Genever. Swiss travel retail giant Dufry’s full-year 2021 performance was characterized by a rebound of travel, predominantly in the Western hemisphere, which drove a 52% rise in organic turnover to CHF3.92bn, as compared to the same period 2020, providing strong confidence in the overall recovery trend.
The company said that 1,970 shops are expected to open globally by the end of March, representing 90% of sales capacity compared with 2019.
Dufry CEO Julian Diaz commented: “In an environment of gradual recovery for the industry and with travel resuming at different speeds in individual countries and regions, Dufry has continued to flexibly adapt its ways of working to the ever-changing requirements. Supported by the resilient willingness of our customers to travel and their ongoing propensity to visit our stores.
“We see encouraging signs for the recovery of the industry and our business performance as vaccination levels increase, passenger traffic accelerates and our sales improve- also supported by higher spend-per-passenger compared to before the pandemic. The overall trends to ease cross-country and domestic air travel continued and were gradually extended.”
In other group news, Dufry has extended its contract to operate the duty-free and duty-paid stores at Helsinki Airport in Finland for a further five years following its partnership with Finavia for the past nine years.
The contract extension will apply to eight stores operated by Dufry, of which five are duty-free stores located in both the Schengen and Non-Schengen areas, one duty-paid arrivals store and two specialty stores. Collectively the stores cover a total retail area of 3,624 m² and offer a varied product assortment including Finnish local brands, as well as major global brands to suit the passenger profiles of each terminal.
