A shopper walks past a Foschini store at a shopping centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, November 11, 2022. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibekosaid on Monday the country's rolling power outages are likely to have reduced the annual retail turnover of its African business by about 1 billion rand .
State electricity utility Eskom is implementing the worst rolling blackouts on record, leaving households in the dark for up to 10 hours a day. While TFG has backup power in 70% of its South African stores, it lost about 345,000 trading hours in the 11 months ended Feb. 28, it said. "The true impact, however, has been estimated at close to double this figure as customer demand is dampened by the associated disruption and inconvenience with reduced footfall observed before, during and immediately after load shedding periods," the retailer added.
This has in turn reduced retail turnover growth for the 48 weeks ended Feb. 25 to 11.4%. This excludes sales from recent acquisitions, it said.