Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
BUSINESS Retailer gets ready for Black Friday boom
Takealot expects record turnover
THIS year’s Black Friday is set to be bigger than before and Takealot.com, the online retailer that brought the global shopping phenomenon to South Africa five years ago, is planning its Blue Dot Sale.
According to the company, since it brought the phenomenon to South Africa in 2012, the event has been growing year-on-year and Takelot’s own year-on-year figures have risen from R1 million in 2012 to R56m last year. The firm expects this year’s sales to be between R80m and R120m.
Takealot SA chief executive Kim Reid, told Business Report this week the Takealot brand was basically three businesses in one: the general merchandise Takealot. com, the fashion and apparel business Superbalist.com and Mr D Food, the food delivery business.
He said looking at e-commerce in general, the history of Takealot was that it had grown “pretty quickly” and the compacted annual growth over the last four years for Takealot had been around 109%. Superbalist had grown faster.
Mr D Food was a new business which the group replatformed about a year ago.
“Our thesis on online retail has always come from the fact that if you look at online penetration in developed markets like the UK and the US, the UK is around about 13% penetrated as far as online retail is concerned. The US is slightly lower than that, between 11 and 12%, but places like China are sitting at 17% already.
“The world is going into online retail and retail is moving online faster and faster, and South Africa has been a little behind the curve, but we believe that it is happening, and happening quickly.”
Reid said the Takealot business turned over around about R2.3 billion to R2.4bn last year and he believed growth would continue to escalate.
Reid said in the last two months of September and last month the business had grown in excess of 70% yearon-year, and looking through this month, was expecting a similar growth rate.
“Now that all builds into Black Friday. Black Friday was a concept we pioneered in South Africa in 2012, launched as a marketing activity.
“There are other retailers who claim they started it, but those retailers only came in around 2014.
“So we started that event really as a marketing opportunity to bring an international concept to South Africa, because we thought it was something fun and exciting and it has kind of built over the past years to being the biggest it was last year, when many of the big brick and mortar retailers also got involved.
“In 2015 we did about R17.8m, last year we did R56m and this year we expecting it to be anything from R80m to R130m, so it is a big event on our calendar.”
Reid said the business grew during the year and culminated in November and Decem- ber and online traditionally had a bumper season in the last three months of the year. Takealot was no different.
“We are looking forward to quite a nice season. We’ve had a good start to it, October being strong November in the start has been strong as well, and we are going to be running what we call the Blue Dot Sale from one minute past 12 on Friday morning and that will run right through the week until Wednesday,” said Reid.
This year, Takealot will offer shoppers a “bigger than ever” series of sales with more than 15 000 dramatically discounted deals, with the retailer cutting prices by up to 60% overall and on selected products by as much as 80% in its Blue Dot Sale.
Viresh Harduth, vice-president for new customer acquisition at Sage Africa & Middle East, said the retail industry was gearing up for the busiest time of the year, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and this year, November 24 kicks off the holiday season shopping frenzy.