Half-year results: a comment by Dag Rasmussen
Today Lagardère group has published its financial results for the first half of this year and I wanted to share with you a few comments about Lagardère Travel Retail’s results specifically.
Testament to the dynamic recovery of air travel and to the continued mobilization of our teams to create efficiency gains everywhere, we are thrilled to announce an exceptional consolidated revenue of €1,688 million, twice as much as H1 2021. This is largely due to the strong rebound of traffic in the US and in Europe, both on regional and international scales. We’ve posted double to triple-digit growth in each region where we operate, with the exception of China where Covid and related sanitary measures have continued to severely hamper business performance in the first quarter. We have also achieved an operational result of €26 million, up €122 million compared to the first half of last year, and have managed to bring our flow-through (impact of sales decrease over operational result) down to an unprecedentedly low level: 6,7%.
The remarkable performance in the first semester fuels our confidence for a strong rest of the year, even if uncertainty remains the name of the game. Most notably, we must be careful about the consequences the economic crisis and the war in Ukraine could create in months to come. We must also look closely at how the Travel Retail market is reshaping. There are certainly very interesting times ahead for our industry and we are confident that Lagardère Travel Retail is equipped to continue its steady development and growth. Our long-standing expertise to developing holistic customer journeys, via a three business lines model, is the right strategy - one we have been pursuing since 2012 - and we believe changing market dynamics will open up more opportunities for us to seize, not less.
Our teams have continued to deliver remarkable efforts to realize the ambitions of our large-scale business transformation program – LEaP – and we are fully on track to achieve the objectives we have set ourselves in terms of efficiency and productivity gains. We have renewed our contract with ADP to continue to deliver our operational excellence to passengers in Paris for the next decade, we have joined forces with AWPL in the Pacific to become the undisputed leader in Travel Essentials across the Pacific region, and are seeking F&B leadership in the Middle East with a new partnership with HWH, and are continuing the dynamic development of our network across all three business lines. All these are some of the seeds which will fuel our growth for many years to come. Finally, we are becoming more bullyish in terms of achieving CSR leadership, and have announced a market-leading ambition to be contributing to carbon neutrality by the end of 2023.
I am very grateful to all the teams who have once again gone above and beyond to help the company achieve such performance, and I look forward to working with all of them to deliver a similar set of excellent results for the full year.