A joint message from our Chairman and CEO

To our gategroup stakeholders,

Our progress is anchored in our customers’ success. We work closely with them to drive their performance, blending culinary excellence with seamless operational delivery. By providing this mission-critical reliability, we empower the world’s leading carriers to differentiate their brands and reinforce gategroup’s position as the industry’s premier partner.

Financial strength and strategic milestones

Our 2025 results exceeded expectations, driven by operational excellence and strategic initiatives that have fundamentally fortified our financial and liquidity positions. A landmark achievement was the completion of a comprehensive CHF 1.4 billion refinancing package. By optimizing our capital structure through this successful transaction and subsequent repricing, we have unlocked the agility to scale our global footprint and capture emerging growth. The refinancing demonstrates the confidence of capital markets in gategroup.

We have continued to expand our leadership in the growing, resilient global airline catering market, and we are addressing opportunities in attractive adjacent markets. Long-term secular drivers, such as our clients’ increasing focus on premiumization and the need to work with partners capable of meeting the industry’s complexity and quality requirements, enable us to expand our existing relationships and enter new ones. Our ability to combine scale and our global network with a leading customer proposition and brand affinity has resulted in over 300 relationships with our aviation customers.

Strategic infrastructure investments also marked the year, including the opening of a state-of-the-art facility at San Francisco International Airport and the modernization of our Montréal-Trudeau operations, both of which set new industry benchmarks for environmental performance and food safety. These investments underscore a wider commitment to our global growth strategy; we continue to scale our capabilities and upgrade locations across our broader network to ensure we deliver a premier experience across all regions.

Scaling innovation and organizational DNA

To maintain our advantage as industry pioneers, we established gatehorizon, our group-wide innovation ecosystem. This program has already identified over 50 high-impact use cases - including AI-driven logistics and intelligent automation - with the potential to double efficiency across key operational processes. Technology is now the core of our model, providing the framework for our 46,000 employees to deliver transformative services. We also advanced our Global Job Architecture to dissolve internal silos and unify our organizational identity across 300 locations. This transparency ensures our talent remains aligned with our international ambitions, a mission further supported by the 2026 launch of gateacademy, a unified hub for scaling culinary, digital, and technical expertise.

Societal impact and global responsibility

In 2025, we accelerated our ESG commitments by implementing targeted measures across gategroup’s entire value chain. These considerations are now fundamental to our strategic vision and integral to our customer value proposition. As the market leader, and through our CEO’s Presidency of the Airline Catering Association (ACA), we are championing the circular economy and utilizing real-time demand signals to minimize waste. Every service we design is rooted in a strategy to provide responsible access to quality nutrition during flight.

Looking ahead: IGNITE 2030

The success of our previous transformation now leads us directly into IGNITE 2030. This strategic roadmap leverages our vast scale to deliver a premium customer experience and superior productivity. As we continue to execute our strategy and expand our platform and portfolio, the Board and Executive Management remain confident in our long-term vision. We are grateful for the dedication of our team and the trust of our stakeholders as we reach new milestones in 2026 and beyond.

Sincerely,