MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian food retailer O'Key may pay no further dividends in 2018 and instead channel proceeds from the sale of its supermarkets into investments and reducing debt, Konstantin Arabidis, chief financial officer, said on Thursday.

"We don't say exactly (whether) we will pay another dividend this year or not, probably no, but the board can approve another payment at the end of the year," Arabidis told a conference call.

In January O'Key, which sold its supermarket business to X5 Retail Group late last year, paid $0.12 per share in interim dividends for the financial year 2018, up from $0.09 a year earlier.

The company's executives also said O'Key expected its hypermarket unit to achieve an EBITDA margin of 7.8 percent this year, up from 6.8 percent in 2017.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova and Olga Sichkar; Editing by Adrian Croft)

Stocks treated in this article : X5 Retail Group NV (EDR), O'Key Group SA