Mango wants more industrial partners in Portugal
The Spanish clothing manga was born in 984, Barcelona, 10 increasingly in proximity suppliers and Portugal 10, already the brand is marked by the position of Turkey and Morocco. The vice president of the multinational and director of brand expansion, guarantees that this is a strategy to maintain, even after the pandemic. “We want to have more industrial partners in Portugal”, highlights Daniel Lopez.
In total, the company works with 1009 factories around the world, of which around 400 are proximity suppliers. “Disruption of supply chains is not an effect of war [na Ucrânia], but from the consequences of covid, which led us to relocate part of our production to markets around the Mediterranean. Of the factories we want and more than 58 are in Portugal, because it is a country with a great Do you know how and in the textile and clothing industry”, he explains.
A bet that is to be kept, assured, even when a pandemic is over. Daniel Lope, noting that, with the growth of online sales, up-to-the-minute information products about consumers are being disseminated. “If you have factories close to your main logistics hub, you have the capacity to react more quickly to the consumer and this is a winning value proposition”, he defends.
Mango ended 2021 with 2234 million euros in sales, an increase of 21.3% compared to 2020, but still 5.9% below 2019, a year of “absolute record” in terms of invoicing. But EBITDA doubled to 423 million and profits tripled, reaching 67 million euros, which leads the official to speak of an “excellent year”, especially still due to the constraints caused by the pandemic. “We have to have a minimum of normal effect. As they haven’t been contacted, at least have 4 days in a row, due to lockdowns, which were followed by a year of disruptive effects, for not being contacted, due to lockdowns, per second-19 over a retail and, therefore, Relation”, he says.
Growth
As for the prospects for 2022, the manager believes that the situation has changed and brings new challenges. “We expected 2022 to be a normal year, we did not expect to be dealing with unexpected events in a region that represented 8% of our EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes), so we are reviewing the strategy for the year to come , but we believe that, despite this, we will grow the business volume by 2”, he says. Daniel Lopez does not quantify the expected growth. “I had to ask for our expectations in January 2020, before covid-if it was a different one. Nowadays “if a different event” – designation refers to a rare, unpredictable and high-impact event in the financial markets -, we need to be prudent in the messages we have”, he argues.
In Ukraine, inflation and the war’s effect of all this on consumer confidence are the biggest challenges, but they extend to all companies in the market. “There is not much that we are prepared to do, on these fronts, so we have to prefer that we are within our reach. There is a lot of potential ahead”, she assures.
Unlike some of its competitors – Inditex, for example, which owns Zara and Massimo Dutti, among others, recently announced an average increase of 5% in its prices worldwide – Mango does not intend to change its prices, at least for now. “It’s a guarantee that I can give today’s date, but nobody knows what tomorrow will be like. Until now, the strategy has been maintaining prices, maintaining our same level of value to our consumers”, says Daniel Lopes, highlighting that price is just one of the factors to take into account, along with quality and sustainability. “Man, from our DNA, but we are still not part of the search for more sustainability, whether in the forms of new production processes, or in the forms of new processes that we can use. The consumer”, he defends.
Expansion
The company opened 200 new spaces in 2021 and ended the year with a global network of 2447 stores. The goal for 2022 is in the same order of magnitude as last year, with special emphasis on strengthening Manga’s presence in its core markets. “Europe continues to be our core market, but we see enormous potential in countries like the United States or India”, explains Daniel Lopez. The brand has five stores in “uncle Sam’s lands”, a number that it intends to more than double by the end of the year. And others will follow. In the next few weeks, a megastore will open on 5th Avenue in New York, and then five more in Florida will follow. “We believe that this could be a core market in the coming years”, underlining. India is another of the big bets, a market of 1.3 million inhabitants and where Mango is in partnership with Mytra, the largest online operator in the country and which also bets on physical retail, having “great development plans” to the brand.
All this without forgetting the “great potential” for development in Europe, specifically designated in France, Spain, Holland and Italy, not only through the opening of new stores, but also the revitalization of some of the existing ones. “We want all our stores to be the same as the ones we have in Chiado or Restauradores, in Lisbon”, says Daniel Lopez.
In Portugal, Mango’s first international expansion market, 30 years ago, the company intends, in 2022, to renovate two stores and open a new store in Lisbon, whose location has not yet advanced, saying only that it will be “very relevant” for house collection. The total investment planned for an omnichannel expansion of the brand – online is already worth 42% of sales when, in 2019, it would be 20% – of the same order of magnitude as in 2021, that is, 45 million.
