Inflation and drought are two of the concepts that concern Consum these days. The first, for a long time, since it already partly conditioned the results of 2021, and as the company explained yesterday, it has marked and will continue to do so the economic result of the year.
The Valencian cooperative, which yesterday presented results for 2022 with a turnover of 3,864 million euros, 14.4% more, although with a decrease in results compared to the previous year, has its own reading of the economic situation, which is not far from far from that of the rest of the distribution sector.
And it is that yesterday when asked how he assesses the proposal to cap prices, the general director of Consum, Juan Luis Durich, was blunt: “Cup prices is total nonsense. You can cap by subsidizing the farmer, the producer, but there is than take it.” Durich justified himself by explaining that the sector is “a transmission belt, we do not generate the prices. We cannot have a lower margin, it is already one to three, otherwise we will have to stop paying the payroll at the end of the month,” he explained. very eloquently. Durich explained how on Consum’s shelves there are products whose margin “is bordering on zero” and recalled that this is a “very tight” sector where margins are “very tight”.
We are a transmission belt, we do not generate the prices”
Durich predicted price rises due to the weather situation in dry-farm products, such as potatoes, oil or wheat, “although then there are other products that will not rise because we are going to enter into a more containment evolution. But there are many unknowns: there will be many products that will go down, but others will continue to rise,” he said. He gave as an example the competition in the international market exerted by the Netherlands, which “has paralyzed its greenhouse apple production and since they are very rich, they pay whatever price it is.”
About the 32-hour day
“In our case it is a problem”
Consum boasted yesterday of applying the 5-day working day in 60% of its shops and 100% in its logistics platforms, but the jump to the 4-day working day that Valencia has tested this past month with a pilot test is far from its goals. This was explained by Juan Luis Durich, who pointed out the importance of serving the trade every day, although he did not rule out that it could be considered with shifts. “In our case it is a problem because there are tremendous bottlenecks because one day we sell twice what we used to do in two days, the entire supply chain is very tense, there are not enough trucks, the customer protests… You have to understand that food is not like buying a shirt, you have to be here every day,” he said.
