Quick Mart, also Quickmart, is a Kenyan

supermarket chain A supermarket is a self-service Retail#Types of outlets, shop offering a wide variety of food, Drink, beverages and Household goods, household products, organized into sections. Strictly speaking, a supermarket is larger and has a wider selecti ...

. As of June 2022, it was the second largest supermarket chain in the country, behind market leader, Naivas Limited, with 84 stores and over 8,000 employees. At that time, according to its website, Quickmart had 53 retail outlets and employed in excess of 5,000 people.

History

Quickmart was founded in 2006 in the then town of Nakuru, which is Nakuru City today. It was started by the late John Kinuthia, a businessman, who passed away in 2016. In its early years, it was run as a family-owned and family-operated business. As of November 2017, the retail chain maintained eight outlets. Quickmart merged with ''Tumaini Self Service Limited'', another retail chain in 2019. At the time of the merger, Quickmart had 11 branches and Tumaini had 13 branches. The new business adopted the Quick Mart brand. The merger concluded in 2020. The majority shareholder in the new business is ''Adenia Partners'' of Mauritius, through their wholly owned Kenyan subsidiary company ''Sokoni Retail Kenya''.

Overview

As of June 2022, Quick Mart Limited was the second-largest supermarket chain in Kenya, with 53 retail outlets. In 2017, the components of today's (2022) Quickmart had gross annual sales in excess of KSh1 billion (approx. US$10 million) then. Quick Mart is a fast-growing retail chain. In 2021, it opened six new stores, the highest number among all supermarket chains in the country that year. A number of factors contributed to that rapid growth. Three large Kenyan supermarket chains collapsed around that time;

Nakumatt Nakumatt was a Kenyan Hypermarket, supermarket chain. "Nakumatt" is an abbreviation for Nakuru, Nakuru Mattress. Overview , Nakumatt had 65 stores in the African Great Lakes countries of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. It employed over 5,5 ...

, Tuskys and Uchumi all went under in rapid succession. At about this time, Choppies Enterprises Limited, a retail chain based in Botswana, withdrew from Kenya. With new funding from Adenia Partners, Quick Mart expanded into some of the locations vacated by the closed firms.

Ownership

The table below illustrates the shareholding in Quick Mart Supermarkets Limited in June 2022. * Sokoni Retail Kenya is a Kenyan investment company, wholly owned by

private equity firm A private equity firm or private equity company (often described as a financial sponsor) is an investment management company that provides financial backing and makes investments in the private equity of a Startup company, startup or of an existin ...

, ''Adenia Partners'', based in

Mauritius Mauritius, officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island country in the Indian Ocean, about off the southeastern coast of East Africa, east of Madagascar. It includes the main island (also called Mauritius), as well as Rodrigues, Ag ...

Governance

After the merger with Tumaini Self Service Stores, Quick Mart is led by a ten-person senior management team headed by the chief executive officer, Peter Kang'iri.

References

External links