The Shoprite Group says its delivery service Sixty60 continues to grow exponentially, having rolled out to more areas over the past financial year ended 3 July 2022.
The group said that Sixty60’s growth performance continues with sales up 150% over the past year while creating as many as 6,299 new job opportunities since its launch in late 2019, and more than double the 2,870 employees in this unit a year ago.
It said it created 4,316 new jobs in South Africa during the year.
Shoprite claims to be the largest South African retailer by market capitalisation, sales, profit, and the number of employees and customers.
“We are a business with over 145,000 employees, thousands of stores and a network of distribution centres across Africa. We serve local communities with the lowest price promise. Over 30 million people shop in our footprint of more than 2,989 stores every day.”
It said it continues to invest in creating jobs and providing thousands of young people with retail skills into 2022.
“Our on-demand one-hour delivery app Checkers Sixty60 continued to innovate and grow its sales despite reporting against an incredible growth trajectory established subsequent to its introduction two years ago,” said Pieter Engelbrecht, Shoprite chief executive officer earlier in September.
The group entered into an agreement with RTT Group, the delivery partner for Checkers Sixty60. In terms of this agreement, the RTT Group’s on-demand business was transferred into a new company, Pingo Delivery, in which Shoprite Checkers has a 50% shareholding.
Pingo Delivery provides us with a critical building block in terms of executing our strategy to own intellectual property in last mile logistics whilst providing us with a platform to monetise our expertise in this area.
Despite growth in its established food retail business operations, Shoprite also continued to grow omnichannel revenue opportunities in adjacent pet and baby categories. The group launched its new PetShop Science e-commerce platform in July 2022.
“Something that I would like to bring your attention to is the increase of 19.6% in other income,” said Engelbrecht in an interview with Moneyweb’s
“We have warned or alerted the market for the last five years to that – that we are doing a lot of these alternate and complementary revenue businesses after we re-platform the business, and we can add all of these services. One actually has to add that back to the trading profit line to get a real picture because these additional revenues are going to get just bigger in time to come,” he said.
Read: Big expansion plans for Shoprite – including a massive new campus in Joburg
