The nationals continued to report on Boots’ potential sale overnight. As covered by The Grocer yesterday, speculation over the future of the owner of Boots has rekindled hopes it could return to the London stock market. US giant Walgreens Boots Alliance, which owns the chemists chain, is in talks about selling itself to private equity group Sycamore Partners. Sycamore is thought to be keen to ditch Boots, which would put a London listing on the cards (Mail Online).
The Independent noted that Walgreens operates 12,000 stores around the world including its 1,900-strong Boots network. It bought a share of Boots in 2012 and fully took over the brand in 2015. Since buying Staples in 2017, it has closed more than a quarter of its stores in the US, going from 1,255 in that year to under 900 today. Boots has outperformed much of the rest of the business, which could make it the target of another sale.
News sites also covered doughnut-maker Krispy Kreme’s cyber security attack, which has disrupted its online operations, including online orders, in parts of the US. In a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, Krispy Kreme said it had been notified on November 29 of “unauthorised activity” in part of its IT systems, which it had taken steps to contain and remediate. As a result, it was “experiencing certain operational disruptions, including with online ordering”, but stores remained open (FT).
Reuters noted that shares of the company were down about 2% in premarket trading. Krispy Kreme said the expected costs related to the incident, including the loss of revenue from digital sales, were “reasonably likely to have a material impact” on its results of operations.
Meanwhile, the Post Office scandal continues to generate headlines. Sky News reported police are investigating “dozens of people” at the Post Office and Fujitsu, as confirmed by commander Stephen Clayman, leading Operation Olympos. A team of 100 officers nationwide are looking at potential suspects and their involvement in the Post Office scandal.
Three suspects have already been interviewed under caution and there are plans to interview others next year, according to police. However, the BBC stressed it will take some time to bring guilty parties to justice, as trials won’t begin until 2027.
The Times covered Gail’s’ potential sale to McWin Capital Partners, as reported by Bloomberg earlier this week. The investment firm is understood to be seeking to pre-empt a sale process for Gail’s, after its owners recently hired Goldman Sachs to prepare an auction of the bakery chain, leading to speculation that it could be worth as much as £500 million.
In an exclusive interview with the FT, Selfridges’ co-owner Tos Chirathivat admitted he paid “too high” a price for the luxury deppartment store. Tos Chirathivat, executive chair and chief executive of family conglomerate Central Group snapped up Selfridges and a handful of other department stores in Europe as part of a £4bn deal in 2021.
Half (50%) of people have recently been somewhere that did not accept cash or discouraged its use. The YouGov survey of more than 2100 people was commissioned by ATM and cash access network Link as part of its research to understand how and where people are using cash. Convenience stores came top in the survey as the most popular place where people used cash, followed by supermarkets (The Evening Standard).
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