Firstly, we hope you, your staff and families are well and remain healthy and safe during this COVID-19 outbreak.
We want to share with you our status and outlook in Marco for the coming months and our approach for now. We am delighted to report no staff or family member is afflicted by COVID-19 and we are doing everything we can to protect their health and their livelihoods as we plan into the coming months.
In our industry, the consumer-facing businesses in hospitality and out of home catering are all seeing revenues fall off a cliff and having to close operations to reduce the rate of cash-burn. Downstream from this is a huge supply chain of B2B businesses like ourselves and you, who will very soon feel the knock-on impact through late payments and reduced order books.
We are endeavouring to remain in operation and continue to supply you all products for as long as possible, while strictly following government guidelines and protocols.
We expect the market for our goods to collapse by at least 40% in April, May and June, as the world waits to see whether COVID-19 containment strategies reap rewards and some sense of ‘normality’ can return. Thereafter our expectation is a slow trading return but still at least 20% below normal expectations. We may be wrong on these numbers but from these suppositions, we can take some actions.
We are engaging with all our stakeholders: our employees, you, our customers and our suppliers to try to make the best decisions for our complete value chain, which in turn will be the right decisions for us both. Therefore, we ask you to consider your needs over the coming months and ask you to share them with us. You may have stock needs, spare parts needs, technical service needs. Whatever you need, if we have an insight into how we can help you manage through this crisis, we can better equip ourselves to do so. A key to managing through this crisis is to remain in communication.
Thank you for your custom. It is greatly appreciated and we wish you health and support as we muddle into the unknown together.
Sincerely,
Drewry & Paul