June 16 (Bloomberg) -- Burberry Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Angela Ahrendts said luxury demand is leveling out as the market slowdown nears its first anniversary.

“Things are stabilizing,” Ahrendts said in a Bloomberg Television interview on the sidelines of a luxury-goods conference in Monaco yesterday. “They’re not getting any worse, they’re not getting significantly better.” The market got “really bad” in September and October last year, she said.

Burberry, Britain’s largest luxury-goods company, last month reported a full-year loss after it sold more handbags and apparel at a discount and wrote off the value of its business in Spain. Sales in the 175 billion-euro ($241 million) luxury-goods industry may drop at least 10 percent this year, Bain & Co. said in March, downgrading its forecast as the recession worsened.

U.S. luxury-spending figures tracked by MasterCard Inc. show that slumping demand eased in May, Jorn Lambert, head of the credit-card company’s “core products” for Europe, said at the conference yesterday. Still, U.S. industry sales were 17 percent below the same month a year earlier, he said.

Burberry has no intention of exiting Spain, where it gets about 13 percent of sales, Ahrendts said yesterday. She spoke at a luxury conference organized by the Financial Times.

Burberry declined 4.25 pence, or 1.1 percent, to 372 pence at 10:23 a.m. in London trading. The stock has gained 68 percent this year, the second-biggest advance in the 13-member Bloomberg European Fashion Index.

To contact the reporter on this story: Thomas Mulier in Monte Carlo at tmulier@bloomberg.net; Ryan Chilcote at rchilcote@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 16, 2009 05:27 EDT