The food distribution brands Auchan and Les Mousquetaires/Intermarché have entered into “exclusive negotiations” with their competitor in serious financial difficulty Casino for the purchase of “almost the entire scope of the Casino group’s hypermarkets and supermarkets”, according to published press releases. Monday, December 18.
According to Casino, “313 stores” would be affected by the transfer, 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. , hypermarkets and supermarkets. Only Auchan and Intermarché had formalized an application for the takeover of the entire park.
“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 specified 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.
File followed by the government
“Certain real estate assets could also be part of the scope of the operation,” specifies Casino, according to which the money generated by the operation would “support the planned financial restructuring, investment in the maintained scope, and support social security for the employees concerned.
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 unsustainable debt, with a change in shareholding on the horizon of March-April 2024. It is the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, the Frenchman Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière and the British fund Attestor who must take control on this date.
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.
The Casino file is also being monitored very closely by the government, including the interministerial committee for industrial restructuring (CIRI), the service responsible for supporting companies in difficulty. Last week, the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, said he wanted to weigh in to “ensure that with the rest of French mass distribution” possibly a candidate for the buyout of stores “all employees can find a solution “. “Vigilant over employment” in the logistics centers, he assured that he had made a commitment “to maintain the headquarters in Saint-Etienne”.
The unions had called for mobilization on Sunday in Saint-Etienne, where the group created by Geoffroy Guichard was born one hundred and twenty-five years ago. “Gentlemen Macron, Kretinsky, Ladreit de Lacharrière, thousands of people are counting on you here in Saint-Etienne to keep their jobs,” declared Jean Pastor (CGT), one of the spokespersons for the inter-union, at the end of the parade.