Major maneuvers are being confirmed in the French retail landscape. The Auchan and Les Mousquetaires/Intermarché brands have entered into “exclusive negotiations” with Casino for the purchase of “almost the entire scope” of its hypermarkets and supermarkets. The Saint-Etienne group is in fact in great financial difficulty. According to Casino, this represents “313 stores” for which “all employees of the transferred stores would be taken over” by the Mousquetaires/Intermarché and Auchan group. The operation, “subordinate” to the ongoing financial restructuring of Casino, “could take place before the end of the first quarter of 2024”, specifies the group.
Most of the big names in the food distribution sector have been associated in recent days with Casino, which, in dire straits, has said it is ready to study offers from competitors for the takeover of all or part of its large format stores. , hyper and supermarkets. Only Auchan and Intermarché had formalized an application for the takeover of the entire park.
100% French capital
“By joining forces to buy the Casino stores, Auchan and Les Mousquetaires are carrying out a project with 100% French capital, a project which would also strengthen French food sovereignty and support for the agricultural world and the territories”, argue the two brands in a joint press release Monday evening. For its part, Casino indicated that the proposed sale would be carried out “on the basis of a fixed enterprise value of 1.35 billion euros (excluding real estate)”, and that “the scope of integrated stores represents a figure total business for the year 2022 of approximately 3.6 billion euros excluding tax (excluding gasoline) for 313 stores.
“Certain real estate assets could also be part of the scope of the operation”, further indicates Casino, according to which the money generated by the operation would make it possible to “support the envisaged financial restructuring, the investment in the maintained scope, and the social support for the employees concerned.
Towards a change of shareholding
The group, which still employed 200,000 employees worldwide, including 50,000 in France at the end of 2022, signed an agreement in July providing for the restructuring of an unsustainable debt, with a change in shareholding by March-April 2024. is the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinskythe Frenchman Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière and the British fund Attestor, who must take control on this date.
But in the meantime, commercial performances have not improved much and the group, still led for a few months by Jean-Charles Naouri, had to lower its financial ambitions several times, before saying it was ready to sell stores if competitors were interested.