Hypermarket chain DMart promoters are likely to pare stake of around 5.2 per cent stake in the company through block deal this month. This comes around five months after promoter Radhakishan Damani had sold 0.98 per cent equity on August 9, 2019. The number of shares likely to be sold this time is around 3 crore while the deal in terms of pricing is likely to be around Rs 1,700-1,775 price per share. The development was reported by ET Now. The stake sale is to comply with the minimum public shareholding norm by SEBI.
Damani’s stake was around 37.41 per cent while the total promoter stake stood at around 80.21 per cent as of September 2019 while the public shareholding was 19.79 per cent. As per SEBI, the public shareholding has to be below 25 per cent minimum threshold. The parent company — Avenue Supermarts had reported a 48 per cent annual increase in consolidated net profit for the July-September quarter of 2019 to Rs 323 crore, Financial Express had reported. The EBITDA for the company grew 33.24 per cent for the September quarter from the year-ago period to Rs 517 crore on increased sales while operating margins were up by 96 basis points to 8.86 per cent. The total income for the quarter increased 22 per cent from last year to Rs 5,998.9 crore.
According to the company, it follows an everyday low cost – everyday low price (EDLC-EDLP) strategy to procure goods at a competitive price. This helps them to have operational and distribution efficiency even as it sells goods at competitive prices. DMart had launched five more stores during the July-September quarter while during first of FY20, the company had expanded with an additional 13 stores. It had 189 stores with retail business areas of 6.5 million square feet in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Daman, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, NCR, Chhattisgarh and Punjab as of September 30, 2019.
Source: Financial Express