2023-06-01 07:19:01
After five years, the Signa Retail Group of the Tyrolean investor Rene Benko is parting ways with Kika and Leiner. With immediate effect, operational business will be handed over to a management team headed by Hermann Wieser. The real estate of the furniture chain is taken over by the Supernova Group of the German specialist store entrepreneur Frank Albert. The closing of the sale took place yesterday in Vienna, according to a broadcast by Kika/Leiner on Thursday.
No information was given about the amount of the takeover price. According to “Standard”, the purchase price for 80 plots of land should amount to almost 500 million euros. The management team around Hermann Wieser was already active in the management of Kika/Leiner. The continuation of Kika/Leiner is to start with a “profound restructuring”. “The necessary measures will be determined by the end of June 2023,” the broadcast said. The new management wants to hold talks with the previous management level of the company, the works council, the suppliers and partners of the company in the next few days.
“The separation from Kika/Leiner was not an easy decision,” Signa Holding boss Christoph Stadlhuber is quoted as saying in a Signa broadcast. The management team around CEO Reinhold Güterbier and all employees “dedicated themselves to the company under the most difficult market and crisis conditions and fought against the upheavals in the furniture market”. “From the Signa Group’s point of view, the takeover of Kika/Leiner was a very good investment, despite the difficult market environment,” says the company.
In order to avoid Kika/Leiner becoming insolvent, the South African Steinhoff Group sold the Austrian furniture chain in June 2018 for EUR 430 million to the Signa Group. As part of Kika/Leiner’s restructuring course at the time, the number of branches in Austria was reduced and the Eastern European business and some non-strategic properties in Austria were sold. Kika and Leiner received a “double-digit million euro amount” from Signa for the modernization of the branches. Signa bought Kika/Leiner’s real estate “prime piece” on Mariahilfer Strasse in Vienna at the end of 2017 for EUR 60 million and is currently building the luxury department store “Lamarr” there.
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