MILAN — “Numbers are not comforting us but luckily our performance was slightly better than we expected. This is the moment to react, even if it might take us longer than we thought to return to [pre-pandemic] performances,” said Renato Ancorotti, president of the Italian association of beauty companies Cosmetica Italia during a webinar on Wednesday.
Inevitably, the health emergency affected distribution across most channels. Lockdowns and restrictions caused a slowdown in sales generated in professional hair and beauty salons, where revenues decreased 28.5 percent and 30.5 percent, respectively, resulting in a combined loss of 240 million euros.
The only channel performing positively was e-commerce, where sales jumped 42 percent to roughly 700 million euros last year, making it the fourth largest, accounting for 7.4 percent of total sales. Ancorotti lauded companies’ resilience and their entrepreneurial commitment even through challenging times, as last year firms continued to invest 6 percent of their revenues in digitalization and R&D activities, compared to a national average of 3 percent invested by companies operating in other manufacturing sectors.