Sale of Grupo Pao de Acucar and Grupo Exito, halving of debt, capital increase of at least 900 million euros… The Casino group, which entered a conciliation procedure at the end of May, detailed on Monday the measures deemed necessary to ensure its economic sustainability.
It therefore plans to sell its South American brands, the Brazilian Grupo Pao de Acucar (GPA) and the Colombian Exito, even if it did not give a precise timetable in its documentation or during a telephone press briefing. At the end of 2022, the group had nearly 1,000 stores in Brazil and more than 2,100 in Colombia, the two countries where it is most strongly established outside of France.
Its presence is much lower in Argentina (33 stores) and Uruguay (96 stores). Three-quarters of the group’s workforce, which employed precisely 208,254 people as of December 31, 2022, work in Latin America.
Debt reduction, a priority project
Casino also hopes to reduce its debt (6.4 billion euros of net debt) by half as part of the conciliation procedure opened at the end of May. Concretely, he hopes to convert “at least all unsecured debt” into capital, ie more than 3 billion euros. This means that the creditors who lent him this money, instead of recovering it, would reimburse themselves by becoming shareholders of the group.
The group from Saint-Etienne, which employs around 50,000 people in France, said it wanted to raise “at least 900 million euros”, to “provide the company with the funds necessary for the implementation of its strategy” 2023-2025 .
The situation of the group worries the representatives of the employees. A rally was held Thursday in Saint-Etienne at the initiative of the CGT, Unsa and the CFDT, on the sidelines of a CSE on the sale to Intermarché of 119 stores in France, in which more than 4,000 people work. The unions present said they feared “a possible next sale by cutting of the Casino group (which) will have the sole objective of enriching the richest”.