Inter‘s chief executive Michael Bolingbroke spoke at the shareholders meeting today, here are his words:
“Unfortunately Erick Thohir had to return to Indonesia for family reasons. We’re all very close to him and I’ll be speaking on his behalf too today.
We’ve just approved the financial results for the 2015/16 season and they were positive both on and off the pitch. In terms of Financial Fair Play, we managed to beat the target we set for last season. We aim to turn a profit by the end of our five-year plan.
China offers us a wealth of opportunities and that’s why we’re opening an office in Nanjing to develop the Inter brand there.
As far as football results are concerned, we ended the season with many more points than the previous season but we want to get back into the Champions League as soon as possible. We have top-class players and we’ve managed to bring some of our academy players through to our first team, which was another of our targets.
If you want to win trophies, you need to balance the football side with the organisational side. We’re happy with the signings we’ve made and they will be balanced out by income from revenue.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Roberto Mancini for his work and Frank de Boer for taking on the job at such short notice.
San Siro is a key part of our growth strategy and last season our average home attendance was over 45,000, a 22% increase on the previous year. No other Italian club has so many fans attending their games and we have seen a big increase in season-ticket sales and gate receipts.
We’ve also extended our partnership with Pirelli for another five years. Ours is the longest sports partnership in Italy and the second longest in the whole of Europe.
Inter Campus is continuing its work in 29 countries and we are the only football club which had the honour of meeting the UN General Secretary in New York last summer.
The main event this summer was of course Suning completing its acquisition of the club. This offers enormous potential in terms of resources and integrating Inter and Suning is a primary objective. We’re one of the most popular clubs in the world with a huge number of fans in China.”
Source: Inter.it
