Casino - comment

As we await FY22 results, Casino continue to drip feed announcements about further purchases and cancellations of their Notes. As announced last night, the Company purchased a €19.9m of the 2024 Notes and €10.5m of the 2026 Notes. We struggle to see the reasoning behind this as we would have expected Casino to be conserving cash in the current times. Small purchases don’t really make significant difference to the situation and we had expected a larger transaction proposal to come from the Company after full-year results.

Separately, there continues to be speculation relating to a potential tie-up between Teract and some/all of Casino’s French assets. We see it as an opportunity for Naouri to create a French listing for the French retail assets, but struggle to see how it will actually deliver any real deleveraging to the overall structure.