Shoprite Hldgs Ltd S/Adr (SRGHY) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, a great welcome to all of you and thank you very much for joining us, giving us the opportunity to present our 2025 full year financial results. I will give you a bit of an overview very quickly about the group numbers and then Anton will unpack for us in detail the financials and then I'll end off again with a little bit of an operational overview of what you can expect us to be busy with in the medium term. 2025 for me is really a standout financial performance year. Absolutely outstanding and I'm in great debt to Team ShopRite for once again delivering an excellent set of results. The group sales have grown by 8.9% to $252 billion First time that we've crossed the $250 billion. The gross margin has improved by 40 bps to 24.3%. And here, I have to mention that that was achieved still staying the most affordable supermarket chain in South Africa. And a few years ago, I did mention that if one does not invest in the appropriate tools to do price optimization, personalization, you'll find it very hard and very complicated in time to come to achieve and maintain gross margin. And I'm very happy to see that our investment is giving us a return and hence the increase in the gross profit margin. The trading profit up 16.6%. to $15 billion, and I think to have double-digit trading profit growth is a remarkable result. And in this case, 16.6%, I think, testimony to an excellent year of execution and business that has run at full cylinders all the time. The supermarket RSA trading margin increased to 6.5%. For a food retailer to run a trading margin in excess of 6% just shows a lot of efficiencies in the business in order to achieve that. Something which we are very proud of. As a shareholder, me and also all the other shareholders around m...