After launching a smartphone brand, Salt, Mr Price’s next growth experiment is taking it to Europe.
Mr Price, the South African retail company, is buying NKD Group, a German clothing and homewares retailer, which will instantly give the South African company an additional 2,100 stores across seven European countries. Per Business Tech, Mr Price is paying R9.7 billion ($572 million) to acquire 100% of the company.
Between the lines: Mr Price is financing the deal by buying the whole holding company that owns NKD (Pegasus Group Holding), rather than just picking up a few assets, and is also taking over the shareholder loans sitting in the structure. In numbers, the deal adds up to R9.7 billion ($572 million) in enterprise value, split between €415 million ($484 million) for the shares themselves and about €38.5 million ($45 million) for those shareholder loans, all of which will be settled in cash.Â
The money will come from a mix of Mr Price’s own cash and new borrowing, and if all the regulatory boxes get ticked, both companies expect the transaction to close around Q2 2026.
Is this Mr Price’s first time? Before now, Mr Price has kept its retail operations local, operating mainly in South Africa, while keeping its presence lean across the rest of the continent. This home-first approach has previously led the retail giant to scale back its international expansion attempts and exit markets like Nigeria and Australia. It wanted to compete with Spar, Checkers Sixty60, and Shoprite, another retail giant scaling back its foreign operations.
However, with a planned European entry, Mr Price seems to have regained its confidence to lead foreign operations at that scale. NKD Group made around €850 million ($994 million) in sales (2024) and serves millions of customers in the value retail segment. It is a mid-sized company, but not as large as competitors like Pepco and KIK, and foreign players like H&M.
Yet the deal gives Mr Price an instant plug-and-play presence in Germany, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Poland. It lifts its store count past 5,000 as it hunts for new growth verticals. Pepkor, another South African retailer, is chasing growth through finance. South African retailers are now split between staying home and spreading wide, or going abroad. Mr Price is betting it is finally ready to pull the next lever in European value retail.