despite Aldi describing itself as one of the country's top 10 retailers, and investment bank UBS estimating  its revenue will reach $9.3 billion by 2019, Australia has precious few numbers on Aldi's revenue and taxes.

That's because Aldi has registered its Australian business as a limited partnership, one of just 3400 limited partnerships with an ABN (Australian business number) in this country. Known as Aldi Stores (a limited partnership), it owns Aldi Liquor and Aldi Liquor Online,

for which no information is available through the corporate regulator.

Mark Northeast, executive director at accounting firm Pitcher Partners, said Aldi's use of the unusual limited partnership structure probably had two advantages.

One, "the foreign investor may be able to get a credit for the 30 per cent [corporate tax rate] paid in Australia to reduce its tax bill at home", he said. And the other is that

limited partnerships are not required to be audited nor to disclose their accounts to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission

(if they had to, their accounts could then be viewed by the public and competitors). Instead, limited partnerships are registered with the states and territories.

Limited partnerships are still required to lodge tax returns. Aldi says it is subject to the "same taxation rules as other retailers" and "over the past three years,  Aldi Australia has paid on average 31 per cent of our pre-tax profits in tax. Furthermore, all profits are reinvested into Aldi Australia's local operation."

But the above statement does not say anything about the profile of the expenses booked before calculating the profit - for instance, interest payments on inter-company debt or licensing fees paid to offshore entities.

No public accounts mean the the public has to rely on Aldi's own statements and estimates from market research companies, rivals and analysts. It's understood Aldi management doesn't  hold meetings with analysts. It also means the public struggles to know whether profits associated with the Australian business are being shifted or booked offshore because of Australia's relatively high corporate tax rate.

Richard Goyder, chief executive of Coles' owner Wesfarmers, said earlier this year his company did not like competing with companies that used "exotic structures" to minimise their tax.

"We expect to pay tax in the countries where we earn income, and we expect to do that because we want those places to be better places,"

he said.

In the absence of meaningful figures or interviews, Aldi puts out feel-good releases to a nation with good reason to be hungry for competition. Their media people tell us, for example, that Australians "will spend $1.3 billion on Christmas groceries this year, with the average family bill totalling $341.90".

So how much Aldi does expect to take of that $1.3 billion? Those people are "unable" to say.

The company's penchant for privacy is long-running, reportedly prompted by the kidnapping of co-founder Theo Albrecht in 1971. He and his co-founder brother Karl became two of the world's richest people; Theo died in 2010 and Karl died this year.

Aldi's line on its market share (more than 10 per cent across the east coast) and revenue (more than $5 billion) come from a year-old report by researcher Roy Morgan. Its comment that 4.2 million people shop with it in an average four-week period comes from the same report.

Unlike other sectors such as media, supermarkets are loath to criticise their rivals publicly. But they're understood to have different numbers for Aldi's market share - some say Nielsen's figure of 11 per cent market share on the east coast is about right; some say Aldi has less.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/retail/lifting-the-lid-on-aldi-20141219-11wepp.ht...