Driving Recovery and Defining the Company Plan 2021-2023

In my editorial for the June issue we were discussing the first signs of recovery and an increasing number of governments lifting restrictions and how that had immediately resulted in an acceleration of flight connections being resumed and passenger numbers augmenting.

Today, I am glad to confirm that this positive trend has continued throughout the summer months and that despite the ongoing uncertainty we have with respect to the short-term visibility of the evolution, we see a persistent gradual improvement across the business environment. We have therefore maintained our highly flexible approach for the reopening of shops, following our successful shop-by-shop strategy which has taken into account the specific situation at each location. With this great effort, to which all our teams contributed with total dedication, we succeeded in opening up the 74% of shops we expected to by the end of August, which represents around 85% of our sales capacity.

I am also very pleased to confirm, that with the opening of more shops, we have also been able to call back an increasing number of colleagues who were on furlough, while in several locations we are also now recruiting again for new colleagues at shop level to join the Dufry family and serve a growing number of customers. Together, these are reassuring signs of the resilience of our company and the industry.

Company plan 2021-2023

Along with the demanding management of the day-to-day business, ever since March we have been pro-actively developing the company plan 2021-2023, resulting in the high level definition of the opportunities and the key initiatives we want to pursue. This will now be refined further in the last quarter of this year and implemented throughout 2022-23.

During the coming months we will continuously inform you step by step on each initiative as soon as it’s ready for implementation. What we can say today is that we will focus on five key pillars consisting of:

• driving growth of the core business;
• expanding airport travel retail;
• further accelerating digitalization including new ventures;
• seizing diversification opportunities and
• continuing to strengthen our business model. 

As a common denominator we can also highlight the fact that digitalization will play a key role both at the internal level with respect to processes and procedures, as well as with customer-facing applications and services, so that we will evolve to become a global digital travel retailer.

ESG initiatives visible in many company areas

Another important aspect of the company development is the ongoing evolution of our ESG engagement (environment, social and governance). Reading through the articles in this issue of Dufry World you can easily see the progress we have made and learn about the various initiatives we have launched. Sarah Branquinho gives a good perspective into the development of our Diversity & Inclusion initiative. The Key Story on our internal communication tool, Beekeeper, features the progress made and how we will connect close to 80% of all our employees by year-end; while the sustainable product strategy shows how we support customers to identify sustainable products within our store assortments. This is also a good example how we foster our customer focus, by learning and identifying new customer expectations and developing the relevant offering.

Thank you

The last quarter 2021 is a doubly important one for us, as we have to keep reopening further stores, while at the same time defining the detailed steps of the company plan. It is also encouraging that we can resume work with an increasing number of personal meetings rather than remote interactions – in fact we just held the first “in person” employee information meeting at the Basel headquarters since September 2019. While there has never been any doubt about your great motivation and dedication to the company, these signs of normalization will provide all of us with additional confidence and further develop our positive attitude. I thank you all for your ongoing extraordinary efforts and great contributions.

Sincerely yours,

Julián Díaz
Chief Executive Officer