Focus on Benelux
The sale of its British activities is part of a plan to help get the store chain back on track financially: it had a 70 million euro debt last year, compared to a mere 5 million euro of operating income. With the sale, CEO Kurt Staelens hopes to improve his position in talks with several banks and he also hopes to reinvest part of the income into the further development of its Benelux activities.
Macintosh says it will evaluate the offers on its 304 British stores (179 from Brantano, 125 from Jones Bootmaker), but it “cannot guarantee these bids will lead to an actual deal”. Based on the current bids, the group may suffer a 40 to 50 million euro accounting loss.
The setback follows the operational issues within the group: over the first 6 months of 2015, Macintosh had an underlying negative cash flow of 3.9 million euro. Looking back one year, that underlying negative cash flow was “only” 1.1 million euro.
