" In 2003,
Luis Amaral bought Eurocash SA (EUR), a Warsaw-based grocery business, for 120
million Polish zlotys ($30 million). The operation was losing money.
Competitors were taking market share. Its owner, Jeronimo Martins SGPS SA, the
Lisbon-based retail operation controlled by billionaire Alexandre Soares Dos
Santos, wanted nothing to do with it.
Today,
Eurocash is Poland’s
biggest distributor of non- durable goods, with 19 percent of the market. The
company’s value has surged more than 15-fold since selling shares in an initial
public offering in 2005, helping Amaral, the 51-year-old chief executive
officer and Portugal
native, amass a $1.1 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires
Index. Amaral’s 44
percent stake in Eurocash, which sold about 7.8 million lollipops and 3 million
bottles of champagne last year, is valued at about $910 million. He has
collected about $220 million in dividends and stock sales since the public
offering, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and has never appeared on an
international wealth ranking.
“He’s a
visionary who created a custom-built business for the Polish market,” said
Jakub Krawczyk, a Vienna-based analyst at Raiffeisen Centrobank AG in a phone
interview on Jan. 9. “Eurocash has helped traditional retailers to survive
against the onslaught of giant supermarkets.” “We don’t comment on his personal wealth,”
said Jan Domanski, the company’s head of investor relations, in a phone
interview on Jan. 9. “He is a very private person.”
Eurocash,
whose wholesale stores sell grocery items, alcoholic beverages and other
supplies, saw revenue increase 68 percent to 12.4 billion PLN in the first nine
months of 2012 from a year earlier. About half of Eurocash’s sales are
generated from independent grocery stores, an important element of most Polish
communities.
The
company’s growth comes amid increased competition from international
hypermarket chains such as Tesco Plc, the biggest food retailer in the U.K., and
Carrefour SA (CA), the world’s second- largest food seller. Carrefour, which
has 248 supermarket and hypermarkets in Poland, announced plans to build
200 smaller stores in the country in July.
“The large
chains are non-Polish owned and mom-and-pops are very frightened of the
hypermarket invasion,” Charles Allen, an analyst for Bloomberg Industries in Princeton, New
Jersey, said by phone. “Eurocash is listed in Poland and
offers a defense.”
Eurocash
also operates its own retail stores. Many Poles are loyal to their corner shop,
preferring to buy milk, vegetables and other household goods there instead of
at the larger hypermarkets.
Amaral
moved to Poland from Portugal in
1995 to work for Jeronimo Martins, where helped establish Biedronka, now the
country’s largest discount retail chain. He left moved to South America in
2000, eventually settling in Brazil,
where he became a partner in a private equity firm.
In 2003,
Amaral returned to Poland
to buy Eurocash. Jeronimo Martins was struggling to recover from a faulty
implementation of productivity and accounting software that threatened to
destroy its business, and sold Eurocash to focus on its expanding Biedronka
chain, Allen said. “The whole
of Jeronimo Martins was in bad shape,” he said. “A lot of people didn’t think
Eurocash would survive.”
Eurocash
had 48 stores when Amaral purchased it in a management buyout. He focused on
expansion, using the company’s profits to finance acquisitions, buying Premium
Distributors, the biggest alcoholic beverages distributor in Poland, in 2010
from Warsaw-based Central European Distribution Corp. (CEDC)
A year
later, Amaral paid 1.1 billion PLN for the Tradis distribution unit of
Warsaw-based retail distributor Emperia Holding SA. The company opened its
150th Eurocash Cash & Carry store in Poznan,
Poland this
month.
Amaral is
expanding beyond food. In September, Eurocash agreed to buy at least 25 percent
of cosmetics maker Polbita- Interchem Group for an undisclosed sum from
Warsaw-based a private equity firm Resource Partners Holdings."
Fonte: http://www.bloomberg.com
