Massmart Holdings Ltd, one of the South African retailers, says it has initiated potential store closure consultations with its staff in East and West Africa.
The South African firm disclosed that it had failed to find potential “local investors and entrepreneurs with a more intimate understanding of regional and local market conditions” to buy their stores.
“Massmart initiated a process over 12 months to investigate… the opportunity to sell our East and West African stores to local investors. Unfortunately, this initiative did not deliver a meaningful outcome,” the company said.
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed retailer opened its flagship Game store in Nairobi in 2016. Kenya is one of the 14 Game stores in East and West Africa – Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda- that had been put up for sale.
Massmart chief executive Mitchell Slape during a virtual financial results presentation in September 2021, said the decision to dispose of the 14 stores was a result of poor performance and complexity in running them in the two regions.
“But that is not enough. Achieving break-even performance isn’t going to be sufficient for us to be satisfied; we’ve got to get Game back to a healthy level of profitability and performance,” Mitchell Slape said.
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