Back to the trenches for Shoprite
The deal with Steinhoff has collapsed, but growth in sales and profit shows it’s still sunny for Shoprite
It would have been a very different half-year results presentation for Shoprite, had the mega-merger between SA’s largest food retailer and Steinhoff not been called off earlier this week. Instead, the focus shifted back to the more mundane issues of Shoprite’s actual business, and whether sales were recovering in its 2,653 stores in 15 countries. The answer was an emphatic yes: sales grew 14% to R71.3bn, while trading profit increased by an even more impressive 19.2% to R3.91bn. This was the first results presentation for Pieter Engelbrecht, a Shoprite veteran of 20 years who took over from the highly rated Whitey Basson as CEO at the beginning of the year. Wiese described Engelbrecht as “virtually hand-reared by the acknowledged master of food retailing in SA — Whitey Basson”. For a debut set of results, Engelbrecht couldn’t have hoped for an easier time of it. “Trading profit growth exceeded our top-line growth by almost 5%, a very fitting tribute from our management team to the ...
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