The bazaar brand GiFi announced that it had reached an agreement with its creditors on Thursday March 21 to reschedule its debt. The world revealed at the end of February that GiFi had requested a rescheduling of its debt, calling for help from the interministerial committee for industrial restructuring (CIRI), a department of the Ministry of the Economy responsible for supporting companies in difficulty.
Gifi assures in a press release that it has obtained “an agreement with its financial partners on March 21, 2024 to support its new 2027 dynamic and reschedule its EMPs [prêts garantis par l’Etat] over two years. The group says it has achieved 1.3 billion euros in turnover in 2023 and knows “positive profitability since always”.
A source close to the matter assured Agence France-Presse (AFP) in early March that the group “pays its suppliers and operates normally”and that employment is not there “not threatened”. According to this source, the rescheduling requests mainly followed a problem with the switchover of an internal IT system in mid-2023.
A group of 6,800 employees
In the GiFi press release on Thursday, the founder of the brand Philippe Ginestet said he had “took advantage of the challenges generated in 2023 by the complex implementation of a new IT system, now behind us, to relaunch a new dynamic for the group”.
The low-price specialist founded in 1981 in Villeneuve-sur-Lot, in Lot-et-Garonne, plans to open 16 new stores “from the acquisition of Bricolex” in Paris and Ile-de-France, for “continue its conquest of city centers that began seven years ago”according to Philippe Gineset.
GiFi has 750 points of sale in 15 countries, but is mainly established in France, with 600 stores. It claims 6,800 employees.