Retail. A major transformation to fight the effects of the pandemic

The retail trade is one of the Spanish economy’s main service sectors. The sector as a whole has shown itself to be much more resilient than other services, posting a much smaller reduction in activity than the slump observed in the Spanish economy as a whole. Part of this commendable resilience comes from retail’s extraordinary ability to adapt to online sales channels, speeding up a trend that had already been taking hold for years and which we quantify in this report based on internal CaixaBank data. In 2021, the outlook for retail is one of recovery thanks to progress in the vaccination campaign, which will enable a gradual but rapid lifting of restrictions in Q2 2021 on trade and movement, including international.