Shoprite’s ‘everyday store’ strategy pays off as sales top R270bn

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JIMMY MOYAHA: Shoprite Holdings Limited released their annual results for the 52 weeks ended 28th of June 2026. There’s an increase in the dividend from a dividends-per-share perspective.

Basic earnings per share are up 7%, headline earnings per share up in the double digits and, most importantly, revenue topping the R270 billion mark – that is billion with a ‘B’.

I’m joined on the line by the company’s group chief executive officer, Pieter Engelbrecht, to look at this performance and see if we can make sense of it. Oom Pieter, lovely having you on the show as always. Thanks so much for taking the time.

A significant increase in revenue. I say significant – numerically it’s 7.2% year-on-year – but if we actually have to look at the numbers themselves, it’s just shy of the R20 billion mark in additional revenue for this current financial year.

Clearly a strong year from the business. How do you reflect on that as a team?

PIETER ENGELBRECHT: Well, you just made me think of something now.

We added R18.1 billion in sales, and I know you can’t make sums like this, but we gave in discounts at till point R18.3 billion back to customers. I can’t even count that far.

So very great for us to be in this position. An additional 1.1 million extra customers served every week; that in a deflationary environment.

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People often say item prices never come down, but they do – 11 500 items this year were cheaper than last year, and that’s why we ended the year on a 0.8% inflation for the entire business, with deflation and Shoprite in a new safe.

So, two things. First the customer growth, secondly the volume growth – both over 5%.

And in this environment we managed to increase the gross profit margin by two basis points.

Now what makes that a very significant number to call out is on the other hand we still claim and say that we give the best value.

Checkers is the lowest priced [retailer], and yet we managed to increase the margin and control the cost.

That’s why the gross profit margin as well as the trading profit have grown more than sales have grown.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Now, Oom Pieter, there are a lot of other numbers I want to get into, but in the interest of time, I don’t think we’ll be able to get through all.

The Petshop business increased its sales by almost 75% 41 new stores opened there. That business is clearly falling in line with the strategy. I think the most notable number that stands out if we’re looking at some of these segments within the business is that:

The revenues generated by the Sixty60 platform alone – just north of the R25 billion mark. For context, that is a little over the market cap of both Pick n Pay and the Spar Group combined.

That is the sales figure alone from a Sixty60 platform perspective. Did you ever think that this platform would do this well?

PIETER ENGELBRECHT: There were a lot of nay-sayers when we started, but not everything is plain sailing and that easy.

When we started out in 2019, just before Covid-19 hit us around there, we started, like the rest of the world, delivering from fulfilment centres. We had three, and very soon realised this thing is not going to work.

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So what we thought at the time was our Achilles’ heel is our big-store footprint, which then became actually our strength.

And as they say, the rest is history.

So what we had, because we have such a wide network, once we rolled it out we realised that we are basically within five kilometres of 90% of the addressable market, because we pick from store.

At the time, that was the only model like that in the world. Everybody picked from automated centres, et cetera.

And every day we think okay, the growth is probably going to slow down. Yesterday we had a new record number of orders. So it’s not over yet.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Oom Pieter, let’s take a look at some of the other aspects of the business – at least in this particular financial year. For some, they might know these as side quests for other businesses, strategic acquisitions. I want to look at the R&A [Cellular] acquisition and the Vida e Caffè acquisitions from a business perspective.

Take us through the thinking there, particularly with the footprint that Vida holds and the relationship that the Shoprite Group currently holds with competitors like Starbucks and the Krispy Kreme franchises.

Read: Shoprite buys Vida e Caffè as profit rises

The business obviously understands where it wants to position its value proposition, and strategic acquisitions are one way to do that.

PIETER ENGELBRECHT: Yes. So, let me start just a few years back when we started to add Uniq [Clothing] pet [and] outdoor. We moved into standalone pharmacies or what we call MediRite Plus.

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All of these had in mind to get a bigger share of the consumer’s disposable income. And we selected the categories that we deem to be more everyday kind of categories.

We want to be your everyday store, [and] because you frequent us so often because we’re in food, that gives us the opportunity to then also market more, because, as they say in e-commerce, you’ve got eyeballs, and then you can tell people how great products or prices are.

So following on from that then is financial services. We called out last year that we’re going to give it some more attention. We’re not going to be a bank, but we will partner with a bank.

The part that you need to be strong in, if you want to be strong in financial services, is cellular, because most of these transactions these days are done on a cellphone, not on a laptop or computer anymore.

So, in short, what is R&A Cellular?

Then the second part of that is they also have terminals out in the field, which independents use and also informal traders use to sell value-added services like electricity or a payment, a bill payment, or airtime. Okay, so that’s how R&A fits in.

With Vida, on the other hand, we have a couple of coffee brands in the business currently. So there are two reasons why we like this.

The one is the market size in South Africa for coffee is estimated at about R40-45 billion. We feel we can get a fair share of that because Vida is the largest single chain around. So that makes sense.

And then the second part of it is we are going to manage it in the franchise division, and that gives our franchisees – that’s the OK [brand] – another way of increasing their business or growing their businesses by taking the Vida franchise on. So that’s the rationale.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Some strategic acquisitions by the Shoprite Group, the largest grocery retailer on the African continent, which has been giving us a sense of how it is that their previous financial year fared – that is the financial year ended 30 June 2026.

Thank you to the group chief executive officer, Pieter Engelbrecht, for taking us through the numbers and giving us some colour around how that business performed.

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