Its president, Juan Roig, assures that “there will be no shortage problems” due to the war in Ukraine because the Spanish agri-food chain “is very strong”
The war in Ukraine is changing absolutely everything. And it has also modified the traditional press conference that the president of Mercadona, Juan Roig, holds every year in Valencia -and the only one he offers- to report on the results of the main Spanish supermarket chain. Thus, Roig broke the usual order that these meetings maintain and did not begin by talking about the five components (customers, workers, suppliers, society and capital) and reporting the numbers he obtained last year, but instead fully entered one of the great concerns that there are today: the problem of shortages, although to deny that the largest.
“I want to guarantee that the Spanish and Portuguese agri-food chain is very strong and there are not going to be shortage problems,” assured the Valencian director, who asked for reassurance: “There is no problem, we cannot get nervous.” In this sense, Roig did admit that there may be occasional problems of lack of certain products, but that they will last two or three days at most, as happened in the panemia with toilet paper and now with oil or flour. “But it’s hoarding. We have more than enough merchandise », he stressed.
What neither the war nor the pandemic has managed to change has been Mercadona’s particular battle in beating its own records year after year. Because her reign is such that she can only compete against herself. And one more year she has done it, although in this case she has not managed to exceed her own forecasts, due to the sharp rise in prices that has been registered as a result of the rise in energy and many raw materials. The Valencian company invoiced a total of 27,850 million euros in 2021, 3.3% more than the previous year, but, nevertheless, its profit fell by 6% to 680 million.
Despite these difficult times, the chain has created 1,000 new jobs this year and the total workforce now amounts to 96,000 employees, of which 2,500 are in Portugal, the country that it began to conquer in 2016 and, for the time being, the only to which it has expanded. It is already the company that creates the most employment in Spain, above El Corte Inglés.
The investment in 2021 has been 1,200 million, 300 million less than a year ago, of which 920 million were allocated to renovating the stores and another 100 million for digital transformation.
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