From jokes to stats
For years, Shoprite Holdings used to host its financial results presentations at the L’incontro Ballroom at the Michelangelo Hotel in Sandton. It was the highlight of results season. Mostly, people came for three things: the numbers, the lunch and Whitey Basson.
The retail boss would poke fun at rivals, suppliers and sometimes government, quipping bizarre phrases which came to be known as “Whiteyisms”. In the event that you’ve never had the pleasure, I’ll share.
“I always say we put our testicles out there, then people tell me, ‘No, it’s the wrong word; you put your tentacles out there’,” he once said.
“Shoprite is far ahead of the pack
. . . we don’t have to import people to run our business,” he said, referring to Richard Brasher, a former executive of British retailer Tesco, who had just been hired to head Pick n Pay.
“I hear he has a new wife. Very pretty and very young,” he said of Woolworths chair Simon Susman.
Those days are over. Basson is normally far more likely to be found in Klein Dasbosch, his wine farm on the banks of the Blaauwklippen River in Stellenbosch, than in front of a crowd of suits. This year, Shoprite’s new-ish boss Pieter Engelbrecht hosted the year-end results from the group’s new distribution centre (DC) for the Western Cape in Brackenfell. And for good reason. It’s one of the most technologically advanced distribution centres on the continent. They started construction in February last year but really, it’s the pinnacle of its supply chain failures and successes over the span of three decades.
They spent a couple of billion rand on it. It is 123,000 m² in size and consists of three different sections — ambient, frozen and chilled.
Engelbrecht has his own charm, if you can call it that. His presentation was peppered with Henry Ford quotes and idioms.
“We won’t test the depth of the water with both feet,” he said in reference to the group’s Eastern Europe expansion. Engelbrecht was in Poland last week, where he’d already made contact with two developers.
With help from Steinhoff. And yes, Markus Jooste was at the Brackenfell DC — he got a toasty welcome from Dr Christo at the beginning of proceedings. You would have seen the results by now so you know Shoprite is making money and still gaining market share. Maybe at a slower pace than what we’re used to, but they’re still doing it.
e:
Secret of success
A very big part of their sustained growth is because of the work that Whitey (and his team) put into the supply chain, yonks ago. It’s not an exaggeration to say they’re unmatched on central distribution.
Centralised distribution is basically a means of organising the receipt of a product from a supplier and its onward delivery to individual stores. This route to market is better than the archaic direct-to-store model, where suppliers incur additional costs due to extra mileage and time spent on individual store deliveries. These were some cool (alternative) facts to come out of the Shoprite numbers: the group’s covered storage space in SA is equivalent to roughly 97 rugby fields. Its fleet of delivery vehicles travelled more than 70m km in the financial year to July 2, the equivalent of at least 91 round trips to the moon.
Over this same period, the distribution centres issued 61m tins of baked beans: stacked end-to-end, these would cover the distance from Cape Town to Cairo, and then some.