Woolworths Holdings Limited

... and you bought strawberries off the shelf, or you didn't buy strawberries off the shelf.

And now I walk into Woolies, and there's Sabroses and this one and that one.

Have we started growing a variety of different types of strawberries, um, locally?

Yes, definitely.

The National Credit Act came into force in 2007, and it allowed, um, companies that, that have, uh, that offer store cards to their customers, it allowed them to charge a monthly service fee, right? Um, but a, a big chunk of Woolworths customers who had opened their accounts before 2007 were simply never charged that fee.

So Woolies exempted them.

And, and that went on until two years ago.

So 2024, July- Suddenly the company changed tax and it started, tech rather, and it started charging the monthly service fee on those cards.

Now, Jamie's career has taken him across three continents and through some of the most fascinating chapters in modern retail history.

From senior leadership roles at the House of Fraser in the UK, to Meyer and Country Road Group in Australia, to leading Witchery through a period of transformation, to to moving to South Africa with Woolworths Holdings, and then returning to Australia to lead Topshop and Topman only a week before it collapsed into administration.

More about that later.

Jamie's journey is already chock full of retail adventures as you can tell, but there's more.

But maybe I should have.

Maybe I should have.

Now, before the call, you also mentioned you did a four-year stint in Cape Town working for the Woolworths Group in South Africa, and you were group head of merchandise, which at the time had owned Country Road.

Can you just tell us how that sort of came about and what was your mandate then?

And so the answer to this for them is the W list where more than 200 everyday products from milk to chicken are price checked against similar products across the market.

Now, the retailer is spending 10 million Rand relaunching this program with the bigger goal here of changing how customers see its prices and convincing them to do more of their weekly grocery shops at Woolies.

So this one's an interesting one.

CashBuild wants to keep growing, but it's actually running into an unusual problem.

On the show today, Lissa Florentiers, of course, MD at Merchant West Investments.

We had Woolies and Aspen results.

The Woolies particularly interests me.

Is food health and beauty on the chopping block? We'll get her thoughts on those numbers.

Vanna Didiaga from Cashboard.

Teddy Nair with Alyssa Furin, MD, Merchant West Investments.

Alyssa, appreciate the early morning time.

Let's touch with Woolies first on the results, but also perhaps the commentary.

In fact, the first four interviews, the first four people we're due to speak to this evening are all about results.

We'll start with the CEO at Woolworths, Sam Ngomeni.

Big changes there.

They're going to further sort of orientate themselves around their foods division.

If you look at the competition in fashion and clothing, if you look at what the foods division at Woolworths has become, that probably does make strategic sense.

But we'll ask Sam Ngomeni for a little bit more of the rationale behind it.

Aspen, big results out from them today.

on 702.