Portuguese retail group Sonae’s first-quarter 2026 report — released in mid-May — quietly confirms what has been building since the takeover of Helsinki-listed Musti Group last year: a Portuguese-controlled platform is now the largest pet-care retailer in the Nordics, and its fastest-growing leg is Norway. Musti Group posted €138.5 million in net sales for Q1 2026, up 15.6% year-on-year, with Norway revenue rising 25.5% to roughly €24 million.
The headline number behind the Norway surge is small in absolute terms but strategically loud: on 18 February 2026, Musti completed the acquisition of Petco Retail AS, a three-store Norwegian pet-care operator with about €3 million in annual sales, for roughly €2.3 million. The deal lands inside a market that Musti already leads under the “Musti” banner in Norway, alongside “Musti ja Mirri” in Finland, “Arken Zoo” in Sweden, “Pet City” in the Baltics, and now “ZU” in Portugal.
The Portuguese ownership stack — and where ZU fits
Sonae — the Maia-headquartered family-controlled group built on Continente supermarkets and a long tail of retail formats — led the public-to-private take-private of Musti Group Oyj from the Helsinki exchange in 2024 alongside private-equity partners. The Q1 2026 report is the first full quarter in which Musti runs as both a Nordic-Baltic pet-retail platform and an Iberian one: the December acquisition of MC’s ZU chain — 65 stores in Portugal, 24 with integrated veterinary clinics, 348 employees — was concluded at a transaction price of €13.5 million. The MC sale-and-Musti-purchase is reported in Sonae’s consolidated accounts as an internal reorganisation: the Portuguese chain leaves MC, the Portuguese-controlled Nordic platform absorbs it, and the group’s pet-care exposure consolidates inside Musti.
For the corridor, that turns ZU from a Portuguese-only retail name into the seventh country in a Musti network that the group itself describes as 474 pet stores, 54 clinics and 196 spas. Reverse-flow distribution — Portuguese private-label SKUs or imported references from Iberian suppliers feeding the Nordic store base — is the part the Q1 2026 report does not yet quantify, but it is the part Nordic pet-food and accessory suppliers should be watching most closely.
Norway: the engine room
Norway’s 25.5% Q1 growth outpaced every other Musti market in the quarter. The combination is hard to ignore: a market the group already leads, an in-quarter bolt-on (Petco Retail) that consolidates three small competitors, and a wider Norwegian consumer-spending backdrop that has held up better than Sweden’s. The Norway P&L now sits inside a Portuguese-controlled holding structure that has clear capital to keep buying — Sonae has previously signalled that pet-care will sit at the centre of its 2025–2027 cycle as it pivots from Iberian conglomerate to European platform specialist.
The flip side: Musti’s consolidated net loss widened slightly to €3.8 million in Q1 2026, up from €3.5 million a year earlier. That gap is small relative to the group’s revenue base and is explicable by integration costs (Petco Retail and ZU both closed in the quarter or just before it), but it is worth flagging for anyone treating the Norway/Nordic story as pure top-line momentum. The platform is investing into the consolidation, not yet harvesting it.
Why this matters for the corridor
Sonae through Musti is now the single clearest example of Portuguese industrial-and-retail capital owning the Nordic mid-market. The corridor narrative still skews to Nordic capital entering Portugal — Stegra at Sines, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Nortada offshore wind, JYSK’s store roll-out, Nordea’s Oeiras hub. The Sonae–Musti structure is the most concrete piece of capital flowing the other way: a Maia-based parent operating a Nordic-listed take-private subsidiary with stores in Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo, Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius and, since December, Lisbon and Porto.
For Portuguese suppliers — pet-food private-label producers, accessory brands, food-grade manufacturers from the Aveiro and Leiria clusters — the platform is now a structurally interesting Nordic distribution channel that does not require a separate Stockholm or Helsinki entity. For Nordic suppliers looking south, the inverse is true: an established Iberian retail footprint inside a group they already supply.
What to watch over the next three quarters: whether Musti makes a second Norwegian or Swedish bolt-on (Petco Retail is small enough that the playbook is clearly to consolidate more), whether the group breaks out ZU’s Portuguese contribution distinctly in H1, and whether Sonae signals an additional capital injection at the half-year. The Norway number alone justifies the pet-care thesis; what happens to Portugal inside the group is the corridor question.