The Board of Directors of Magnit, which took place on Wednesday, July 25, considered the issue of acquiring the distribution company "SIA Group" and "found the preliminary terms of the deal inadequately developed," follows from the published materials of the retailer. "Nevertheless, the council shares the strategic vision of management about the need to invest in the logistics infrastructure in order to improve the value proposition to the buyer and the results of the LFL (trade efficiency indicator, which allows assessing the dynamics of its development." - RBC), the documents note. - In addition to the current work with Boston Consulting Group (consultant to Magnit, participating in the development of its strategy - RBC), the Board recommended that management involve an investment bank to study the optimal strategy for improving the logistics infrastructure in order to identify the appropriate asset and conditions, and then submit a proposal advice ".

On the question of RBC, when the board of directors is waiting for new proposals on the development of this part of the logistics direction, at the time of publication in the "Magnet" did not respond.

In early June, "Magnet" said that it is in talks to acquire a pharmaceutical distributor of "SIA Group". But the proposed purchase aroused concern among the minority shareholders of the retail company, as it could be an interested party transaction: "SIA Group" belongs to the investment group "Marathon Group". The latter at the end of May purchased 11.82% of VimpelCom's Magnit from VTB Bank. The minority shareholders also questioned the possible effect of the deal. As stated in the statement of one of the minority shareholders - Prosperity Capital Management, - "there is no need to buy a wholesale seller, bear its costs, hire staff and get the risk of transferring non-payments from other pharmacy stores."

As explained earlier in an interview with RBC, the general director of Magnit, Olga Naumova, "the purchase of a distributor enables not only to optimize transportation costs, but also to receive in addition about 5% of profitability, which is not provided by the option of strategic partnership." "If done from scratch by yourself, it will take considerable investment and time," Naumova said. She recalled that in addition to 51 pharmacies the company has 4 thousand droheri stores Magnet Cosmetics, and since the commodity security of this category is close to the pharmacy, this transaction will help optimize costs and the process as a whole.

"We still have to solve this task in one way or another - if not purchase, then a strategic partnership, if not with this distributor, then with the other," the top manager believes.

According to the "Magnit" reports published on Thursday morning, July 26, at the end of the first half of 2018, the company had 4,000 stores of the droger format (the company had 16,960 outlets in total), and this is the only segment of the group that showed a positive growth of 3, 7% of LFL indicators of the average check (for the group it is negative - 1.7%). Also droger stores showed the highest dynamics of revenue growth: for the first six months of 2018, it increased by 13.7% compared to the same period last year, to 42.031 billion rubles. The total revenue of Magnit increased by 7.2%, to 595.263 billion rubles.