Shoprite Hldgs Ltd S/Adr (SRGHY) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's an absolute pleasure for us that you take some of your valuable time to give us roughly an hour of your time that we can tell you a little bit about what has conspired in H1 of this financial year. I'm going to just do a very quick synopsis, and then I'm going to hand over to Anton, of course. He'll take you through the detail, which is really important for you. I know the detail numbers. I know you've read the sense and understand all of that. But he'll color it in for you to make sure your morals are in place. And then I'm just going to end off by saying a little bit about what we've been doing. Not everything is perfect, so we'll also tell you what is not great. So the sales growth was 7.2%. You have read that. Now almost $137 billion for the half year, adding $9.2 billion in sales for the six months. The trading profit grown by 5.9%, to $7.7 billion. And probably the most... telling number is the fact that the African supermarkets achieve the trading margin of 6.2%. And for a value trader, I think that is an outstanding number. And I want you, if I may ask, to just think about that number a little bit, that it sits with you, that it is the one that we consistently, and Anton will talk about it, where we consistently try and achieve. And that is not something that happens because we increase prices. It happens because of the efficiencies and how efficient this business is run. And that's my emphasis on the 6.2% margin. The ROIC has increased again. I know a lot of you are interested in that. We can go back in history. We can talk a lot about what if Africa never happened and all the investments we made there. The ROIC would have been probably much higher, but that's not the point. I think what is important is the fact that ...