Friday December 24th 2021
Bought British retail chain
KaDeWe owners swallow Selfridges
The owners of the Berlin department store KaDeWe know their way around luxury goods. For a billion sum they are now securing the British retail chain Selfridges. The takeover also includes a London property in an exquisite location.
The owners of the Berlin KaDeWe and several other retail chains have taken over the British luxury department store chain Selfridges. The companies Central from Thailand and Signa from Switzerland announced this together in a message. Both parties are said to hold 50 percent of the shares in the Selfridges Group.
The takeover of the brick-and-mortar stores and the online business also include several properties – in addition to the famous flagship department store on Oxford Street in London, a building in Manchester and others in Ireland. The companies did not provide any information on the purchase price. According to dpa information, it should be in the mid single-digit billion range in euros.
Since 2003, Selfridges has been in the hands of the Canadian entrepreneur family Weston. Now the chain is becoming part of a huge department store network: Central and Signa belong to the KaDeWe Group and several other chains in Europe, including Illum in Denmark, Rinascente in Italy and Globus in Switzerland.
According to the announcement, the sales of the new network before the pandemic in 2019 were said to have been five billion euros. According to investors, it should grow to more than seven billion euros by 2024. Appropriate approvals for the takeover are still pending.
The Central company is owned by the Chirathivat family. According to an estimate by Forbes magazine, she is one of the richest families in Thailand at around $ 20 billion. Central operates 33 malls and 23 department stores there, according to its own information. The group has more than 80,000 employees worldwide. Together with Signa, Central operates the Alsterhaus in Hamburg and the Oberpollinger department store in Munich in Germany. The new department store in Düsseldorf’s Carsch-Haus is scheduled to open in September 2022.