World's retail giants competing to take over Indonesia's hypermarket chain: source

Three foreign retail giant firms, U.S. Wal-Mart, France's Casino Guichard-Perrachon and South Korea' s Lotte Mart, are tightly competing to acquire Indonesia's retail chain Hypermart, owned by Indonesian prominent retailer PT Matahari Putra Prima (MPP), local media reported here on Thursday.

A source who asked anonymity that knows the takeover plan said that MPP intends to sell its retail business units to focus on its core health care and property assets. The sale value of Hypermart is projected to reach more than 1 billion U.S. dollars.

The auction had also drawn the interest from South Korea's major retail player Shinsegae, but no further information available on whether the company is still engaged in the bidding processes or not,

President director of MPP, Benjamin Mailool, however, refused to make further comment on this issue.

He said that the company was still waiting for the result of a study on the company's asset restructuring conducted by financial consultant, Merryll Lynch.

The study results would led to the MPP's decision to sell Hypermart of not, the Jakarta Post reported.

"The [selling] status remains unclear, because Merryll Lynch has not revealed the result of its study yet. We're currently still observing [the company's condition] to get more concrete and substantive proposals to optimize our company value," he said.

Benyamin added that the company expected that Meryll Lynch to complete the study in mid-December this year.

MPP currently runs 49 Hypermart outlets across the country with four of them opened earlier this year. Hypermart is currently the second largest retail chain in Indonesia after market leader France's Carrefour that runs 83 outlets nationwide.

Indonesia's huge population and its stellar economic performance had made the country one of the most potential emerging markets in Southeast Asia.

The Association of Indonesian Retailers (Aprindo) predicts that the country's total retail revenue will jump to 100 trillion rupiah (11.1 billion U.S. dollars) in 2010, up 20 percent on 83.4 trillion rupiah last year.
(Source:xinhua)