Casino, Guichard-Perrachon S.A. (0HB1) Q3 2020 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third quarter 2020 of Casino Group Conference Call. I now hand over to Mr. David Lubeck, Chief Financial Officer of Casino Group. Sir, please go ahead. Thank you. Good evening, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter sales conference call. I'm here with Lionel and the IR team. We hope you are safe and well. First, a few words about the current environment. As we are experiencing in every country, the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult to forecast. In France, we came out of lockdown in May, and daily life reverted to some degree of normalcy during the summer, albeit with restrictions on international travel that severely curtail tourist flows from abroad. Against this background, we have delivered stable sales in France and a 46 million euro improvement in EBITDA in the quarter, principally due to our swift action on cost and strong performance from the CDiscount marketplace. In recent weeks, we have clearly seen an increase in infection rates and hospitalizations. Nighttime curfews were recently imposed in part of the country, and now a new national lockdown has been decided, effective this evening at midnight. I will discuss the possible impact of these restrictions later, bearing in mind that there are different factors at play. Less eating out at restaurants will likely increase sales in retail stores and restrictions on movements would boost proximity and e-commerce. At the same time, new restrictions could also impact consumer morale. Forecasting is not straightforward in this environment and we are ready for a number of different scenarios beyond the recent announcements. In any event, We have already been operating our stores in the past months fully complying with the security constraints of the pan...