The Casino supermarket logo is pictured in Paris
by Sudip Kar-Gupta
PARIS (Reuters) – Casino’s launch on Monday of the sale of part of its stake in the Brazilian supermarket chain Assaí, to accelerate its deleveraging, was well received by investors, supporting the retailer’s stock on the Paris Stock Exchange. Paris.
The Casino share, which opened with a jump of almost 3%, still outperformed the CAC 40 in the middle of the morning, posting an increase of 1.08% in a Parisian market down 0.89% at the same time.
This sale will involve 140.8 million shares representing 10.4% of Assaí’s capital, to which a maximum of 49.5 million shares (i.e. 3.7% of Assaí’s capital) could be added, is it specified in the press release from the French distributor.
Given the closing price of the Assaí share on Friday, November 25, at 19.21 reals, the sale of 140.8 million shares would represent an amount of 2.7 billion reals (around 480 million euros).
According to Casino, this operation will take the form of “a secondary placement whose allocation is scheduled for November 29 and settlement-delivery on December 2, depending on market conditions”.
The distributor announced at the end of October that it had started thinking about this sale project, citing an amount of approximately 500 million dollars (495.9 million euros).
The title Casino has been weighed down for several months by concerns about the low generation of cash flow and the group’s high indebtedness.
The distributor, engaged in an asset disposal plan to reduce its debt, intends to carry out disposals worth 4.5 billion euros by the end of 2023.
(Written by Sudip Kar-Gupta, French version Myriam Rivet, edited by Nicolas Delame and Kate Entringer)