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Nakumatt Holdings Limited is now the leading retail market player in East Africa and is still expanding. Julia Smith reports on the company’s meteoric progress to date.

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Nakumatt Holdings Limited

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Nakumatt Holdings Limited is now the leading retail market player in East Africa and is still expanding. Julia Smith reports on the company’s meteoric progress to date.

Nakumatt Holdings Limited

trail

Nakumatt Holdings Limited

When Kenyan entrepreneur Atul Shah opened his first store in Nairobi in 1992, he laid in place the cornerstone for an ambitious vision. Twenty years later, the retail business he founded, Nakumatt Holdings, has achieved international recognition. It is at the forefront of the East African retail scene with a growing portfolio of supermarkets at the cutting edge of retailing. Today over 5,000 staff manage 29 stores in four East African states and a number of new stores are in the pipeline.

Nakumatt Holdings Limited

Nakumatt Holdings Limited

as sustainable as possible and the company strives to play an active role as a social development investor. To date, Nakumatt has led community development initiatives in health, entrepreneurship, sports, culture, environment, education and urban restoration.

Although customer service bows to the requisites of local culture, all Nakumatt stores are managed according to world-class standards. The company has recently had its recertification confirmed under the ISO 9001:2008 quality standard by the Kenya

Bureau of Standards (KEBS) after successful implementation of the ISO 9001:2000 standard for three years.

When presenting the ISO Certificate, KEBS’s acting managing director Joel Kioko commented that Nakumatt had demonstrated an ability to consistently provide products that met customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements. Moreover, the supermarket chain had sought to constantly enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of its quality system, including processes for continual

A winning formula lies behind Nakumatt’s meteoric growth in the region. Shah has brought together quality, value, service and a product offering tailored to a variety of lifestyles—each store carries over 50,000 top-quality product lines—in a way that no other retailer has ever attempted.

The company prides itself on a sourcing strategy that enables it to offer many unique products along with a wide selection of the world’s best-known brands. But Nakumatt’s growth has also been underpinned by a deep understanding of consumer behaviour which extends far beyond meeting basic physical need. In line with the growing affluence of consumers, there is a new level of expectation and a new demand for a more comprehensive and sophisticated retail experience which Shah set out to meet.

Store formats range from convenience stores to supermarkets and hypermarkets. But the key focus is on the latter which showcase world-class design in floor layouts, aesthetics and amenities. Nakumatt stores are acclaimed as offering much more than a shopping experience; it is the added value dimension of a unique leisure experience for all members of the family that has enabled the stores to occupy a niche whereby a visit is perceived as a great day out.

Innovation in the customer experience has long been a hallmark of the Nakumatt approach since its inception. A key benefit offered to customers is an outstanding smart-card customer loyalty scheme which currently has over 650,000 members. Approximately 70 per cent of all customers have signed up to this scheme which features an option to translate points into school fees. Education is hugely important to Kenyan society and the scheme has been a runaway success.

Shah believes that the retail sector can make a major contribution to East Africa’s economic and social development. Nakumatt operations are designed to be

improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.

The model in Kenya has now been successfully rolled out to three other states. In 2008, Nakumatt opened its first store outside Kenya in the Union Trade Center in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. A year later, the first Nakumatt store in Uganda opened its

doors in Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. The move into Uganda was quickly consolidated by the acquisition of Payless Supermarket, a Ugandan supermarket chain with two stores in the capital. This summer, the first Nakumatt store opened in Tanzania at Moshi. Another outlet is planned at Dar es Salaam in the near future and the company is constantly evaluating other opportunities as they arise.

Most growth has been organic, but the

company has also made several acquisitions. In the latest deal, which marks the first ever major acquisition deal undertaken by a local retail chain against an active competitor, Nakumatt has just taken over the management of Woolmatt supermarket branches in a move intended to raise the brand’s presence in the Nairobi Central Business District.

Speaking during the official opening of the new Nakumatt Kakamega supermarket at the town’s

Holden Mall, Shah said the acquisition had been undertaken as part of the firm’s national expansion plans and demonstrated his ongoing commitment to the Kenyan market.

The success of Nakumatt to date is due in no small part to the business acumen Shah has displayed over the past two decades. Shah is recognised internationally as one of Kenya’s most prominent businessmen and was recently cited by the Financial Times of London as one of the top 50 emerging market

Nakumatt Holdings Limited

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business leaders. Currently serving as Nakumatt’s managing director, he was named alongside another 49 of the highest profile business leaders from the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—and other emerging market economies.

Shah and James Mwangi, CEO of Equity Bank, were the only Kenyan business leaders to hit the survey’s top ranks. On its Nakumatt Holdings note, the Financial Times observed: “Atul Shah has built Nakumatt into the biggest supermarket chain in East Africa and made it the region’s most prominent connection to the world of globalised consumerism.”

Shah described the recognition by the Financial Times as a vote of confidence in the strength of East African economies and pledged to play a key role in deepening the regional retail market scene. “This accolade encourages me to step up Nakumatt’s market presence in East Africa,” he

stated. “Besides my personal pride and that of the entire Nakumatt customer and staff fraternity, such recognition is a clear vote of confidence in the potential of East Africans.” www.nakumatt.net BE

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UGANDA: T: (256-41) 4344487/4251338 • E: uganda@eagm.com • TANZANIA: T: (255-22) 2864983-5 • E: tanzania@eagm.com

INDIA: (Head Office) - T: (91-44) 42126262 • Email: info@eagmindia.com

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