Chairman’s statement

Italtile is committed to satisfying the needs of its customers while delivering acceptable profit growth. The Group endeavours to create wealth for the benefit of all stakeholders.

Overview

In these testing economic times and in the context of a constantly evolving environment, retailers are compelled to remain contemporary and relevant to their customers. With 43 years of experience in this industry, Italtile recognises that its greatest challenge is to keep innovating and striving to ensure its offering is aspirational, accessible and affordable.

The period under review served as a vital opportunity to review the Group’s scorecard in terms of our performance versus our ambitions. Key to this process was to refocus our energy on honing our application of basic retail principles in order to deliver an unparalleled shopping experience to our customers. In this regard, we paid renewed attention to researching and understanding our customers’ desires better, and ensuring we had the right stock at the right time. We beautified our stores and simplified our customers’ buying decisions by creating intuitive solutions. To complement our customers’ aesthetic experience in our stores we invested in refining our technology, warehousing and logistics systems, aimed at creating a seamless shopping experience.

The common thread in making these strategic improvements possible is the people who staff the business. In this regard intensified effort was directed at developing and leveraging this asset to its full potential. Nurturing human capital is a constant theme throughout this integrated annual report and illustrates management’s commitment to the subject.

The results reported by the Group for the period are representative of the success achieved in implementing the abovementioned initiatives.