Southern Skies Investment Holdings has signed on to provide funding and business expertise to assist CyberCellar return to profitability and then scale to capitalise on the wine e-commerce opportunity. This was announced on Monday by Andrew Douglas, Group Managing Director for Southern Skies who has been very active within the wine industry recently.
“CyberCellar is South Africa's oldest wine e-commerce retailer and has played a pioneering role in connecting consumers with wines online for over 23 years,” said Douglas, “There's enormous value that's been created through their sales of local producers' wines during this time, something we want to ensure continues.”
The funding is through a post-commencement financing loan agreement with Publik, the company that operates CyberCellar. Publik is currently going through the business rescue process after several years of disrupted trading and aims to emerge as a purely e-commerce focused entity. Publik recently closed its wholesale operation.
“This funding is crucial to ensure CyberCellar continues to trade uninterrupted while we outline an optimal business structure,” says Managing Director David Cope, “I'm looking forward to working with the assistance of Andrew and the Southern Skies team to get our business through this process and into a place from where it can grow significantly.”
CyberCellar is positioned as SA's leading online drinks destination and is on a mission to change the way people discover and shop wines, making it convenient and accessible for consumers across South Africa.
“The CyberCellar brand and marketing has become unmissable since David and his team took over,” said Douglas, “He is an individual that's made a massive impact on the SA wine industry over his career and we know that with the right team and support in place CyberCellar can stabilise, restructure for scale and go on to achieve even bigger results than before.”
Southern Skies Investment Holdings is focused on delivering high impact sales, marketing and business intelligence solutions to the SA wine industry. Among other companies it owns wine.co.za and CellarDirect. Recently, it launched wine industry intelligence platform Vintelligence.
For more information contact Andrew Douglas at andrew@ssih.co.za.