SPOTLIGHT’S RETAIL AND PROPERTY REVOLUTION
RETAIL group Spotlight is on track to open 150 new stores across its three brands over the next five years.
It has already welcomed customers to 24 new outlets in the past 12 months, despite Covid disruptions, the most recent being the company’s $45m development in
Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast.
The project features the biggest ever haberdasheryfocused Spotlight store at over 6000sq m, anchoring a superstore of camping and outdoor brand Anaconda and a homewares-centred Harris Scarfe, which are also owned by the Spotlight Group
Spotlight’s billionaire executive deputy chairman and co-owner Zac Fried calls
This is the best development we have ever done Zac Fried
it the biggest and best project he has ever worked on.
“It’s a benchmark. It is not the standard boring, big-box [retail] at all,” he said.
The privately owned Spotlight has plans for 28 more stores to open this year and another 15 are already approved for 2023.
Spotlight traces it roots back to Mr Fried’s late father Ruben and uncle Morry
Fraid, the group’s executive chairman, who opened the first Spotlight store in suburban Melbourne in 1973.
Almost 50 years later, the Maroochydore opening is only the first stage of what will eventually be a $250m project.
Mr Fried said there were plans to transform the Spotlight group from a pure retailer into one of Australia’s more prolific property developers over the next decade and more. The group will also soon build hotels, apartments and mixed-use property projects all over the east coast of Australia.
Spotlight’s owners already have about $2bn worth of property on their books amassed over several years. The massive retail business now has 11,500 employees and annual sales of $2.6bn.