Shoprite has completed its acquisition of R&A Cellular, taking an initial 51% of the eMalahleni company whose point-of-sale devices sit behind the counter in spaza shops and informal stores across South Africa.
The transaction became effective on 14 August 2026, according to Shoprite Holdings’ results for the 52 weeks to 28 June 2026, published on Tuesday. Both the closing date and the size of the stake are new disclosures.
When the deal was announced in March, Shoprite said only that it was acquiring a majority holding and gave no timeline. Financial terms remain undisclosed, and the group says the initial accounting for the business combination has not been completed, so it cannot yet allocate the purchase consideration or quantify the acquisition’s financial effect.
Three moves
Group CEO Pieter Engelbrecht described R&A Cellular as “relatively small” and not categorisable under the JSE listings requirements – meaning it wasn’t large enough, measured against Shoprite’s vast size, to trip the exchange’s categorisation thresholds.
More useful than the price is the group’s first public statement of intent for the platform. Engelbrecht set out three moves:
- Expanding R&A Cellular’s installed device base nationally across informal retailers;
- Broadening the value-added services those devices carry; and
- Embedding Shoprite’s own financial services products inside the R&A Cellular ecosystem.
The third is the one to watch. Money Market, the prepaid, money transfer and transactional account business through which Shoprite sells financial services to underbanked customers, has until now been delivered through the group’s own footprint – 2 839 Supermarkets RSA outlets at year-end. R&A Cellular’s device network puts those products in shops Shoprite does not own and would never build.
R&A Cellular is a privately held company based in eMalahleni, Mpumalanga, founded and led by CEO Rui Campos. It supplies point-of-sale hardware and a vending platform to spaza shops, convenience stores and informal traders, who log in to a trader portal branded DesertPOS.
A single device lets a trader accept card, tap and digital wallet payments while selling prepaid airtime, data, electricity, gaming and lottery products. The devices support an offline mode that syncs transactions once connectivity returns – a meaningful feature in the market they serve. The company also supplies prepaid products on a wholesale basis to other distributors, who sell them on through their own networks.
Shoprite vouchers were already sold through R&A Cellular devices before the transaction, which is what brought the two together.
The contest for South Africa’s informal retail till is the most active front in domestic payments. Trade Intelligence puts informal FMCG retail at R184-billion to R197-billion a year, spread across somewhere between 100 000 and 150 000 outlets depending on whose count you take, and it remains overwhelmingly cash.
The field is crowded. Pepkor’s Flash, now merged with Shop2Shop, moves more than R200-billion/year through the same channel and underpins that group’s banking ambitions. MTN has launched MoMo Pay for informal traders, Vodacom’s VodaPay holds a payment service provider licence and Yoco, the most visible card-acceptance business in the small merchant segment, has more than 200 000 merchants. – (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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