Lithuanian company Consul Trade House UAB, owner of the chain of Novus supermarkets in Ukraine, has bought the supermarket chain Billa Ukraine from Austrian company Rewe International AG.
Now the Anti-Monopoly Committee is considering approval of the agreement.
For now, Billa supermarkets continue working as usual. If the deal is approved, Novus will reveal its plans for the acquired stores.
Novus has 46 stores in 14 cities in Ukraine, while the Billa chain counts 35 stores in Kyiv, Kyiv Oblast and Zhytomyr.
But Novus’ business has been on the upswing lately. In July, it secured a $100-million loan from several banks, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, for the construction of 30 stores and a warehouse in Kyiv.
By contrast, Billa has been sizing down.
In 2017, Billa announced the sale of nine of its stores in six cities: Dnipro, Kherson, Nikopol, Kremenchuk, Kramatorsk and Odesa. Two years earlier, the company closed its supermarkets in Sumy, Kamianske, Mariupol, Kharkiv and Zaporizhia.
“The main (reason for the closing of the stores) is the unstable political and economic situation in the country and especially in the east of Ukraine, where most of our regional stores operated,” Oksana Mandzuk, chief executive officer at Billa Ukraine, said in an interview to RAU, a retail news site, in 2018.
Still, in 2018, Billa Ukraine announced plans to open at least 10 supermarkets in Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast.
