Shoprite Hldgs Ltd S/Adr (SRGHY) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and a very warm welcome to you all at our interim results presentation. for 2025. I'm going to just give a few highlights. Then Anton is going to explain some detail. Pay special attention to what he's going to explain. There are a few changes in the current year number that will make comparability difficult. But if you pay attention, you will understand and it will clear it for you. And then I'll give it some color towards the end again. Firstly, I just want to say this was a fantastic six months. And I would be really amiss if I don't extend my thank you and my greatest gratitude to the people of ShopRite that work extremely hard to achieve this kind of results. The group sales are up 9.6% to $128 billion. Now, I say in any man's language, that's a lot of money. That's a big number. We are happy to say that we didn't just buy market share. It didn't come with... giving margin away, we actually managed to also increase the gross profit margin by 30 bps. Trading profit up 13.5% more than sales or gross profit, which is quite commendable. And it's been a while since we've been able to have the trading profit line outperform the revenue line. EBITDA is up 16.7%, up to 11.7 billion. That all resulted in headline earnings per share growth of 9.9%, just under the 10. So operationally, if we look at the business, the sales growth, RSA supermarkets was actually very strong. That was double digits. Very good volume momentum, growth in customers and in volume. That's where the total result comes from. At a time when the internal food inflation came down to 1.9%. And you will recall the previous time I said that I expect that if the inflation comes down, that we will see some volume growth. And the volume growth is so important for our suppliers to keep the costs ...