The management of the grocery chain “Gulliver”, which has a hundred retail outlets in the Ulyanovsk and Saratov regions, has sent offers to potential investors about the purchase of the business, reports “Kommersant” citing sources. The “Gulliver” store network is one of the business directions of the eponymous group, which also develops the “Pobeda” discount network (more than 670 outlets in 31 regions of Russia) and the Crimean network “Narodny Ambar” (34 stores).
In the opinion of the CEO of “Infoline-Analytics” Mikhail Burmistrov, the sale of “Gulliver” grocery stores is a logical step and is due to the fact that the growth rate of this business lags behind that of other directions of the group, and the format of the stores will be of interest to top federal networks – “Lenta”, “Magnit” and X5. “Gulliver” could ask for about 4-5 billion rubles for its network, Burmistrov believes. At the same time, according to him, the market valuation of the network does not exceed 3-3.5 billion rubles. The decision on a possible sale was made against the backdrop of a general decline in revenues in the grocery retail sector due to Russians switching to an economy mode: the average profitability of the top ten players at the end of 2025 will be 1.7%, note in “Infoline-Analytics” (in 2024 it was 2.3%) (The Moscow Times).
