The distributor Casino, in financial difficulty, announced Monday November 27 that it would study the sale of additional supermarkets and hypermarkets after having received “preliminary” offers to this effect. However, an agreement had already been planned, which involved the sale of 119 stores to the Les Mousquetaires-Intermarché group. That’s not all: to get its head above water, the group also announced the purchase for 10 million euros of a third of CDiscount’s parent company, Cnova, bringing Casino’s stake in its online sales subsidiary with almost 99% ownership. Since the end of October, the Casino group has been in an accelerated safeguard procedure in order to restructure its unsustainable debt. Its new structure should ideally be up and running by the first quarter of 2024.
This restructuring is accompanied by a change in majority shareholder: Casino must come under the control of billionaires Daniel Kretinsky, Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière and the Attestor investment fund. This capital increase should allow it to bring in 1.2 billion euros of new money in total. In its press release, Casino specifies that the “indications of interest” received will be “analyzed by the Casino group and the consortium” of buyers “in the coming weeks”. “Any transfer operation must be approved in advance by the consortium,” indicates the company.
Stores sold mainly in South America
Casino, and its emblematic CEO Jean-Charles Naouri, insisted on wanting to preserve the integrity of the group. At the end of 2022, it had more than 200,000 employees worldwide, including 50,000 in France under well-known brands such as Monoprix, Franprix or Grupo de Acucar. It is mainly in Latin America, where three quarters of employees work, that activities will be sold. But the group’s commercial performance is struggling, to the point that Casino once again lowered its activity forecasts for France at the end of November. It now anticipates an operating loss for 2023 and an operating profit halved in 2024.
In this context, daily life The echoes indicated on Sunday evening that Casino had received expressions of interest for supermarkets and hypermarkets not affected by the agreement with the Intermarché group. The economic daily adds that if the sale were completed, it could lead to the sale of warehouses and would raise the question of the future of the group’s historic headquarters in Saint-Etienne. In mid-July, the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire indicated that “the State will be vigilant on employment” and on the maintenance of the “headquarters in Saint-Etienne”, provided for by the agreement between Casino and the candidates upon its resumption.