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The group that owns Selfridges and a handful of other upmarket department stores has recorded a £124mn loss since it was set up just over a year ago.
Accounts filed at Companies House this week for Cambridge Retail Group Holding, which was incorporated on December 21 2021 as a vehicle for the acquisition of Selfridges Group, the owner of the various retailers, registered a £124mn pre-tax loss and revenues of £804mn during the period to January 28 2023.
Cambridge Retail is owned by René Benko’s Signa Group in Austria and Tiang Chirathivat’s Central Group in Thailand, which together bought the department store portfolio from the billionaire Weston family for £4bn. This acquisition was completed in August 2022.
The published accounts include results from this date to the end of January for the retail operations of Selfridges in the UK, De Bijenkorf in the Netherlands, as well as Brown Thomas and Arnotts in Ireland.
They also show that at the end of August 2023, the new owners replaced a €354mn loan from Julius Baer, Switzerland’s second-biggest bank, with a short-term shareholder loan of €364mn, of which €55mn was due at the end of last month. Julius Baer declined to comment.
The €354mn Julius Baer loan was initially extended for two weeks before it was refinanced. The €55mn chunk will be repaid during a flexible grace period, Selfridges Group said.
Companies House documents show that San Simeon Investments, a British Virgin Islands company owned by Central Group, arranged the shareholder loan.
Separately, Cambridge Retail said a restructuring consultation at Selfridges in the UK would conclude this month. This is expected to lead to dozens of redundancies. A reorganisation is also taking place in De Bijenkorf, according to the accounts, but the process “remains in the very early stages”. The group, which employs more than 3,000 people, declined to comment on redundancy numbers.
The holding company had total liabilities, including leases, of £3.4bn and total assets worth £3.8bn during the period.
Selfridges UK performance weighed on the other brands in the group. It posted a £106mn loss on revenues of £426mn from August 2022 to the end of January. De Bijenkorf recorded losses of £6.6mn on revenues of £224mn, while the Brown Thomas and Arnotts brands together reported a loss of £11.4mn on £153mn of revenues.
Annual accounts for Selfridges in the UK for the year to the end of January, covering previous and current ownership, showed losses of £37.9mn and revenues of £843mn. This compares with a pre-pandemic profit of £34mn and revenues of £853mn in the year to the start of February 2020.
Selfridges’ shareholder Benko has been under scrutiny in the past year after Signa’s offices were raided by Austrian police in October 2022 over a corruption investigation. No charges have yet been brought in the case. Benko was acquitted of bribery charges in a separate case in January.
Additional reporting by Owen Walker
