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On 2 July 2026, Attica Department Stores began trading on Euronext Athens, 21 years after opening beside Syntagma Square in Athens, and therefore becoming the only listed department store in Greece. The listing was a secondary offering: the selling shareholder offered to sell up to 29.92% of the company, but Attica itself received nothing. The offer was 3.9 times oversubscribed and priced at the top of its range for a day-one capitalisation of €192.5 million.

To understand such a move, it is important to grasp the fundamentally different nature of the Greek retail market, where the “everything under one roof” idea disappeared in one generation and was replaced by a premium proposition. In that context, Attica’s IPO is less a financial transaction than the latest instance of a tension every fund-owned department store knows: what happens to a patient, relationship-driven institution when the capital that steers it reasons in exit horizons?

A century of Greek department stores

From a department store paradise to a land of desolation

The first modern Greek department stores appeared later than in the rest of Europe, but in numbers: Dragonas (1896), Athenee (1898), Klaoudatos (1900), Lambropoulos Bros (1901), Akron Ilion Krystal (1925), Minion (from a kiosk founded by Ioannis Georgakas in 1934 to a full department store from 1944) and Katrantzos Sport (1939).

Minion, dubbed the “Greek Harrods”, was leading the pack. By the 1950s, it carried some 120,000 different products, employed around 1,000 people, and, by the 1970s, ranked among the largest department stores in Europe. Minion introduced fixed pricing, escalators, air conditioning, television advertising and a Christmas celebration in Greece that is still remembered in 2026. Katrantzos Sport was an eight-storey reinforced-concrete building with sixteen escalators and a separate goods-handling system. Lambropoulos completed the trio: “meet me at Lambropoulos” was a common sentence in the city, thanks to Greece’s first climate-controlled entrance, introduced in 1965.

A dramatic break occurred on the 19th of December 1980, with a coordinated arson in Minion, which was destroyed, and Katrantzos, which partially collapsed. Combined damage was estimated at roughly two billion drachmas (€133m adjusted for inflation, as of 2026), against which Minion was reportedly insured for only a fraction. The terrorist action was claimed by a previously unknown group, the “October ’80 Revolutionary Organisation” and the case was never solved.

A second wave followed from June to July 1981, damaging Klaoudatos, Athenee, Dragonas and, in Piraeus, Lambropoulos. In hindsight, according to the Greek press at the time, these firebombings “ended the era of Greek-owned department stores and cleared the way for foreign multinational retailers.” This sequence of events radically differentiates the Greek market from others. Elsewhere in Europe, department stores lost ground slowly, to malls, to fast fashion, to changing city centres, and had two or three decades to adapt or fail. In Greece, the format was removed at its commercial peak, in eighteen months, before that competitive pressure ever arrived. The malls and the fast-fashion chains came afterwards, into space that was already empty.

Minion never recovered: debt-laden after the fire, it was nationalised in 1983, bought back by Ioannis Georgakas, the founder, in 1991, and closed for good in 1998, with its building standing empty for nearly three decades. Most of the remaining department store companies went bankrupt in the mid-1990s. The last one, Lambropoulos, was sold by the family in 1999 to the Papaellinas group, and the store was renamed Notos Galleries Lambropoulos, before being integrated into the Notos group in 2001.

In the meantime, competition changed in nature: while Marks & Spencer had entered the country as early as 1978 with the support of a supermarket leader, the Marinopoulos family, Zara opened on Ermou in the mid-1990s, and H&M in 2007, as the environment favoured new players and fast fashion, thanks to the appearance of a new format: malls. The Mall Athens, 58,500 m², opened in November 2005, followed by Golden Hall in 2008, transferring footfall from the historic centre toward Marousi and the suburbs.

Such a new environment encouraged the opening of a new department store in the city centre, Attica, in 2005, with a significant change from the former generalist emporiums that Athenians were used to in the past: it was the first curated, premium, fashion- and beauty-led department store of its kind in the city. Attica inherited nothing from Minion or Lambropoulos: no building, no company, no staff. That lineage passed to Notos. What Attica inherited was the absence: a capital city of four million with no department store of scale, and a generation that remembered what one felt like.

The financial crisis came in as a full reset

The 2010s sovereign debt crisis was, in effect, a filter that separated healthy and fragile retailers (a phenomenon the world would experience in 2020 with the COVID-19 crisis). By August 2012, nearly a third of the shops in central Athens’ prime commercial triangle stood empty, and vacancy on top-tier streets such as Ermou ran near 10%. By 2015, store closures spiked as the recession and austerity returned, but, most importantly, Greeks, who had long relied on cash, were forced almost overnight to use cards, seeding the electronic payment habit on which the country’s later e-commerce growth would rest. The parallel collapse of the Marinopoulos supermarket empire into Sklavenitis in 2016–17 showed the shock's magnitude, while Notos entered a long managed contraction, closing its Home store in 2019.

But, as the saying goes, “nothing beats a good crisis”. In September 2023, IDEAL Holdings, an Athens-listed investment company, acquired 100% of Attica for €100 million, financed by €65 million of bank debt and €35 million of equity. By 2025, Attica operated four stores in Athens and Thessaloniki totalling roughly 69,000 m², carried close to one million products, drew some 6.9 million in-store visits, and posted a series of records: revenue of €244.2 million (+5.3%), comparable EBITDA of €30.4 million (+11%), comparable pre-tax profit of €23.6 million (+19%), and net cash of €40.7 million, including €10.8 million of card receivables. In parallel, in April 2025, the Minion building reopened, not as a department store but as a mixed-use complex, with offices, planned apartments and a Zara flagship as its retail anchor.

However, things did not end up rosy for everyone: in May 2026, the owners of the Notos building declined to renew the lease, setting its permanent closure for 31 August 2026.

The current state of the Greek market and why Attica went public

When listing in 2026, Attica was navigating a healthier market, as the rents on Ermou (Athens’ high street) suggested: while they collapsed to roughly €1,800 per square metre per year in 2013 (the 31st most expensive street globally), by 2025 they had recovered to around €3,720 per square metre per year (the 15th most expensive globally and 6th in Europe). In top-tier streets (Ermou, Kolonaki, Glyfada), vacancies fell from around 10% in 2015 to under 5% by 2025. A tourism boom and the return of international brands to the centre drove this recovery.

In parallel, although Greek customers were already accustomed to e-commerce (a €9-10 bn annual market in 2025), the market has room to grow, as online retail still accounts for a high-single-digit share of total business, which is low by Western European standards. Fashion is the largest online category, an opportunity for Attica. However, two features of the Greek market make the digital opportunity harder than it looks:

• A large share of online spend leaks abroad: Temu and Shein capture a substantial portion of Greek fashion demand, and the largest domestic player by volume is the Skroutz marketplace, not a traditional retailer.
• Greek shoppers research heavily and abandon carts at rates around 75%, rewarding operators with deep CRM and logistics rather than a mere transactional website.

Attica’s e-commerce remains a low-single-digit share of sales, though growing fast, and its stated 2026 plan leans on omnichannel, CRM, and a new beauty store. By listing, Attica effectively commits to this curve rising.

How and why Attica went public

The listing was a secondary offering: KYMORA Limited, the Cyprus-based vehicle holding IDEAL Holdings' main investments (Attica, Byte, Barba Stathis) and in which the credit fund Oak Hill Advisors then held a 25% minority, sold existing shares, without issuing new ones, and Attica received nothing. 18 million shares (29.92% of the existing) were placed at €3.20 (the top of the range). Valid demand reached €212 million, 3.9 times the public offer, for gross proceeds of €57.6 million, of which €54.7 million from the public offer and €2.9 million from a parallel private placement. Day one market capitalisation was €192.5m.

The €40.7 million net cash reported at year-end did not reach the market: Attica paid its shareholders a €32 million dividend ahead of the listing, and net cash stood at €3.6 million on 30 June 2026, two days before the first trade. On that basis, the €192.5 million capitalisation implies an enterprise value near €189 million, or roughly 6.2x comparable EBITDA of €30.4 million. That figure excludes IFRS 16 lease liabilities of about €261 million; including them would raise the multiple substantially, but precedent department-store transactions are quoted on a pre-IFRS 16 basis, so the comparison holds.  Precedent department-store transactions in the United States clustered around 6–10x EBITDA, and the banker analyses prepared for the Nordstrom take-private valued the sector at mid-single-digit multiples. In Europe, El Corte Inglés, earned €628 million on €17.2 billion of revenue in its 2025–26 year, with net debt down to 1.3x EBITDA, its lowest level in nearly two decades. Attica therefore came to market at the low end of the 6–10x precedent range, not the premium one would expect for a company with record results and a transformation plan, but the discount a small, illiquid market applies to any listing on it.

So why such a listing? Attica did not need capital: it generated €23.6 million of pre-tax profit in 2025, funds its investment plan from its own cash flow, carries no bank debt, and had enough surplus cash to pay its shareholder €32 million before listing. A capital increase would have diluted existing holders to raise money the company did not require and would have signalled a need that does not exist. A secondary sale avoids both, and allows it to crystallise value, establish a public reference price, and retain control.

This means the listing was not about choosing between a public listing and private financing, but about the nature of the owner. IDEAL Holdings describes itself as the only company listed on the Athens exchange that “invests with the philosophy of a private equity,” seeking companies with a “visible path to exit.” This is a far cry from the usual ownership in the department store industry, which lives on decade-long relationships with the brands that grant it exclusives, the buildings it makes into destinations, the customers and staff who give it a reputation, and investments whose returns arrive over years, not quarters. A controlling owner reasoning toward an exit and a public market reasoning in quarters add a new and conflicting time dimension.

The Greek market structure helps explain this. For Attica, the survivor of a fragmented market, a listing is defensive: it provides acquisition currency to consolidate a still-fragmented field, an external discipline that sharpens operations, and a governance standard no family-owned competitor can match. But the discount is the pressure. Listing below sector multiples means the transformation story Attica implicitly promised the market (omnichannel, CRM, digital experience, a new beauty concept) is not yet priced in, and someone now needs it to be. That someone is IDEAL, whose remaining stake converts to a return only if the multiple re-rates before it sells. A public company is expected to show that curve rising visibly and steadily, while a department store’s deepest work is invisible for several quarters before it pays.

Attica has to be both at once.

A Greek specificity or a foretaste of what is coming?

Department stores across the world increasingly sit inside investment vehicles, funds, holdings, family offices edging toward liquidity, and each must reconcile a patient format with an owner’s return horizon. Steen & Strom, Stockmann are two examples from the Nordic region, Nordstrom has been taken private by its founding family and Liverpool; El Corte Inglés manages a delicate balance between family branches and outside capital; in Asia companies are in the hands of giant conglomerates, and others sit in the hands of funds whose clocks are ticking. Attica is the most recent instance of that reconciliation being tested in public, with three things worth watching:

• The sincerity of IDEAL on the long range, when it says it does not intend to sell down further, but only at the end of the lock-up period,
• What happens to capital expenditure when the investment plan will meet a disappointing quarter,
• How e-commerce will aggregate, and not cannibalise, the store business.

The first data point arrived on 2 September 2026, two months after listing: H1 sales of €113.6 million, up 7%, with comparable EBITDA of €12.4 million and e-shop sales up 23%, but footfall flat and comparable EBITDA growing 3% while sales rose 7%. The same day, IDEAL announced it would buy out Oak Hill Advisors' 25% minority in Kymora for €118.75 million, on a €475 million valuation of the vehicle, taking its indirect stake in Attica from 52.5% back to about 70%: one fund's clock stopped, and the controlling owner's exposure to Attica increased. Management, for its part, guides full-year 2026 revenue and EBITDA growth of 7% to 9%, which would mean the first-half margin gap closes in the seasonally heavier second half. Margin compression in the first reported half is the second watch-item arriving early: not the disappointing quarter itself, but its shape. Attica has bet that market exposure protects a retailer rather than exhausts it. Two to three years of results will settle whether that was foresight or the moment a patient business took on an impatient owner's clock.

Credits: IADS ( Selvane Mohandas du Ménil)