Where the corona measures have been relaxed and the airports are open again, the business of the travel retailer Dufry is running. The next holidays will show whether the war in Ukraine will change anything.
Dufry sales figures in Europe and the Caribbean have already been up to 90 percent of the pre-crisis level in recent months.
During the pandemic, the travel retailer Dufry has given up making specific forecasts for the current financial year. But as was made clear at the annual press conference, management is confident that things will continue to improve. For the duty-free specialist, 85 percent of whose shops are located at airports, 2021 was already significantly better than the previous year. However, despite an increase of 39 percent compared to 2020, sales did not even reach half of the level before the pandemic. Accordingly, the bottom line was that there was another loss, albeit a much smaller one than in 2020.
There are good reasons for the optimism for 2022: most of the airport shops are now open again. And with the openings, sales have also come back. Dufry’s sales figures in Europe and the Caribbean, for example, have already been up to 90 percent of the pre-crisis level in recent months. Where it was still hard in 2021 was in Asia. But there has also been movement there since the beginning of the year, after Australia, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia and Macau began to carefully ease travel restrictions. With the increasing sales, the break-even point should be quickly exceeded again, because the fixed costs (including shop rents) could be significantly reduced during the pandemic. This is reflected in the operating result, which was already clearly positive again at the current level of sales in purely operational terms, i.e. excluding the prescribed depreciation on the concessions.
And the war in Ukraine? Could he thwart Dufry? Juan Carlos Torres, Dufry’s outgoing boss, doesn’t anticipate it. In any case, nothing has been noticed in the course of business in the past two weeks. “We still feel a great need to travel. The Easter holidays will show whether it lasts.”