The president of Inditex, Marta Ortega, chaired this Tuesday her first General Shareholders' Meeting since she took office last April, in which she showed her "deep gratitude" to the Board of Directors for their "support" and underlined that " the feeling of responsibility is immense”, but the “pride” is “far outweighs it”.
This was stated at the Ordinary General Shareholders' Meeting organized by the Galician company, in which the entire Board of Directors of the company was present, except for the founder of Inditex, Amancio Ortega.
The new president stressed that Inditex "has always been people before anything else", citing suppliers and customers, and stressed that, although there are different financial results, performance is "always the same". "It is not the merit of anyone in particular because it is everyone's," she said.
Ortega thanked his father and founder of Inditex for his "vision, tenacity, and absolute dedication" to the company and stated that this is "the place" where he has grown "personally and professionally" and where he has always "wanted to be".
For his part, the CEO of Inditex, Óscar García Maceiras, who was also making his debut at a general meeting, announced that the company will offer an extraordinary dividend of 0.40 euros per share in 2023, which will be added to an ordinary dividend corresponding to 60%. of the benefits. The shareholders approved, for their part, the dividend for the 2021 financial year, of 0.93 euros per share, having paid 0.45 euros on May 2 and the remaining 0.45 euros on November 2.
Likewise, it announced the “first operation to take an entry stake in the capital of a start up”. Inditex will enter the capital of Circ, which Maceiras defined as a "disruptive start-up" that responds to one of the main challenges from the point of view of sustainability in the sector, the generation of sustainable fibers from products of mixed composition. The entry "will make it easier for your process to gain industrial scale and the rest of the sector can benefit from this process," he assured.
Maceiras highlighted that the entry into capital of start-ups is "a path that we leave open", since they aspire "to continue identifying projects that can develop us in the development of our sustainability strategy":
In addition, he reported the financial result of the company in 2021, which was approved by the shareholders' meeting, in which Inditex obtained 27,716 million euros from sales and profits of 3,243 million euros. The manager stated that it was "a year very marked by the pandemic, with a direct impact on the activity of the first and fourth quarters."
Likewise, he highlighted the results of the first quarter of 2022, in which the company obtained 6,742 million euros, the group's historical maximum for a first quarter. Maceiras stressed that this financial year is the "year of recovery in economic activity, with a very important rebound in traffic and sales in physical stores and the consolidation of online sales."
Regarding sales by channel, he pointed out that Inditex obtained 7,500 million in sales through the online channel, 25.5% of the total. Maceiras highlighted the company's goal of achieving in 2024 that its online sales channel represents "more than 30% of sales".
The manager highlighted the "excellent" operating performance of Inditex, with a gross margin on sales that reached 57.1% in 2021 and 60.1% in the first quarter of 2022, the "highest in the last 10 years in a first trimester. In addition, he underlined the "adequate" management of the inventory and pointed out that, in the last two quarters, for reasons of "prudence" they have anticipated "the entry of articles in the logistics and distribution centers to guarantee the availability of eventual tensions in our chain of supplies”.
The shareholders approved the appointments of Ortega and García Maceiras as proprietary director and as executive director, respectively. Likewise, the re-election of Pilar López and Rodrigo Echenique as independent directors was ratified and the rest of the resolutions on the agenda were approved.
The secretary of the board of directors, Javier Monteoliva, highlighted that with the ratification of Marta Ortega and Óscar García Maceiras, "the generational change of the company" has been completed and has meant "the separation of the positions of president and chief executive".
