Frasers Group adds to Boohoo stake as it tops 17%
Frasers Group’s appetite for stake-building in its online-only peers shows no signs of fading with news on Monday that the retail giant has boosted its holding in Boohoo
The company had already become Boohoo’s biggest single shareholder in early October and carried on adding to its stake during that month, having only begun building its holding in June this year.
Now it seems that the group owns as much as 17.22% of Boohoo, up from 16.5% recently.
The Boohoo share price jumped 3% on Monday morning on the back of the news, but is still less than 35p a share, well down on the £4+ it reached back in June 2020 as e-tailers boomed during the pandemic.
The company’s total market value at present is around £440 million, putting the value of the Frasers stake at just over £75 million. Of course, if the Boohoo share price recovered to even half of its pandemic high, that stake could be worth almost six times that figure and would prove to be a very lucrative investment indeed.
But it’s likely that the Frasers serial purchases aren’t just about making money from the investment and are as much about synergies and cooperation.
The same could be said about the group’s similarly-sized holding in ASOS.
There has been speculation too that the company is interested in perhaps buying one or both of the e-tailers. But it has insisted that its moves are simply a “strategic investment”.
