Leap in profits at Lindt & Sprüngli

Chocolate market grows worldwide

10-Mar-2022 - Switzerland

The consumption of chocolate at home in particular has brought Swiss manufacturer Lindt & Sprüngli a significant jump in sales and profits in 2021. Net profit rose 53.2 percent year-on-year to 490.5 million Swiss francs (485.9 million euros, the company said Tuesday in Kilchberg near Zurich.

High demand for "products for home consumption" was the growth driver, it said. Globally, the chocolate market is growing by around three percent a year, and slightly more in the premium chocolate sector, said CEO Dieter Weisskopf.

Sales rose 14.2 percent to 4.6 billion Swiss francs (4.56 billion euros, as the chocolate maker had already announced in January. That was even more than in the year before the pandemic (2019) after a difficult 2020.

The online business grew in double digits, Weisskopf said. In the first pandemic year of 2020, Lindt & Sprüngli lost business mainly because stores were closed, tourists could not travel and operations at airports came to a virtual standstill. Duty-free stores at airports are an important sales channel for the company.

Germany remains the most important market for Lindt & Sprüngli, accounting for 16.3 percent of total business. Sales there rose by 11 percent, and in Europe as a whole by 13.8 percent. Europe accounts for a good half of total business. The company achieved particularly large increases in Brazil, with plus 55.7 percent, and in China, with plus 37.1 percent. Lindt & Sprüngli has 14,000 employees worldwide.

The company sees trends towards more specialization and is on the market with products for this: vegan chocolate, for example, or those with reduced added sugar. For climate protection reasons, Lindt & Sprüngli packaging is to be 100 percent recyclable by 2025.

All packaging made of pulp and paper is to be sourced from certified, sustainable sources.(dpa)

Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.

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