World Duty Free: Eugenio Andrades the new CEO

By

Dominique Muret

Published
Nov 18, 2014

World Duty Free has a new CEO. The retailer, owned by the Benetton family, which sells duty free products in airports, has a new President: Eugenio Andrades, it announced in a press release at the same time as the publication of its quarterly results.

This Spanish engineer, with a Masters in Economics and Strategy obtained in the United States, started his career as a consultant at McKinsey. In 1996 he joined Aldeasa, the Spanish manager of airport outlets, later bought between 2005 and 2008, at the same time as English World Duty Free, by Autogrill, the motorway catering group owned by the Benetton family, to be merged into a single company, World Duty Free Group.

Eugenio Andrades played an active role in the integration of the operational and sales activities for this merger, afterwards becoming the Sales Manager for the entire group in 2011.

In 2013, the World Duty Free division was split from its parent company Autogrill and introduced onto the stock market with the goal of teaming up with new partners. In this context, the strategy was to concentrate on highlighting the group's assets.

A vision that Josè Maria Palencia, former CEO of World Duty Free, did not share. Head of the Autogrill group's activities for nine years, he preferred to promote the development of the business by expanding it to other markets.

As the group explains in its press release, "the process of developing the strategic lines of the new industrial plan resulted in diverging opinions between the company and Josè Maria Palencia," who was thus forced to leave.

World Duty Free is the holding of World Duty Free Group, present in 19 countries across 490 retail points in Western Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Asia. In 2013, the group generated 2 billion euros in revenue.

For the first nine months of the year, World Duty Free saw its net profits dive 19.9%, dropping from 91 million euros on 30 September 2013 to 72.9 million at the end of September 2014, while over the same period the EBITDA dropped from 194 million to 191.7million (-1.2%). However, revenue did go up from 15.8% to 1.77 billion euros.

1 EUR = 0.799298 GBP
1 EUR = 1.25295 USD