Uchumi (Kenya): Once the oldest formal supermarket chain in Kenya
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Show notes
This is the story of the oldest supermarket chain in Kenya. A company that Kenyan industrial policy invented in nineteen seventy five, that Kenyan retail investors bought into on the Nairobi Stock Exchange in nineteen ninety two, that collapsed for the first time in June of two thousand and six, that came back from that collapse and looked, for a few years, like the great Kenyan corporate turnaround story of its decade, and that then collapsed a second time, in a different way, between twenty fifteen and twenty twenty. Fifty one years after its founding, Uchumi is still, technically, on the Nairobi Stock Exchange. It trades under a court ratified Company Voluntary Arrangement. It operates two stores.
