Dubai Duty Free says it has set up a committee studying the possibility of online shopping and says it plans to make 5,000 products available to its customers during a trial period.

 

“This is not new, it’s in many airports around the world, but from March we will have 5,000 products available to customers to buy online and collect either on departure or upon arrival at the airport,” says Colm McLoughlin, Executive Vice Chairman of Dubai Duty Free.

 

“Depending on how that does and depending on the results from that, we may very well develop it further, and that’s what we do with everything. You know, we make mistakes all the time and we just try and make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake again.”

 

Colm McLoughlin, Executive Vice Chairman of Dubai Duty Free.

 

This new venture could help DDF to reach its targets earlier than expected. DDF says sales in 2014 should exceed $1.9bn by which time it hopes to be the no 1 duty free location, in sales terms, in the world…if it isn’t already.

 

“I thought we had already overtaken them,” says McLoughlin. “If we haven’t done it already it’s very likely to happen, as our business increases every year and last year we finished with US$1.8bn sales. It’s going to be in excess of $1.9bn this year. We foresee that it’s going to grow because of various things happening in Dubai and in our 10-year plan we reckon we will have sales of $3bn by 2018, so I think it will happen.

 

“It’s really not that important. We didn’t start looking at it until we realised we were fifth or sixth in the world and then we scratched our heads and thought, ‘Yes, it would be nice to be number one some time’.”

 

DDF says that the Chinese and Russian travellers are both very important to Dubai Airport. The Chinese traveller accounts for 4% of traffic, but its studies indicate that they account for almost 15% of our business.

 

“Africa contributes 13% to our business,” adds McLoughlin. “Russians are big spenders and you get individual cases of very high spend, but the percentage of Russian business is not as big now as it was 10 years ago, for example.”

 

See the full interview with Colm McLoughlin in the May issue of TRBusiness.