Casino's sale of Vindémia

All,

Today’s announced sale of Vindémia - the Indian Ocean businesss - is a mild positive from our point of view.

While Casino’s balance sheet was promising E330m and Casino’s IR team earlier in the year commented that the value be close to E300m after fees and while we don’t believe the subsidiary to hold significant amounts of debt, we had not added the figure to our recovery analysis for lack of further transparency. The company had made no dividend payments in the last two years and Casino had corrected its carrying amount in 2018, fuelling little hope that the book value would now be exceeded.

Still, given Vindemia’s importance in the region, the EBITDA multiple achieved in the sale will most likely be significantly accretive to that of Casino.

What remains unclear is what part of the E219m will be paid in cash to Casino at the end of the day.

Wolfgang