> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.businessbagel.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Woolworths is shrinking its clothing floors as food increasingly becomes the retailer’s biggest growth engine
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/woolworths-is-done-treating-its-divisions-the-same-and-fashion-is-the-one-that-pays/
- Published: 2026-09-04T02:15:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T02:14:59.000Z
- Description: Food earns less on each rand and far more in total, so the new chief executive is sending the capital and the floor space its way.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Sam Ngumeni has been group chief executive of Woolworths for three months, and the first thing his results changed was not a number. It was who gets the money. The group used to fund its divisions on roughly equal terms, and it will not do that again.

Food is what he is funding. Woolworths says it is reorienting the group around its premium food ecosystem, the business it calls its strongest source of competitive advantage and its main engine of value. Home and Beauty sit alongside it as ways of extending the food relationship rather than as businesses standing on their own. Fashion is the one left explaining itself.

## The division that earns a fatter margin and less money

Fashion, beauty and home together lifted sales 4.4% and still watched their adjusted operating earnings fall 14.1%, to R1.38 billion. Food, growing a little faster, earned R3.71 billion and added to that number instead of losing it. Ngumeni is direct about why he keeps fashion anyway: it is a higher-margin business, he told Business Day, but it does not create the economic returns of the food business.

Inside the clothing division the split is just as sharp. Home grew 11.7% and Beauty 7.9%, while fashion was the drag, with its own price inflation running at 0.9%. The floor space has already started moving: net trading space across the division shrank 0.7% over the year.

## The quality gap customers named

Ngumeni says Woolworths is looking at trimming the tail of fashion lines that do not sell and giving that space to home, which earns more per square metre. He is not closing the division. “We are definitely not turning our back on fashion,” he told Business Day, adding that customer feedback had made product quality the priority. Every business is under review, Country Road included.

The food projects get the runway meanwhile. Woolworths is in just over 100 Engen forecourts and wants to double that, its on-demand service grew revenue 19.6%, and management admits that chasing margin targets constrained its online investment and disappointed the online customer.

Investors have not been won over. The shares fell more than 3% on results day and have lost more than 40% of their value over three years.