Focusing on Strengths and Values
 to Achieve our Goals

In the third and fourth quarters, we have successfully completed several financing initiatives to secure the resilience of the company and we announced some important cooperation agreements, whilst at the same time winning and extending important contracts. These initiatives are major and encouraging steps towards the recovery of the business and beyond.

Our values are key success drivers

The key success factors which have allowed us to achieve these valuable goals, have once again been our characteristic strengths and company values, which helped us to develop Dufry in the past and which have once again proven to be the drivers of success: determination, execution, delivery and resilience.

In the business year 2020, we have seen a permanent alteration of our business environment forcing us to repeatedly adapt the company and the way of doing business on a location-by-location based approach, whilst at the same time shaping our new organization to be ready for the recovery and the years to come. The short-term implementation of all these initiatives would not have been possible without our values, which focus on the delivery of goals with a high level of determination. They will remain highly important in the coming quarters to help us achieve our targets and ensure we are ready to seize opportunities as soon as travel restrictions are lifted.

In recent weeks, we have finalized our organizational structure with the completion of the full Hudson reintegration, which allows us to further simplify our internal processes going forward. Whilst we will continue to focus on developing our duty-paid, duty-free and airport F&B operations in North America, the closer collaboration and the further integration of processes will benefit the whole company. At the same time, the collaboration with Alibaba, the new concession won in Turkey at the Sabiha Gökçen airport and the extension of our Pulkovo operation prove that – amongst others – there are excellent opportunities to be seized in the market and to be proactive in shaping the future of our resilient business.

Increasing number of open shops

Even though uncertainty remains and visibility on the recovery time-line is still low, there has been increasingly encouraging news with respect to the deployment of vaccines, as well as the re-openings of travel routes and tourism destinations in several locations. So let’s stay alert and make sure we have all our initiatives in place allowing us to best serve our customers. The next few months will require us to continue with our determination and ability to quickly adapt to external events and implement local adaptations of the business; we can however assume that things might become more stable as the new year evolves. By the end of November, we had over 1,300 shops open serving our customers, which represents a sales capacity of more than 60% of the Group, and we have a clear trend for the opening of additional shops and locations towards the year-end. Sales are still low as compared to a normal environment, but the upcoming holiday season is a good opportunity we need to seize.

I hope that you and your family are all in good health and keeping well, and I would like to wish you and your families all the best for the coming year. Let us all enjoy some relaxed moments during the forthcoming seasonal holidays, clearing our minds and gaining a positive spirit and renewed confidence to tackle the New Year, which we expect to be tough, but probably better than the one we are just about to close!

Kind regards,

Julián Díaz
Chief Executive Officer