By: Jan Vermeulen - MyBroadband

Checkers Sixty60 has recorded 63.1% sales growth during the first half of Shoprite’s 2023/24 financial year, the company announced on Tuesday (30/01/2024).

Shoprite’s online shopping platform and same-day delivery service helped lead the charge in a half-year that saw the company’s sales grow about R121 billion — a 13.9% year-on-year increase.

This is slightly down from the 17.5% half-year sales growth Shoprite reported for the same period last year.

Checkers and Checkers Hyper reported sales growth of 13.7%, Shoprite and Usave recorded a 13.1% increase, and LiquorShop sales increased by 25.2%.

“Sustained high level of execution and continued customer momentum together with record Black Friday and festive season trade has extended the period of uninterrupted market share gains achieved by our core South African supermarket brands to 58 months,” Shoprite stated.

Sixty60 was launched in November 2019, accumulated over 3.1 million downloads by March 2023, and expanded to 466 stores by September 2023.

As South Africa went into lockdown during the Covid–19 pandemic, Sixty60 was available in selected Sandton, Johannesburg, and Cape Town locations.

However, it rapidly expanded as the success of its formula became evident.

Even as lockdowns ended, Sixty60 kept growing at an incredible pace.

The customer-facing app was developed by the company behind Zulzi, which launched one of South Africa’s first successful fast-moving consumer goods apps in 2016.

Shoprite also credits its success over the past five years to its rollout of SAP’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.

“When you walk into a Shoprite or Checkers supermarket and see a full range of products stocked, displayed, priced and with promotions clearly marked, that is what the ERP system does for us,” Shoprite told MyBroadband.

Checkers also told MyBroadband last year that SAP helped make Sixty60 successful.

“SAP Retail is the source of the stock ledger and real-time sales, which are essential for accurate fulfilment of customer orders,” Shoprite stated.

“The ERP also provides promotional information, prices and article data to Sixty60, which ensures that the prices on Sixty60 are the same as the prices in-store.”

However, it wasn’t always smooth sailing.

In 2019, Shoprite released a shocker of an earnings report, partly blaming delays in its SAP rollout for causing a drop in earnings.

“Supply constraints stemming from industrial action and the deployment of a new ERP IT system resulted in lost sales in the period,” it said at the time.

However, it also assured investors in January 2019 that the upgrades had been completed and that its operations were already improving.

Spar is experiencing similar issues with its SAP deployment, saying the project cost R1.6 billion in lost turnover.