bargains still ahead. The report forecasts that online shoppers will spend roughly $10 billion over the course of Saturday and Sunday, and a record $12 billion on Cyber Monday.

But spending will likely begin to taper off deeper into the holiday season, according to Pandya. Cyber Monday, as the last major deal day of the holiday season, could be the final spending spike on non-essential goods for the rest of the year.

“We do expect growth to weaken because those discounts will weaken and they are dictating a lot in terms of buyer behavior this season,” said Pandya.

He noted that there are always gift-givers who procrastinate their holiday shopping so spending could continue to trickle in late into December. But the real growth surges, he said, “end up being in November and Thanksgiving week.”

Adidas on Tuesday hiked its full-year guidance and posted stronger-than-expected third-quarter earnings, aided by sales of its Yeezy inventory.

The German sportswear giant, in surprise preliminary estimates release, projected a full-year operating loss of 100 million euros ($106 million), a significant improvement on its previous forecast of a 450 million euro loss, and expects revenues to decline at a low-single-digit rate for 2023.

Third-quarter operating profit came in at 409 million euros, down from 564 million for the same quarter in 2022.

Adidas shares climbed 4% during early trade in Europe on Wednesday.

“While the company’s performance in the quarter was again positively impacted by the sale of parts of its remaining Yeezy inventory, the underlying adidas business also developed better than expected,” Adidas said in its earnings report.

The company terminated its partnership with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, in October 2022 after the rapper made a series of offensive and antisemitic remarks. It has since been working to sell off its remaining inventory of his trademark Yeezy sneakers.

“Including the positive impact from the two Yeezy drops in Q2 and Q3, the potential write-off of the remaining Yeezy inventory of now around € 300 million (previously: € 400 million) and one-off costs related to the strategic review of up to € 200 million (unchanged), adidas now expects to report an operating loss of around € 100 million in 2023 (previously: loss of € 450 million),” the company said.

The U.S. has accused discount shopping site Temu of possible data risks after its Chinese sister app was pulled from Google’s app store over “malware” — but analysts say they’re not that worried.

Compared to Pinduoduo, which was suspended by Google in March after versions offered outside Google’s Play store were found to contain malware, Temu is “not as aggressive,” one analyst said.

The malware in Pinduoduo was found to leverage specific vulnerabilities for Android phones, allowing the app to bypass user security permissions, access private messages, modify settings, view data from other apps and prevent uninstallation.

Google called it an “identified malicious app” and urged users to uninstall the Pinduoduo app, but the Chinese online retailer denied those claims.

According to analysis by Kevin Reed, chief information security officer at cybersecurity firm Acronis, Pinduoduo requests for as many as 83 permissions — including access to biometrics, Bluetooth and information about Wi-Fi networks.

“Some of these permissions Pinduoduo is asking seems to be unexpected for an e-commerce app,” said Reed, who shared his analysis of both apps with CNBC.

“But Temu is not as aggressive as Pinduoduo that is requesting all kinds of privileges,” said Reed.

Pinduoduo is a China-based e-commerce app that sells everything from groceries to clothing. It is the flagship product of Nasdaq-listed Chinese company PDD Holdings which also owns Temu. Temu’s headquarters are located in Boston.

“There should be no need for biometric data to be stored on an e-commerce website or app. I personally wouldn’t want my biometric data to be stored anywhere else other than my device,” said Sean Duca, vice president and regional chief security officer for Asia Pacific and Japan at cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks.

“Biometrics have a lot greater value than anything else, because I can’t simply change my fingerprint at all, unlike passwords,” said Duca.

He also questioned why access to Wi-Fi information was necessary. If it is corporate Wi-Fi that the user is connected to, it will “become a very lucrative target for cyber criminals where they start to actually gain access to this information,” cautioned Duca. “But why does an e-commerce provider actually need that?”

Temu, dubbed a copycat of fast-fashion label Shein, is taking the U.S. market by storm.

Just 17 days after its launch in September, the app surpassed Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Shein on the Apple App Store in the U.S., according to Apptopia data shared with CNBC. It launched in the U.K. in March, just weeks after entering Australia and New Zealand.

The fact that Pinduoduo “has requested even more permissions than Temu app even though they seem to be a similar kind of applications seems over-intrusive to me,” said Reed.

“Pinduoduo is much more aggressive in collecting users’ information,” said Reed who claimed the data was “obviously [transferred] back to the company.”

PDD Holdings did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment regarding those permissions.

In comparison, the Temu app requests for 24 permissions, said Reed. Some of these permissions include access to Bluetooth and information about Wi-Fi networks.

“There have been no reports of the malicious functionality present in official Play, App Store or third-party versions of Temu. The keys used to sign the Pinduoduo malware are not the same keys used to sign the Temu app,” said Daniel Thanos, vice president and head of Arctic Wolf Labs, the threat intelligence arm of cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf.

“Based on our analysis, it appears that this malware is targeting Chinese users primarily, as it appears to target devices usually sold and used in China such as Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, Samsung, etc, and their corresponding applications,” said Thanos. PDD Holdings did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

In a report on Chinese “fast fashion” platforms published in April, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission accused Temu and Shein of posing possible data risks.

Shein and Temu “primarily rely on U.S. consumers downloading and using Chinese apps to curate and deliver products,” said the report.

“These firms’ commercial success has encouraged both established Chinese e-commerce platforms and startups to copy its model, posing risks and challenges to U.S. regulations, laws, and principles of market access,” it said.

Chinese-owned apps face intense scrutiny in the U.S. over security concerns. U.S. lawmakers have cautioned that any Chinese-owned apps could be vulnerable to data privacy breaches or interference from the Chinese government.

While politicians often accuse Chinese companies of handing data over to the Chinese government, there is no evidence to support such claims.

“But there’s also a larger play here, which is many other apps that are not talked about are also collecting information and have been doing so for such a very long time,” said Duca, noting it is more of a systemic problem.

One analyst said she was less worried about shopping apps than social media platforms such as TikTok and its sister app Lemon8.

“From a national security standpoint, in addition to creating user profiles with all these data, social media platforms also have the ability to select, promote and demote content based on opaque metrics that ultimately, we don’t really have an insight into,” said Lindsay Gorman, senior fellow for emerging tech at the German Marshall Fund.

For shopping apps, the “real sort of content influence” may be Chinese companies promoting their products which “feels less of a threat to democracy,” said Gorman. Instead, social media apps could promote content about political topics which are much harder to track, she said.

TikTok faces a possible ban in the U.S. after its CEO Shou Zi Chew’s testimony before Congress, which failed to quell lawmakers’ concerns about the app’s ties to China or the adequacy of Project Texas, its plan to store U.S. data on American soil.

“ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government. It’s a private company,” Chew said during the hearing.

In his first public interview since the congressional hearing, Chew said at the TED2023 conference last week: “We are building all the tools to prevent any of [Chinese government interference in U.S. elections] from happening.”

He said he was “very confident” the risk can be reduced to as close as zero with the company being “very, very far along” with Project Texas.

Another analyst, Glenn Gerstell, senior advisor at Center for Strategic and International Studies, said these apps are “ultimately controlled by Chinese parties and that’s what the American political system is going to be focused on.” Geopolitical tensions with China will continue to put Chinese apps under scrutiny.

“It may be that if we got more sophisticated, we’d be able to distinguish one app from another and create a safer, more limited and controlled space. But right now, we don’t have that system in place,” said Gerstell.