King of British high street casts a royal eye on Boohoo

Offaly man John Lyttle, chief executive of fast-fashion company Boohoo, will have been watching his company’s share register with interest in recent months as Mike Ashley, the king of the British high street, continues to build a large stake in the business.

Ashley is the boss of the Fraser Group, which owns Frasers department store and Sports Direct, and has been buying up shares in Boohoo since the summer of 2023. In December, for example, Ashley bought £3 million (€3.5 million) worth of shares to push his stake to 17.2 per cent, and so far this year has spent a combined £21 million to bring his stake to 22 per cent. Overall, he has spent nearly £85 million acquiring the shares, and his total stake is now worth about £98 million at Boohoo’s current share price.

In a statement to the London Stock Exchange at the time it first announced the spree, Frasers said that “driving growth through strategic investments was a core part of Frasers’ DNA” and that it was looking to “build on our long track record of establishing supportive shareholder positions in attractive retail companies”.

In parallel, Ashley spent much of the last year building a sizeable stake in Currys, the electrical goods retailer, and Asos, another fashion retailer.

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He has evidently gone a little sour on Currys, however, since he has trimmed back his position in recent months from 12.7 per cent to 11.1 per cent. But he has been enthusiastic about Asos, where he now holds about 26 per cent of the shares.

The big question in all of this is when Ashley will get to 30 per cent, the threshold at which an investor has to make a mandatory offer.

He’s a good distance off that with Currys, but Lyttle will be keenly aware that if he keeps up this current pace of share buying, he’ll soon reach the point at which he’ll be obliged to make an offer for the rest of Boohoo’s shares. One to watch.

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