Travel Retail’s Lost Year

Travel retail came into 2020 flying high, but the ride got bumpy pretty quickly. With international travel nearly at a standstill, travel retail has been a grim sector for beauty brands. For the first nine months of the 2020 fiscal year, Shiseido’s travel retail business decreased by 19.3%, a drop of $173 million year over year. Coty pinned the “vast majority” of its 35.3% decline in APAC revenue on “continued significant pressure” in travel retail in its most recent quarterly earnings. The duty-free retailers’ earnings paint a similar picture. For the first nine months of 2020, duty-free retailer Dufry had a 67.8% decrease in sales. LVMH stated that its DFS [Duty Free Shoppers] company “saw a significant decline in its activity in most destinations” in its most recent quarterly report. Read more at Glossy.