Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group snares stake in Australian fashion marketplace as retail swoop continues
Mike Ashley’s retail empire has nabbed a 29 per cent stake in Australia’s fashion platform MySale.
Frasers Group has snared a 28.7 per cent holding in MySale, in its latest retail swoop, it announced on Thursday morning.
My Sale puts global buyers in touch with sellers to Australian and New Zealand e-commerce sites.
London-listed Frasers said the holding would create “an opportunity for a strategic partnership whereby end of line Group products can be cleared via an established clearance channel.”
“This pipeline will be further enhanced by the benefits of counter seasonality between the European and Australian climates,” the group added.
Shares in the group plunged 2.5 per cent on Thursday afternoon.
Last week, the group boosted its stake in luxury German fashion brand Hugo Boss.Now, Frasers holds 4.9 per cent of Hugo Boss stock directly and a further 26 per cent of stock indirectly through the sale of derivatives known as put options.
The House of Frasers and Sports Direct owner poached troubled online retailer Missguided for £20m, after administrators were called in last month,
The group snapped up some assets from Studio Retail Group in February 2022, as well as pursuing a takeover campaign for the collapsed Debenhams department store chain in 2020.
Frasers are “certainly trying to position themselves as leaders in the retail industry, gathering a huge portfolio of brands,” Wizz Selvey, retail strategy guru and former head of buying at Selfridges, told CityA.M.
The group was selecting a very diverse range of businesses which cover different demographics, she added, pointing to its pandemic attempts to acquire the Debenhams’ store estate.
The Frasers Group are always looking for something that can bring additional resources or skills, or historically it has been physical space that [they] have been able to utilise within the business,” she added.
“What’s interesting about the Missguided acquisition is that is a digital-only brand,” enabling Frasers Group to reap the rewards of the Manchester-based retailer’s “digital skills.”
At the time of the Missguided takeover, Michael Murray, the new boss of Frasers Group, said the firm’s “digital-first approach to the latest trends in women’s fashion will bring additional expertise to the wider Frasers Group.”
Hargreaves Lansdown senior investment and markets analyst Susannah Streeter called the deal’s price tag a “bargain”.
“The £20m it is paying to acquire Missguided’s intellectual property is small beer, when you consider the many millions of pounds poured in during vain attempts to save it from collapse,” she explained.