Frasers Group's stake in MySale edges closer to 60%

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Oct 17, 2022

Frasers Group is edging ever closer to its goal of owning Australia and New Zealand-based close-out business MySale and on Monday it reported that it now controls well over half of the shares.

It’s bought a further 65,385,488 shares and this means that on settlement, it will own 580,104,135 MySale shares in total. That represents 55.8% of the firm’s issued share capital.

It’s still well short of full ownership, of course, and the process to get shareholders to accept its 2p-a-share offer does seem painfully slow. But the MySale board last week changing tack and recommending the offer that it had earlier said undervalued the company looks like it’s had an impact.

Frasers Group — which owns Flannels, Jack Wills, House of Frasers and Sports Direct, among other businesses — launches its mandatory cash offer for MySale in late September.

That came after the UK firm had increased its stake to almost 29% back in June.

Then it said in early August that it wanted to buy the whole firm as it “has extensive ambitions to grow its business outside of the UK and is exploring the potential for further international expansion through acquisitions, joint ventures and organic openings”.

Buying MySale would “increase its presence in Australia and the surrounding regions at a faster rate than via organic growth”.

Importantly too, it said the nature of MySale’s business would be complementary to that of the existing Frasers Group, “including providing the opportunity to clear end-of-line products via MySale's established clearance channel. This pipeline will be further enhanced by the benefits of counter seasonality between the European and Australian climates”.