A member of staff walks past the gift shop inside terminal 3 at concourse A, the A380 terminal at Dubai International Airport in Dubai (file). Dubai Duty Free is renegotiating with suppliers after a weaker pound led to lower sales and expects to boost revenue by 5% this year, driven by spending by Chinese travellers. “We have been negotiating with our suppliers, a lot of whom we pay in dollars,” the airport retailer’s chief executive officer Colm McLoughlin said in a Bloomberg interview yesterday. “They cooperated very well with us and we’ve been able to correct this business of being perceived as expensive.” The government-controlled company, which operates at Dubai International Airport – the word’s busiest by international traffic – posted a 3% drop in sales to $1.85bn in 2016. The decline was partly due to the pound’s slump versus the dollar in the second half of the year after Britain voted to leave the European Union in June, the CEO said. “The big effect of Brexit from our point of view is the exchange rate,” McLoughlin said. “If it makes travel more expensive for people, it’s serious.” European travellers make up almost a quarter of Dubai Duty Free’s business, he said.