Patrick Chalhoub, CEO of the company has revealed that the business is gradually recovering to about 60 per cent of pre-Covid-19 levels.
Major luxury player Chalhoub Group, which is headquartered in Dubai, UAE and distributes luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Dior, achieved its 2025 e-commerce target in a single month during the pandemic.
CEO Patrick Chalhoub told the Ai Everything conference at the World Trade Centre that the business had been decimated by coronavirus, during government lockdown measures introduced in March and April. He said: “During the period of lockdown, our business went down from 100 to nearly zero.”
However, he revealed an increase in e-commerce activities during this time, coupled with private sales, saw the business recover to operate at 20 per cent pre-Covid-19 levels.
“We reached our e-commerce target of 2025 in one month,” he said. “We have been able to multiply our e-commerce abilities by six, but the business was still minus 80 per cent.”
Chalhoub added that he expects the “return to normality” to take place around the second or third quarter of 2021. “In the meantime we will probably have to live with this pandemic, but we will have probably learned much more in how to act and how to react and how we can connect better with our customer and consumer and how we deal with this situation,” he said.
