Shoprite dominates Woolworths and Pick n Pay

PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report reveals that Shoprite enjoyed significantly better coverage than Woolworths, Pick n Pay, and Spar.

Most South African retailers provided operational updates in recent weeks, with some doing well while others face significant challenges.

Shoprite’s operational update for the six months ended 28 December 2025 showed revenue increased 7.2% to approximately R136.8 billion.

Shoprite kept internal selling price inflation at just 0.7%, significantly lower than the national food inflation rate of 4.7%.

Checkers and Checkers Hyper reported sales growth of 8.9% and Checkers Sixty60 remains a strong growth engine, with sales surging 34.6%.

Woolworths’ trading update for the 26 weeks ended 28 December 2025 showed that the group’s turnover grew by 5.4%.

Headline earnings per share are expected to increase by 7% to 12%. However, earnings per share (EPS) are expected to fall by 30% to 35%.

This is primarily a base effect, as the prior year’s earnings were inflated by the R792 million profit from the sale of the Bourke Street property in Melbourne.

Pick n Pay’s latest update was a significant blow to investor confidence, with the retailer issuing a sharp profit warning.

Turnover of the Pick n Pay and its subsidiaries for the 48-week period to 1 February 2026 grew 3.2%, and 3.4% on a like-for-like basis.

The results showed that its turnaround strategy is hitting speed bumps, which caused its share price to plunge nearly 10% on the day.

Spar’s recent performance can be described as a great reset. It was a period where it cleaned up its balance sheet and fixed internal tech blunders.

The retailer reported a R5.1 billion loss, down from a profit of R158 million the previous year. This was almost entirely due to R5.2 billion in impairments and exit costs.

These costs were related to the sale of its businesses in Poland and Switzerland, as well as write-downs in its UK business.

Shoprite has much better media sentiment scores than its competitors

PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report showed that Shoprite achieved much better media sentiment scores than its main competitors.

PressPulse is an online media-sentiment tracking platform that developed a custom artificial intelligence (AI) sentiment-measuring system.

It tracks South Africa’s top business publications and measures companies’ success in achieving positive exposure in these media publications.

The sentiment ranking is based on the number of positive, neutral, or negative articles and the reach and influence of the publication where they are published.

Each company is assigned a sentiment score. A positive score indicates overall positive exposure, while a negative score indicates negative exposure.

The size of the score indicates the impact of the exposure. A big positive score, for example, shows that a company enjoyed highly impactful positive exposure.

Press Pulse’s sentiment analysis for South Africa’s retail sector showed that Shoprite topped the rankings with a positive score of 105.

Woolworths was second with a positive score of 35, followed by Pick n Pay and Spar on 14 each.

These scores align with the strength of their financial results and analysts’ sentiments about their market position.