WOOLWORTHS EXPANDS PET PROJECT
WOOLWORTHS has invested a further $4.9m into its pet insurance and veterinary services joint venture PetCulture, as it looks to build up a new business pillar in the $10bn pet sector that will cater to needs from insurance and medicine to food products.
Under the guidance of chief executive Brad Banducci, Woolworths has laid out a new strategy over the past three years to break into the valuable pet industry, underlined by an announcement in December the supermarket owner had paid $586m for a controlling 55 per cent stake in leading pets business Petspiration.
Complementing that investment, it has now poured a further $4.9m in its much smaller online start-up PetCulture business after a loan it made to the joint venture was converted into further equity.
The equity top up was matched by its joint venture partner Petsure, maintaining Woolworths’ stake in the business at 60 per cent.
“Woolworths and Petsure have a longstanding joint venture in PetCulture, an online specialty pet retail start up. This start up involves periodic investment, which in this case was the conversion of shareholder loans into equity,” a Woolworths spokesman said.
“The joint venture parties continue to operate the PetCulture business as a stand-alone business, benefiting from the specialist expertise of the Woolworths and Petsure businesses.”
Petsure is owned by the Enthoven family, with Richard Enthoven founder of PetSure in Australia and part of the same Enthoven family from South Africa who founded Hollard Insurance and have a large stake in fastfood empire Nando’s.
Woolworths uses the family’s insurance arm as an underwriter for its leading Woolworths pet insurance product.
A deal was first struck with PetSure in late 2020 and soon saw the creation of the PetCulture start-up.