The prospect of a stock market float of Asda will have gone down well with store managers at last night’s town hall bunfight. Anything’s better than being owned by a parent company 4000 miles away which clearly wants to get shot of you.
Whether any UK investors will want to buy the shares is another matter.
Shorn of the ability to merge with another player, stuck in an industry inevitably moving to the digital leaders — for which read Tesco and, one day, Amazon — it’s hard to make any long term investment case for buying into Asda.
By all accounts, it had been trying to find a buyer long before Sainsbury’s came along, to no avail. If no private equity or trade buyers wanted it back then, why would stock market investors want it now?
Folks around the market say bankers would have to price an IPO so cheaply that the board back in Bentonville would balk.
It is inconceivable Walmart doesn’t know this. Which is probably why its executives sprinkled caveats aplenty in their IPO tosh-talk. Including the admission that the path to a float would take “years”.
A cynic might say they were using the bogus prospect of a float to buy time while they work out what they’re really going to do with their troublesome British child. Not the most transparent way to deal with unsettled employees.
London Capital & Finance latest
After years of doing little to prevent the virus spread of unregulated bond funds, the collapse of London Capital & Finance has finally provoked the regulator to do something.
Reports say the Financial Conduct Authority is pulling down the website of Asset Life, linked to LCF by its chairman Martin Binks. Let’s hope there are more actions to come.
