Category Management Planner - APAC

Avolta seeks a Category Management Planner for APAC to translate global liquor strategies into regional execution, handling planning, analytics, and coordination across duty-free and duty-paid channels.

This position acts as a key support function for the Category Manager - Liquor, APAC, bridging the gap between global strategy and local implementation. The role focuses on strengthening execution discipline, enhancing category visibility, and facilitating timely decision-making through robust planning and commercial support across the region.

Responsibilities

• Assist the Category Manager in developing and maintaining commercial plans for liquor categories by country and sales channel.
• Gather and coordinate inputs from regional teams regarding sales forecasts, local market trends, and implementation needs.
• Monitor progress against established category actions, timelines, and commercial priorities.
• Prepare business review materials, category updates, and decision packs for regional and global stakeholders.
• Manage assortment extensions, novelty implementations, and delisting processes in alignment with global strategy and local market demands.
• Track assortment performance metrics including sales, margin, stock levels, and productivity by vendor, brand, SKU, and channel.
• Coordinate with country teams on listing requirements, item creation, documentation, pricing inputs, and implementation schedules.
• Develop and support stock exit and low-performance depletion action plans in collaboration with operations and supply chain teams.
• Support promotion planning, mechanics upload, forecasting inputs, and post-promotion performance tracking.
• Coordinate information for pricing policy reviews and validation with country teams and Global Category Management.
• Track passenger profiles, market pricing, competitive activity, and promotional performance where data is available.
• Monitor local advertising and promotion inputs, ensuring accurate tracking of supplier funding and campaign documentation.
• Prepare weekly and monthly reports on sales, margin, and category performance for the Category Manager and stakeholders.
• Analyze trends, forecast inputs, SKU productivity, promotional effectiveness, margin movements, and inventory risks.
• Develop concise insights and recommendations to support category reviews and business decisions.
• Maintain dashboards, trackers, and reporting templates to ensure visibility and consistency across markets.
• Support Open to Buy and demand planning coordination by consolidating country sales plan inputs and follow-up actions.
• Work with supply chain and country teams to monitor availability, stock risks, slow-moving inventory, and supply constraints.
• Coordinate follow-up on purchase orders, supply timelines, and inventory actions as required.
• Help reduce duplication and improve information flow across category, country, supply chain, and operations teams.
• Support supplier and brand partner coordination on documentation, listings, promotion details, launch information, and activation materials.
• Coordinate staff and visual merchandising training materials where required, in partnership with operational teams and suppliers.
• Maintain clear trackers of vendor commitments, documentation status, implementation milestones, and outstanding actions.
• Assist in gathering market, consumer, product, and competitor intelligence relevant to liquor, spirits, wine, champagne, and regional brands.
• Identify reporting gaps, process inefficiencies, and opportunities to improve category planning discipline.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Commerce, Analytics, Supply Chain, Finance, or a related field.
• Strong analytical capability with confidence handling sales, margin, pricing, inventory, and SKU-level data.
• Advanced Excel skills.
• Strong attention to detail, follow-through, and ability to manage multiple workstreams across countries and stakeholders.
• Good commercial judgement and curiosity about liquor, travel retail, shopper behavior, and APAC market dynamics.
• Strong communicator who can prepare clear summaries, trackers, and reports for diverse stakeholders.
• Reliable, proactive, and comfortable working in a fast-moving, matrixed environment with some ambiguity.
• Fluency in English is required.

Nice to have

• Experience in travel retail, duty-free, liquor, spirits, wine, premium retail, FMCG, or retail operations is strongly preferred.
• Experience with Power BI, ERP, merchandise planning, reporting, or forecasting tools is advantageous.
• Mandarin or other APAC languages would be advantageous given regional stakeholder and market exposure.

About the company

Avolta is the world’s leading and largest Travel Experience company, operating over 5,500 outlets across more than 1,200 locations in over 70 countries with a workforce of more than 77,000 employees. The company is driving a travel experience revolution through its Destination 2027 strategy, which focuses on delivering exceptional experiences, diversifying geographical presence, fostering a culture of continual improvement, and prioritizing sustainability.

• Avolta is committed to putting the traveler at the core of its operations.
• The company is pursuing a Destination 2027 strategy focused on four pillars: Travel Experience Revolution, Geographical Diversification, Culture of Continual Improvement, and Sustainability.
• Avolta operates as a global leader in travel retail, convenience, and food & beverage.