Rami Levy: What the Super Cofix move into retail is really worth
The transfer of 30 Super Cofix urban grocery stores into the retail segment changes the 2026 headline more than it creates new group growth. The business was already inside the 2025 consolidated accounts, some of the improvement levers were already running before the merger, and the real new value will be proven only if the urban format lifts margin and sales density inside the core retail engine.
What Is Actually Moving Into Retail
The main article already argued that Rami Levy’s discount core remained strong, but that 2026 would test the quality of cash and the quality of growth. This follow-up isolates the one issue most likely to distort the next read of the numbers: the absorption of Super Cofix into the retail segment.
This is not new group growth. Super Cofix was already inside the 2025 consolidated accounts. What changes in 2026 is mainly where the business is shown, alongside a clean-up of the minority layer and a fuller operating move into the retail network. Anyone who sees a sharp jump in retail and does not separate those three effects, reporting classification, ownership, and operating execution, will give the headline too much credit.
The hard facts are these. In August 2025 Rami Levy bought 23.71% of Cofix Group from the public for NIS 40.415 million and took its holding in Cofix to 100%. On December 31, 2025 a statutory merger transferred all of Super Cofix’s assets and liabilities into the company. From January 1, 2026, 30 urban grocery stores that had still sat inside Super Cofix through the end of 2025 are meant to appear inside the retail segment.
The chart shows why caution matters. In 2025 retail already grew to about NIS 6.963 billion, while the "other" segment fell to about NIS 398.0 million and its operating profit dropped to about NIS 34.1 million from about NIS 46.0 million. But "other" is not a pure Super Cofix bucket. It mainly includes Cofix, telecom, the credit-club activity, the insurance agency, and stock. So the decline there cannot simply be treated as if it now moves in full into retail.
Three Different Layers Hiding Under One Headline
The classification layer
The retail section of the filing gives the warning itself. At the report approval date the network already had 99 sales points, of which 36 were urban-format groceries. Yet the December 31, 2025 retail tables do not include the 30 stores that the company began operating directly only from January 1, 2026 after the Super Cofix merger. The same exclusion applies to retail selling area and retail headcount. In other words, the 2025 retail base does not include the new urban shell.
That is the first distortion. The 2025 retail disclosure effectively rested on only 6 directly operated urban points, 5 Beit Haperot stores and one Jerusalem branch. From 2026 it opens with 36. So every metric such as sales per square meter, sales per store, or segment margin will require a clear bridge from the old base to the new one.
There is also a smaller but important detail. The Super Cofix operating section shows 31 stores as of December 31, 2025, while the bridge into retail speaks about 30 stores entering the segment in 2026. That is not a dramatic gap, but it does mean the migration is not perfectly one-to-one even at the physical store-count level. The physical bridge also needs careful reading.
The ownership layer
The NIS 40.415 million tender-offer amount is the second common source of confusion. That was not a price paid only for 30 Super Cofix grocery stores. The August 2025 offer was a full tender offer for all public shares in Cofix, meaning the remaining 23.71% minority in a company that then held two activities: the coffee-shop business through Urban Cofix, and the urban grocery business through Super Cofix, which was held 70% by Cofix and 30% directly by Rami Levy.
That leads to an important conclusion. The move did create a real economic effect, but not by creating new group sales. The effect was the clean-up of the minority layer inside Cofix, simplification of the holding structure, and the transfer of the grocery activity from a subsidiary into the core retail segment. Anyone who assigns the full NIS 40.4 million only to Super Cofix is mixing up the purchase of the entire Cofix minority with the later retail-segment absorption of the grocery stores.
The operating layer
This is where the real question sits. The filing describes a list of actions already aimed at improving Super Cofix profitability before the retail absorption: moving to direct distribution, optimizing selling area, adding shelving and displays, using dead space better, changing pricing, improving trade terms, widening the range toward higher-margin premium products, and adding new categories. The filing also says explicitly that Super Cofix already benefited from the group’s combined purchasing power and the group’s sales promotions, and later adds that by the report date it had already reduced its reliance on the third-party logistics provider and moved to direct supplier distribution.
That is the core distinction. A meaningful part of the efficiency play did not start on January 1, 2026. It was already running during 2025. So if retail looks better in 2026, it will not be correct to attribute all of that to the merger itself. Part of any improvement, if it comes, will simply be a continuation of a process that had already begun under the Cofix layer.
What We Can Already Know, And What We Still Cannot
| What can already be established | What still cannot be established from the 2025 disclosure |
|---|---|
| 30 urban grocery stores move from "other" into retail from 2026 onward | How much of 2025 "other" segment revenue belongs specifically to Super Cofix rather than to the coffee-shop business or the other activities |
| The business was already inside the group’s consolidated accounts before the new segment classification | How much of the NIS 34.1 million operating profit in "other" truly belongs to the urban grocery business |
| Some of the main improvement levers, especially procurement, promotions, and direct distribution, were already active before the merger | What the clean stand-alone margin of the urban format will be after absorption into retail |
| The 2025 retail base is not directly comparable to 2026 without a formal bridge | Whether the absorption improves sales density and margin, or merely dilutes the core metrics for a period |
This table matters because it shows why the NIS 398.0 million of "other" segment revenue, or the NIS 34.1 million of its operating profit, cannot be dropped one-for-one into 2026 retail. The report simply does not disclose a split between the coffee-shop activity and the urban grocery activity inside the Cofix layer, so any full transfer assumption would be guesswork, not analysis.
What The Right 2026 Test Will Be
The right read of the next reports should not begin with the retail revenue line. It should begin with four other checks:
- Whether the company provides a bridge that isolates the transfer of the 30 stores into retail instead of leaving the reader to guess what was organic and what was merely reclassified.
- Whether retail margin, after absorbing the urban format, improves beyond what had already been achieved through group purchasing power and direct distribution during 2025.
- Whether sales per square meter, selling area, and operating expenses are shown on a base that allows 2025 to be compared with 2026 without mixing in stores that were not part of the earlier denominator.
- Whether the "other" segment stabilizes after the grocery stores leave it, making it possible to see what really remains in the coffee-shop activity and the smaller non-retail engines.
In other words, the real 2026 question is not whether retail becomes larger. It almost certainly will become larger in the reported numbers. The question is whether it becomes better.
Conclusion
The answer to what the Super Cofix move into retail is really worth is less than the accounting headline, and more if operating proof arrives. For the group, this is not a new revenue engine born in 2026. It is a business that was already inside the accounts, only under a different heading. For shareholders, it is also not merely cosmetic, because it cleans up a minority layer and simplifies the holding structure. But the new value that deserves to be attributed to the move will begin only where the urban format proves better margin and better sales density beyond what had already been laid down before the merger.
That is why the next Rami Levy report will require two kinds of discipline at once. First, the market will have to neutralize the store transfer between segments. Second, it will have to test whether the operating promise is actually beginning to move through the P&L. Until that happens, the Super Cofix absorption changes the way the retail segment should be read more than it changes the group’s economics in full.
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