Rohlik Group, which includes the online retailer Rohlík.cz, has acquired the German online grocery store Bringmeister. It bought the company from Czech investment group Rockaway Capital, which will acquire a stake in Rohlik Group in return. However, Rohlik Group withdrew from the Spanish and Italian markets due to its strength in Germany.
Rohlik has been active in Germany since 2021, operating around Munich, Augsburg and Frankfurt. The new acquisition will also add Belrin. Bringmeister has around 250,000 customers and sales of €100 million (roughly CZK 2.4 billion). Rohlik Group founder Tomas Čupr told Seznam Zpravi that Bringmeister has a warehouse in Berlin suitable for automation. According to Čupr, if the company rebuilds it, it will start making profits immediately.
“The business is designed in such a way that it depends on how many customers convert. But the store is stock-based, which means we didn’t have to take a euro out of our wallet. How much it will be worth, I don’t really know now, but in any case it’s a very good deal for Rohlik,” Čupr told SZ. Rohlik Group is also going to other German cities. “The moment we unlock more money through profitability, we will open Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Cologne very quickly. Our ambition is to have twenty cities in Germany by 2030,” said Chupr.
The company now wants to concentrate on Germany, which is why it has stopped operations in Spain and Italy. “If we win Germany, there will be other countries. If we now spread our attention and money over three countries – Italy, Spain and Germany – chances are we will do each of them a little bit wrong,” said Chupr. He expects the company to return to Spain and Italy in about five years. “But by then we will have three to four billion euros in turnover in Germany,” he added.
Source: Rohlik Group and CTK