Casino, Guichard-Perrachon S.A. (0HB1) Q3 2021 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome to the third quarter 2021 of Casino Group Conference Call. I now hand over to Mr. David Goubeck, Chief Financial Officer of Casino Group. Sir, please go ahead. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for attending our quarterly results conference call. For most of the past 18 months, until last July, the pandemic was a key factor in our environment. We had to adapt our operations And we did so quickly and effectively by leveraging our key strengths, convenience, urban stores, and our exclusive assets and partnerships in food e-commerce. We also took advantage of our technological capability to reduce our costs substantially in our stores and back offices, leading to a high level of profitability in all our banners, the bottom hypermarkets, and indeed at a positive level in hypermarkets. As a result, we have emerged from this situation in better shape, with more profitable food retail operations, an improved financial situation, and attractive growth opportunities in our new B2B businesses. As stated at the end of H1, our key goal now is to get back to growth in our core business, building on the strengths of our best format. Since this summer, our environment has started to shift away from the pandemic constraints with a successful rollout of vaccines. Restaurants, cafes, and entertainment venues have fully reopened for customers equipped with a pass-in there, which led to some headwinds for food retail as a result. Strong demand for various goods and services, coupled with temporary restrictions in logistics hubs, have also led to a return of inflationary pressures. In this environment, our priorities in France have remained the same. First, a return to growth in our food retail business with proximity and e-commerce leading it. Second, maintaining our ...