Woolworths : Statement on Masters

Sunday, 11 December 2016: Woolworths Limited (Woolworths) confirms that all Masters stores will cease trading today, Sunday 11 December, in line with the company's announced Home Improvement exit.

From the time of the announcement, Woolworths number one priority was to ensure our Masters team were immediately provided with redeployment choices and support.

Woolworths is now very pleased to announce that 1650 Masters store staff have been redeployed in the Woolworths Group, mostly into supermarkets.

'Within a week of the announcement of the Home Improvement closure, 63 additional HR managers were employed by Woolworths to provide critical local store support and counselling services to all affected staff, including one on one interviews,' Gillian Davie, Director Human Resources, Home Improvement, said.

'We also provided over 4000 hours of tailored training to our team to help them in their job search.'

'For those employees who didn't want to move into supermarkets, and instead chose redundancy, Woolworths established a Job Placement program. In doing this, we partnered with over 100 external organisations who provided our team members with over 580 employment opportunities through a well-connected network,' Ms Davie said.

The Masters store closures follows a successful sell down of all inventory. The sell down resulted in a total value at retail of around $1.2 billion through GA Australia. GA promised a recovery of $500 million based on cost price and have over delivered on this. In excess of 90 cents in the dollar at cost price was recovered.

For further details on the Home Improvement exit, please refer to Woolworths' announcement of 24 August 2016.

ENDS

Media Contact:
Woolworths Group Press Office - ph 02 8885 103