only to close them a few years later – or by sponsoring the Paris Dakar rally, Martine Prémat finally sold the company to Laurent Adamowicz for FF240 million (€36.6 million) in March 1998, including the freehold of the buildings on Place de la Madeleine, sold the following year. From 1998 to 2003: wide expansion of activities Laurent Adamowicz, a former investment banker and business school graduate with experience in the field of luxury products, positioned the brand on the gourmet foods market. He launched new products and ad campaigns, renovated points of sale, withdrew the brand from mass-market outlets and renovated the historical Tea Salon on Place de la Madeleine. He started a new partnership with Air France, and promoted young pastry chefs, like Pierre Hermé, Sébastien Godard, Christophe Adam, Dominique Ansel. In 2000, Fauchon became a growing and profitable company again, with 90 million Euros ($135 million) in sales and 5 million ($7.5 million) in EBIT for 2002. Fauchon opened new stores in Japan, in South Korea, Taiwan, the Middle East, Europe, and finally in the United States where it never had a store before, investing FF60 million (€9.2 million) in five years in the US market, with a diversified investor group that included Michel Deroy and Jean-Francois Toulouse, former owners and managers of Dock de France supermarkets, the investment fund Matignon Investissements et Gestion, the publicly listed UK fund Intermediate Capital Group, and Barclays Capital Development France. Barclays Private Equity France, a subsidiary of the Barclays plc Group, backed Laurent Adamowicz in his takeover of Fauchon to participate in its development in France and abroad. In France, the acquisition of Flo Prestige delicatessens for €39 million increased the number of outlets in Paris by 12 stores. In 2003, the Fauchon network included 650 franchises, with 16 of its own shops, three in New York and 13 in Paris. The acquisition of the Flo outlets in Paris in 2002 and the opening of three shops in New York led to a sharp rise in income between 1998 and 2004, but a decline in Fauchon's net profits. In the spring and summer of 2003, Fauchon, heavily in debt, was affected by the collapse of the tourism market with the combination of several events: the Iraq War and the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in April 2003, followed in May 2003 with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus epidemic,