IVS S A : Relazione Finanziaria Annuale 31 dicembre 2020

Our Mission

Chairman's letter

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Annual 2020Report

Dear Shareholders and Stakeholders,

2020 was a year that will not be forgotten, neither globally nor by our company. After two months of a substantially stable growth and in line with forecasts, Italy, as well as the rest of Europe and the world, were struck by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

People's hopefulness and the desire not to be too pessimistic, perhaps led some to initially underestimate the impact and the duration of an objectively severe situation.

Social and economic activities have been affected at all levels.

The pandemic has reduced personal freedoms that had normally been taken for granted and has changed individual and collective lifestyles and behaviors on a very large scale.

IVS Group, along with all its employees and partners, were obviously also affected.

Our first concern, as required by government and regional authorities, was to safeguard the health of our people. Adapting the procedures and organization of the entire group to the specific regulations issued to address the health emergency required considerable efforts.

At the same time, the Company had to adapt its business to the new and challenging backdrop, which affected all markets, albeit with slight temporal differences. Measures to control the spread of the pandemic shut down many sectors of economic activity and imposed total or very severe restrictions on people's movement and their presence in public places.

This, in turn, sharply reduced hours worked or spent in the workplace and slashed consumption "away from home", which is the mainstay of the vending sector.

Blanket lockdown measures imposed at the end of the first quarter resulted in a particularly strong fall in vending consumption in Italy and across the rest of Europe. While a gradual and soft recovery began in the middle of the second quarter and through the summer, a second wave of the Covid-19 infections, which started to spread across Europe in the final months of the year, has caused a further slowdown in activity.

The announcement at the end of last year of the availability of vaccines is supportive of a gradual easing of the health emergency and unwinding of restrictive measures this year, but economic activity will require more time to return to relatively normal conditions.

In this context, IVS Group has adapted its organizational structure to the lower levels of consumption and sales, making use of different forms of support for temporary unemployment of workers, according to national regulations, redefining all the main categories of operating costs, and significantly reducing fixed investments, especially in terms of the purchase of new vending machines.

Achieving this required a considerable effort to reorganize commercial logistics, while still maintaining the key objective of continuity and quality of customer service. This objective has been achieved and, together with it, the group has been able to preserve the conditions of economic equilibrium, thanks to the positive contribution of operating profits, even in a very complex scenario, and by strengthening its financial and liquidity reserves.

Thanks to the sizeable investments made in the past years, the slowdown in 2020 had no significant effects on the group's technical assets and operating capacity. The ability demonstrated last year to be flexible and resilient, even in extremely difficult conditions, represents the best and most objective premise for maintaining a strategy that remains oriented towards growth and development.

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Annual 2020Report