Africa’s Retail Giants: Who Actually Leads the Race – and Who’s Quietly Fading

By Des H Rikhotso

Lists like “Africa’s Top 10 Retail Chains by Net Asset Value” travel well on social media because they flatter a simple intuition: bigger logo, bigger bank balance. The trouble is that retail in Africa, like retail everywhere, is a business of thin margins and sudden reversals.

A chain that looked unassailable five years ago can be worth a fraction of its old self today, while a quieter rival has crept past it. Check the numbers against current market data, and several entries on the popular list collapse on contact.

The Actual Scoreboard

Using market capitalisation for the publicly listed players – the most current and verifiable measure of how investors value a company today – the picture looks like this, as of mid-2026:

Two other names that regularly show up in viral rankings don’t fit neatly into this table at all, for the same reason: nobody can quote a current share price for a company that doesn’t have one.

Massmart, owner of Makro, Game and Builders Warehouse, hasn’t traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange since November 2022, when Walmart bought out the 47 percent of the company it didn’t already own and took it private. At the time of delisting, the remaining public stake was valued at roughly R13.5 billion (under US$1 billion) – a steep discount to the multi-billion-dollar figure that keeps circulating, and reflective of a turnaround Walmart wanted to manage out of public view.

Naivas, Kenya’s largest supermarket chain, is privately held by Mauritius’s IBL Group, with East African Africa’s growth pulling in additional capital along the way. It posted roughly US$751 million in revenue for the financial year ending June 2025, up 21.6 percent – genuinely impressive – but revenue is not net asset value, and there is no market price to rank it against listed peers.

Majid Al Futtaim, the Dubai-based conglomerate that runs Carrefour stores across the Middle East and parts of Africa, reports group revenue of roughly US$9.2 billion. It’s a serious operation, but it’s a private, diversified company spanning malls, cinemas and real estate well beyond retail, and well beyond Africa alone – lumping its full size into an “Africa retail” ranking overstates what’s actually attributable to African grocery shelves.

The Quiet Collapse of a Former Champion

The most jarring gap between perception and reality belongs to Pick n Pay. For decades it was the byword for South African grocery shopping, the chain that taught a generation where to find the best in-store bakery.

Today its market capitalisation sits closer to US$1 billion than the US$6-7 billion floating around online – a company trading at a fraction of its former scale, having posted a net loss in its most recent full year and seen its share price shed roughly a third of its value over the past twelve months. Shoprite, once Pick n Pay’s junior rival, has spent that same period pulling steadily ahead.

Spar Group tells a similar story, if quieter. Its market value has roughly halved in the past year alone, its chief executive resigned in early 2026 after a difficult run, and the wholesale-distribution model that built it – supplying independent grocers rather than running stores directly – has struggled against margin pressure and a stumbling expansion into Poland.

It is not the US$7–8 billion operation the popular list suggests; it is closer to the size of a single mid-cap industrial firm.

The Pharmacy That Outgrew the Supermarkets

Meanwhile, the company least associated with “supermarket” branding has quietly become one of the most valuable retailers on the continent. Clicks Group – health, beauty and pharmacy, not groceries – now carries a market value comparable to Pepkor’s and well ahead of both Pick n Pay and Spar combined.

It is a useful reminder that growth in African retail increasingly tracks rising middle-class spending on health and wellness, not just food, and that “biggest retailer” no longer means “biggest grocer” by default.

What the Real Story Tells Us

Three things stand out once the numbers are corrected. First, South Africa’s grip on the upper end of African retail is real, but it is no longer a story of grocery chains alone – pharmacy, value clothing (Pepkor) and lifestyle retail are doing as much heavy lifting as food.

Second, “size” itself has become slippery: a multinational like Walmart can simply take its African unit private and remove it from public scrutiny altogether, while a private-equity-backed Kenyan chain can post serious revenue growth without ever putting a number on what it’s “worth.”

Third, and most tellingly, the gap between the chains gaining ground (Shoprite, Clicks, Pepkor) and those losing it (Pick n Pay, Spar) keeps widening – a sign that scale and operational discipline matter more on this continent’s high streets than brand nostalgia ever will.

The lesson for anyone forwarding the next viral “Africa’s Top 10” graphic: check the date on the data before you check the rank.

Des H Rikhotso is a seasoned C-Suite Multi-Industry (Automotive – OEM + Retail, Logistics, Oil & Gas, etc) business executive with 25+ years of Business Leadership Experience across the South, East and Western Sub-Sahara Africa Region. Based in Kampala, Uganda he serves as East Africa Region Country Director and Business Executive, driving Business Strategic Growth and Operational Excellence – contributing his Business Leadership Experience to the Region. Des has held Business Leadership roles at BMW Group Africa, Volkswagen Group Africa, Peugeot Motors South Africa, Toyota/Lexus South Africa, Lexus East Rand (Unitrans/CFAO), Nissan Group of Africa, G.U.D Holdings (Africa Exports Operations Division),The HDR Group of Companies and The Ezra Group of Companies (a Leading Uganda & East Africa Conglomerate). He holds Under-Graduate and Post-Graduate business degrees from the University of the Western Cape, Wits University (Wits Business School) and the University of South Africa.