It is profitable to run a grocery store. But you can’t believe that if you look at the dividend statistics from Ica.
The grocery store Ica Axelsberg has a turnover of 80 million per year. The small shop has not distributed a penny since 2016 to the owners, as it appears in the information from the regular meetings. But in the last two years (2020 and 2021) it has still been distributed. A total of SEK 34 million. It is on a par with what you bring in in merchandise sales in the store in a year.
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It will be hard to see
Jens Nylander is a Swedish analyst. He has worked with software development and data analysis for 25 years. And he has started a database to keep track of the Ica stores, which can be difficult on your own.
– ICA applies dividends. But it has been difficult to see how much because you hold a meeting where you decide not to distribute any money. But then you hold an extra meeting soon afterwards and decide on it there, says Jens Nylander News24.
14 years of Ica data
He has mapped annual reports and company minutes from the last 14 years in a huge database for Ica, profitability and dividends.
– Shelves and freezers cost money, but running the store itself year after year doesn’t cost that much. Then you can extract a lot of profit, he says.
ICA does not have a common organization number. Each store is its own small business, which makes it more difficult for the public to gain insight.
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Information advantage for Ica
– It has long been the case that whoever has the information has the upper hand and here ICA has had the power because it has been difficult to review them from the outside, says Jens Nylander.
He describes himself as an idealist.
– It was a hobby from the beginning, he says.
But soon the project grew to take more and more time. Today, the database is huge.
Jens Nylander: “Actually millions” in profit
– I started this review in my free time, because I think everyone should have the right to the information. And it seems here that they made it deliberately difficult to find it. Even the newspapers report on shops that pay out zero or very little, but the owners have actually received millions.
He doesn’t take a stand against the winnings, but he thinks you should be honest with them.
– I shop at Ica myself, I just want people not to give a distorted picture of how things are.
Municipal review
Over the years, Nylander has run several companies, such as the mp3 company Jens of Sweden and the headphone company Jays, among others.
Right now he is mapping the municipal sector and public procurement.
– There are 290 municipalities to go through, so it takes time. You can wish that in the future it will be available online, but right now it is only me who enters the information, municipality by municipality.
Top three biggest wins
The ica store in Axelsberg is no exception. Many companies have large profits in the margins.
The figures for 2023 are not yet complete because there are extra AGMs with dividends that have not yet been reported. The latest year with reliable sources will therefore be 2022 for most stores.
If you look at those with the largest hidden dividends, the store Ica Maxi Umeå tops with 242 million over the past nine years, compared to the considerably more modest 84 million reported as ordinary profit.
In second place is Ica Maxi Hälla in Västerås, which made 233 million in hidden dividends for the owners compared to 63 million in ordinary dividends.
SEK 138 million in out
But in relation to the ordinary dividends, Ica Maxi still wins in Haninge. On paper, not a single kroner has been distributed in recent years in ordinary dividends to the owners. But in the hidden distributions, they have distributed 138 million kroner in the last nine years.
The entire survey can be seen here at Jens Nylanders website.
This is what Nylander wrote in an article:
“So it is not wrong to decide on extra profit distributions, but why it is done so frequently is a simple way to avoid transparency in these distributions with the disclosure companies”.
Nyheter24 has contacted ICA Sweden for a comment.
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