trade
KaDeWe owners take over Selfridges luxury department store chain
A view of the Selfridges flagship in Oxford Street, London. Photo: Matt Dunham / AP / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The British department store chain Selfridges had been in the hands of a Canadian family of entrepreneurs since 2003. Now it is being taken over by the owners of the Berlin KaDeWe.
The owners of the Berlin KaDeWe and several other retail chains have taken over the British luxury department store chain Selfridges. The companies Central from Thailand and Signa from Switzerland announced this together in a message.
Both parties are said to hold 50 percent of the shares in the Selfridges Group. The takeover of the brick-and-mortar stores and the online business also include several properties – in addition to the famous flagship department store on Oxford Street in London, a building in Manchester and others in Ireland.
The companies did not provide any information on the purchase price. According to dpa information, it should be in the mid single-digit billion range in euros.
Since 2003, Selfridges has been in the hands of the Canadian entrepreneur family Weston. Now the chain is becoming part of a huge department store network: Central and Signa belong to the KaDeWe Group and several other chains in Europe, including Illum in Denmark, Rinascente in Italy and Globus in Switzerland. According to the announcement, the sales of the new network before the pandemic in 2019 were said to have been five billion euros. According to investors, it should grow to more than seven billion euros by 2024. Appropriate approvals for the takeover are still pending.