The mass grocery retailer is currently working closely with 1,800 local farmers who are actively supplying them with produce and have an additional 200 seasonal ones.
“We have active farmers who supply us with quality produce; the active ones normally supply us every two weeks,” he told BusinessMonitor. “We encourage local production and support small scale farmers and businesses whether it is dairy, manufacturing, milling, agriculture or any other sector.” Choppies’ initiative to support farmers, who are finding their feet in farming, comes after government’s bold move to ban the importation of 16 vegetables in January 2022. Since the moratorium on the importation on vegetables such as onion, butternut, tomato, watermelon, carrot, potato, cabbage and ginger, a number of Batswana have gone into farming.
Meanwhile, on other aspects of business, Ottapathu said Choppies has adopted a slow and steady approach to future expansions focusing its attention on its cash cow; Botswana as well as Zambia and Namibia. In the coming financial year, the retailer plans to open four more stores locally and additional 15 in the region.
The CEO said the company is planning a careful phased approach rather than its previous aggression in expanding footprint. “Our expansion is phased in a manner where we target areas where Choppies is making money. We want to stabilise businesses in these countries and become number one player in those counties before we consider exploring any other market. “We will be adding nine more stores in Namibia and six more in Zambia,” Ottapathu said. Currently, Choppies has 31 stores in Zambia and 15 in Namibia.
Ottapathu said for the year ending 30 June 2023, Namibia successfully turned around with sales growth of 60.0% and like-for-like sales growth of 14.4% while Zambia continues to grow with sales up 44.7% and like-for-like sales growth of 33.3%. “We are confident that Zambia will generate taxable profits in the foreseeable future.” According to the CEO, the Zimbabwean Dollar (ZWL) has significantly weakened especially in the last two months of the financial year. As a result of the above mentioned factors, he said pula sales declined by 48.3% During the reporting period, Botswana experienced sales growth to 4 459 million from the P4 209 million that was recorded previously.
This was supported by volume growth from new stores and double-digit price inflation. Sales from Botswana increased by 5.9 percent and like-for-like sales growth was 2.2 percent, as the business continued to show strong resilience in an increasingly challenging economic environment. “The performance for the second half was much stronger than in the first half as our strategies, leadership and inventory optimisation system have started to come to fruition,” he said.
