Wesfarmers paid $230M for Catch, lost $347M more, and shut it down

Five years after forking out $230 million to a couple of charmed entrepreneurs for online marketplace Catch.com.au, Wesfarmers boss Rob Scott raised the white flag. Wesfarmers decided to shut Catch down, with department store chain Kmart picking up the infrastructure scraps, including warehousing; it would no longer operate as a standalone marketplace.

Bought in 2019, Catch was supposed to inject expertise and a growth culture into Wesfarmers' retail brands while pure online operators like Amazon and Kogan looked like a clear and present threat to brick-and-mortar groups — acquiring the enemy seemed a good way to learn their tricks, even if the price tag challenged Wesfarmers' reputation as a hard-headed asset trader. The result was a case of buyer's remorse and sellers' delight: founders Gabby and Hezi Leibovich walked away wealthier while Wesfarmers sustained years of losses.

The numbers never turned: an $88 million loss in FY2022 (including $44 million for July to December), $163 million in FY2023, and $96 million in FY2024. Catch was expected to lose up to $40 million in the first half of FY2025, on top of $50–60 million in one-off exit costs. Columnist Elizabeth Knight's verdict: a traditional conglomerate's entrepreneurial acquisition drowned in bureaucracy while rivals like Amazon wrote the book and Temu gained traction.

The strategic rationale — learn e-commerce by owning a marketplace — bought a business with no path to scale against Amazon, Kogan and later Temu.

The price tested Wesfarmers' own brand as a disciplined buyer of assets, and the discipline never showed up in the results.

The culture transplant ran backwards: the acquired company's entrepreneurial edge was drowned by the parent's bureaucracy.

Even for an $82 billion conglomerate the dial barely moved — which is exactly how a $600-million-plus mistake survived five years.

Buying the enemy teaches you their costs before their tricks. A marketplace is a scale business — if you are not the major player on day one, every year of learning funds someone else's price war.

Wesfarmers announced the shutdown in January 2025: Catch ceases as a standalone marketplace, Kmart takes the warehousing infrastructure, and the group books $50–60 million in one-off costs. Wesfarmers shareholders showed few tears; the exit ended a strategic experiment the company would, in Knight's words, rather forget.