ITAB's response to consequences of COVID-19 outbreak

ITAB is facing a crisis which must be addressed with humility and determination. Nothing is more important than the well-being of our staff, customers and partners, and we are focusing continuously on adapting our way of working to ensure a safe environment.

Our customers within Grocery and Pharmacy experience increased activity while most other customer segments experience a visible slowdown. It is difficult to predict the consequences of COVID-19 with any degree of certainty, but most of ITAB’s companies notice signals of decline in demand due to the current concern. We are monitoring the course of events closely, while following the recommendations and complying with the decisions by local authorities in order to continuously adapt our operations on the markets where we are active.

Taking the current circumstances into account, ITAB need to make immediate changes to its operations by implementing a personnel reduction. This will be carried out through permanent as well as temporary measures on our different markets.

ITAB’s actions mainly include:

• Temporary lay-offs and/or reduction of approximately 200 staff members with the support of state subsidies.
• Announcement of approximately 350 redundancies
• Reductions of approximately 200 temporary workers
• Review and control of all purchasing, inventory and receivables
• Review, simplification and streamlining of our operations while maintaining our ability to deliver

We are working resolutely to be able to resume normal operations as soon as possible, and we are striving to implement these measures with the minimum of disruption for our staff, customers and partners. Our most important resource is our passionate and loyal staff, and we are impressed by how they have handled the situation surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak and all the uncertainty that has followed in its wake, for us and our customers, up to this point. It is our hope that the scope of this crisis will be as limited as possible.