DOLLARAMA 💚S MEXICO

🔎 Buried deep inside Dollarama’s Q4 earnings released April 3rd, 2025 was the company’s announcement that $DOL’s majority-owned Latin American banner, Dollarcity, will now open its “first stores” [plural!] in Mexico in the summer of 2025 [yep — this year], faster than initially planned [i.e, 2026] “as a result of accelerated planning efforts.”

This underscores Dollarama’s recent, and aggressive international push to seemingly become the World’s Dollar Store. Case in point; Dollarama’s acquisition of Australian store chain “The Reject Shop” just a couple of weeks ago.

Here’s what’s interesting; Pesorama $PESO.v – a fellow Canadian company – has been opening their “Joi Dollar Plus” stores across Mexico City since 2018/19; its founder Rahim Bhaloo understood the massive untapped opportunity in Mexico early on, years before behemoth Dollarama.

In a story featured in the Financial Post, Rahim, a Toronto-native and lifelong entrepreneur, said that he struggled for hours to find a gift bag for a birthday party that his daughter was to attend in Mexico City (where Rahim + family had moved to). And from that struggle hatched the idea to open dollar stores, which look and feel a lot like Dollarama stores, throughout Mexico City (have a look for yourself by searching “Joi Dollar Plus” in Google Maps)

Notably, Dollarama’s original governance terms with Dollarcity did not include Mexico – can you believe that? 😁 It was only recently in Fiscal Year 2025 that Dollarcity and Dollarama agreed on updated governance terms as part of the ‘Dollarcity Transaction’, which provide for, among other things, “the future expansion of the business into Mexico”.

Fast forward to today; Mr. Bhaloo opened the 25th Joi Dollar Plus store in Dec 2024, and the company plans further expansion throughout Mexico City, with a sprawling 23,000,000 population — the 7th largest mega-city in the world!

This all begs the question; could Pesorama $PESO.v be a takeover target for Dollarama in the future? Regardless, Dollarama’s now aggressive push into Mexico most likely validates the business case that it’s a crucial, and largely untapped market — but can multiple store chains co-exist?… time will tell.

(Ownership Disclosure: $PESO.v – yes)