CORPORATE PROFILE

Strategy

The group's success is strongly driven by our constant development of our merchandise offering to meet our customers’ needs together with a targeted expansion and upgrading of our store base in all the trading divisions, thus ultimately improving the customer’s experience. The brands offer lifestyle with value to a focused target market and delivering on what is needed allows us to retain and acquire customers.

Our strategy of reinventing, extending and revitalising the trading brands has repositioned them with new store concepts and refreshed merchandise. New brand concepts and business initiatives such as @home, DueSouth and Luella have been successfully introduced into the retail arena, and today our stores are world-class in regard to their appearance and layout, merchandise systems, merchandise offering and customer service.

The group’s long-term strategies in order to grow its market share and profitability include:

a more aggressive approach to the opening of new stores in selected formats which are under-represented;
the repositioning and turnaround of our Foschini division which is already showing positive results;
the continuation of our supply chain initiative, designed to significantly improve lead times and cut distribution costs; and
the continued roll-out of 12-month accounts to new customers, as an alternative to the existing 6-month option.

In line with our strategy of investing for the longer term, we anticipate opening in excess of 120 new stores in 2009/10.

A key element of the group’s strategy is the continuation of our supply chain initiative in order to ensure that lead times in ordering, acquiring and distributing stock are reduced to the minimum. Over a period of time, this will result in improved lead times and increased stock turns, ensuring our ability to be first to market with key products and ultimately ensuring a more consistent delivery of our merchandise promise to our customers.

Being a credit retailer we plan to maximise turnover from our credit book by actively pursuing new credit account drives and maximising low usage of available credit. This will be achieved with the assistance of our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) department whose primary aims are to look at innovative methods of attracting new customers to the group; to build loyalty and the likelihood of repeat shopping with existing customers using the group’s diverse range of products as an incentive to cross-shop from their existing store card; and to establish regular communication with those customers who prefer to buy for cash.