Massmart’s Builders Warehouse will close in Nairobi, its only store in Kenya. It was perhaps inevitable: Massmart had already announced it would close all of its Game discount stores outside Southern Africa in July 2022. The only Builders Warehouse Massmart had opened in East (or West Africa), at Nairobi’s upmarket Karen Waterfront Mall, was always likely to be vulnerable.
The store covered almost 10,000m2 of sales area (including its garden centre) and brought the successful South African model of good quality home improvement, hardware and building materials to the Kenyan market. It only opened in August 2020.
Massmart was hit by the ongoing supply chain disruption of the pandemic, the sharp rise in the cost of building materials, the soaring cost of container freight through 2021 and much of 2022, the depreciation of the Kenyan shilling and the squeeze on consumer incomes, and moves by the Kenyan government to squeeze more revenues from importers of goods.
Like Shoprite (which exited Kenya almost exactly as Builders Warehouse opened) and Game, Builders Warehouse’s dependency on South African supply chains and private label has put huge pressure on its import model. Ultimately, with South African retailers increasingly moving back from expansion markets (Pick n Pay opening its second supermarket in Nigeria in October 2022 is a notable exception), Builders Warehouse was always at risk.
