This has been a challenging year for the fashion industry, including , which posted losses for the first time in the first half of the year. However, after everything that has happened, and with 15% of all physical stores still closed, Inditex’s online sales continue to be a powerful growth engine for the textile group. If the year-on-year growth rate stood at 76% year-on-year during the third quarter of 2020, now, after the presentation of its annual results, we know that that growth was 77%.
Sales of the entire group, both physical and online, reached 20,402 million euros during 2020 (28,286 million euros in 2019). Total sales at constant exchange rates fell 24.5%. For its part, online sales grew to 6,612 million euros, 32.4% of the total. In its presentation, Inditex wanted to highlight that online visits in the 2020 financial year grew by 50%, to 5,300 million. For its part, the group has 200 million followers and active applications have reached 132 million users.
The pandemic has boosted the growth of Inditex’s online sales
The company’s goal was increase Inditex’s online sales to reach more than 25% of the total by 2022a percentage that, as we can see, has been greatly exceeded due to the boost that its online channel has received during the pandemic.
In this sense, the group has shared the main advances that its digital transformation strategy has had in recent months. Among them are the new technological tools offered by the integrated platform in stores and online among which stands out
This commitment, in which Inditex has already invested around 1,000 million euros, allows that users live a new relationship experience with the fashion brand, through the creation of its own technological base on which all the digital operations of the group work, including inventories, purchases, distribution or orders. An initiative with a marked omnichannel spirit, of which we have already seen its first fruits in the implementation of a battery of measures that he explained to us at the time
Thus, the RFID and SINT programs have already been implemented in all formats. SINT contributed 1,156 million euros to online sales in the year. The integrated stock or SINT is a tool that Zara has opted for and has been developing for years. This tool is very important, and according to Marcos “It allows a different way of selling.Over the years we have thought ‘We have stock in physical stores, why don’t we sell that stock? This is how SINT was born, which among other things allows us to manage stock through RFID tags. Without him we would not be able to publish all the stock that we have in the physical store”.
For its part, the implementation of the new digital platform Inditex Open Platform (IOP), on which all the group’s digital operations will be executed, is already 80% complete and is expected to be fully implemented by the end of 2021.
Lefties online finally arrives in Spain
In addition, the digital transformation of Inditex has managed to expand the markets with integrated online sales, in addition to starting operations in 12 new markets, including countries such as Chile, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala.
And as one more boost, in Spain and Portugal, while the Group’s brands continued to open stores that include the latest technology: as of October 31, Inditex reached 7,191 stores in different parts of the world, including 25 new markets. Among them is Beijing, where Zara opened the largest store in Asia with more than 3,500 square meters spread over four floors and that integrates an area especially dedicated to online orders.
Although Inditex’s online bet also means a closure of physical stores: the group announced that between 2020 and 2021 it will close around 1,200 physical stores around the world, specifically the smaller stores whose turnover can now be covered by the online channel, with which Inditex will finally be left with around 6,500 physical stores.
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