LISBON (Reuters) – Portuguese food retailer Jeronimo Martins hopes to increase its sales by nearly 50% to 50 billion euros a year by the end of the decade, its CEO said on Thursday, without revealing any details.
Speaking at a news conference after the company posted a 9.3% increase in 2024 sales to 33.5 billion euros ($36.3 billion), Pedro Soares dos Santos described the 50-billion-euro mark as “our great ambition”, but said the exact strategy of how to achieve that was yet to be defined.
“The big challenge … is to look at the coming five years and see where we really want to grow,” he said, without ruling out acquisitions as one of the possible ways to grow.
Jeronimo Martins’ largest market is Poland, where it runs the country’s largest supermarket chain, Biedronka, and it has been expanding in Slovakia, as well as in Colombia.
For now, the company plans to invest around 1.1 billion euros in 2025, the same it invested last year, opening hundreds of new stores in Poland, Colombia, Slovakia and Portugal.
Shares in Jeronimo Martins were 1.5% lower in afternoon trading, underperforming the broader bluechip index in Lisbon, down 0.8%.
($1 = 0.9223 euros)
(Reporting by Andrei Khalip)
