Mike Ashley is on a mission. His company Frasers has this month made numerous “strategic investments” in listed rivals including Asos, Boohoo, Currys and AO World. The shopping spree adds to an investment portfolio that already included minority stakes in Hugo Boss, Mulberry and N Brown. Here’s another name for the list: Next, Britain’s biggest retailer by market value.
Frasers last year bought 1mn Next shares with a value at the time of approximately £60mn, according to data compiled by Argus Vickers, a specialist shareholding analysis service. Its data also shows that, between the end of March and mid May of 2023, Frasers then halved the Next stake to 500,000 shares.
As far as we can see, Frasers’ investment in Next has never been reported. That’s in spite of Argus Vickers-supplied shareholder data being available (uncredited) on every Bloomberg terminal.
Read the full story on the Financial Times here.