Colombia's top-selling retailer lost 579 billion pesos

Of the 7,475 retail companies filing with Colombia’s corporate regulator, the one that sold the most in 2025 was Jerónimo Martins Colombia, owner of the Ara stores: 16.34 trillion pesos, two and a half trillion ahead of the runner-up.

And it closed the year with a loss of 579.4 billion pesos.

The easy headline would be “the biggest seller is the biggest loser.” The easy headline is wrong, and the income statement explains why in four lines.

Where the money went

	2025	2024	Change
Revenue	16.34 tn	13.80 tn	+18.4%
Cost of sales	13.60 tn	11.54 tn	+17.8%
Gross profit	2.73 tn	2.25 tn	+21.2%
Distribution expenses	2.51 tn	2.14 tn	+17.3%
Administrative expenses	242 bn	196 bn	+23.2%
Operating profit	+18.45 bn	−45.33 bn	flipped sign
Finance costs	598 bn	556 bn	+7.5%
Result for the year	−579 bn	−601 bn	−3.6%

The row almost nobody looks at is the sixth. In 2024 Ara’s operation lost money; in 2025 it produced 18.45 billion pesos. That sign change is the real news of the year.

What sinks the result comes after: 598 billion pesos in finance costs, thirty-two times the operating profit. Efficient stores or not, that line takes the year.

And the loss, measured against revenue, fell from 4.4% to 3.5%. The company is losing less while growing 18.4% a year.

The contrast with D1

Same business, same country, same hard-discount format. Everything as a percentage of each company’s own revenue, which is the only way to compare them:

	Ara (Jerónimo Martins)	D1
2025 revenue	16.34 tn	11.12 tn
Annual growth	+18.4%	+6.6%
Gross margin	16.7%	19.0%
Distribution expenses	15.3%	9.1%
Administrative expenses	1.5%	5.5%
Operating margin	0.1%	4.5%
Finance costs	3.7%	1.9%
Result	−3.5%	+1.9%

Two warnings before drawing conclusions, because this is where most circulating comparisons go wrong:

The line between “distribution” and “administration” is not drawn the same way by every company. Ara reports 15.3% and 1.5%; D1, 9.1% and 5.5%. Comparing only the first row would suggest Ara spends 70% more on distribution, which is not true. Added together, operating expenses are 16.8% at Ara against 14.6% at D1: a real gap, but of two points, not seven.
D1’s gross margin is 2.3 points higher. That comes from sourcing, private label and logistics scale — not from charging more.

Add the two gaps — two points of expense, two and a half of margin — and you get the difference that matters: 0.1% operating margin against 4.5%. On top of that, Ara pays nearly double in finance costs.

Root cause: 1,653 leases

Here is the part the income statement does not show, and it explains the finance line.

Ara closed 2025 with 1,653 stores after opening 225 in a single year, and invested around 650 billion pesos between January and September alone in stores and logistics. Its Portuguese parent reported that net finance costs rose 39% year on year, and named the cause: higher capitalized lease interest tied to the ongoing expansion program.

That sentence is the key. Under IFRS 16, a lease enters the balance sheet as a right-of-use liability, and the interest on that liability is booked as a finance cost, not as rent. With 1,653 leased locations, every new store automatically adds finance cost from the day it is signed, even if it sells well from month one.

Put differently: a large share of those 598 billion pesos is not bank debt from poor management — it is store rent turned into interest by an accounting standard.

And the one financing it is not a bank: the parent capitalized the subsidiary through a share issue worth 108.9 billion pesos. The owner is putting in capital rather than demanding profits now.

The two revenue figures

If you look this story up in the press you will find 14.7 trillion pesos, not 16.34. Both are correct and measure different things.

The press figure comes from the parent’s report and refers to sales. The regulator’s figure is the revenue from ordinary activities line of the income statement, which can include other operating income and cover more than one brand under the same tax ID — Ara and La Bodega del Canasto.

This is not a detail: mixing “sales” from a press release with “revenue” from a financial statement produces rankings that mean nothing. Every figure here comes from the same source and the same line.

How to read a result like this

Losing money does not always mean the business does not work. Sometimes it means the company is paying in advance for its future size, and that is exactly what these numbers say: operation in the black, 18% growth, a shrinking loss, and a finance cost growing far slower than sales.

There is one ratio to watch: when operating profit grows enough to cover finance costs. Today it stands at 0.03 times. The day that crosses 1, Ara reports profits without changing anything else.

The reverse also holds: if growth stalls while the leases keep running, the loss stops being an investment and becomes a problem.

How this was built

The financial figures are those Jerónimo Martins Colombia SAS and D1 SAS filed with the Superintendencia de Sociedades, 2025 cut-off, with their 2024 comparatives. They are in millions of pesos at source.

Percentages are over each company’s own revenue, not the sector total. Store counts, investment and capitalization come from the economic press and the parent’s annual report, cited below.

All information concerns legal entities and is public. This analysis describes what the financial statements show; management explanations are readings, not claims about internal decisions at either company.

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