"Pets will become even more important"

People are at the heart of our business. We are working tirelessly to keep our employees, business partners and the communities where we operate healthy and safe during the coronavirus outbreak. We remain committed to ensuring continued production and delivery of our pet food for pets in Germany, Europe and worldwide. To achieve this, we are working closely with our supply chain, distribution and retail partners. We are assessing the situation on a day-to-day basis.

There are some challenges brought about by the present situation for sourcing raw and packaging material - but we are working hard to manage this. Overall, we do not see a major impact on the supply chain at this stage.

Nestlé's business performance remained resilient in the first quarter of 2020. However, the crisis is far from over and we will face uncertainties moving forward. It is too early to assess the full impact of Covid-19, which will depend on the duration and depth of the crisis. There are pluses and minuses between geographies, categories and channels. Nestlé Purina Petcare with its products has been impacted by stockpiling in many geographies highly affected by the virus.
We believe that the coronavirus crisis will not significantly change current trends that have already manifested themselves in the market or that we are approaching on the horizon. However, we are expecting these trends to either slow down or accelerate due to changing consumer expectations.
Our positioning as a company will not change solely because of the coronavirus crisis. We are constantly in motion to adapt our organisation to an environment that is ever changing and changing faster than ever, and we will keep on doing so to remain competitive in the future.

It is too early to judge the full long-term impact of the crisis on both our company and on wider society. However, we are keen to learn from the experience and to adopt working practices that allow us to collaborate better and make decisions with more agility. This includes greater use of video conferencing and cloud services and allowing more flexibility in working arrangements.
We recognise that the physical and mental wellbeing of our…