Most of the major High Street retailers are expected to measure up the stores portfolio put on the block by Littlewoods yesterday.
Tesco and Safeway are thought to be at the head of the queue for the 135 sites. But other potential bidders are expected to include Kingfisher. A bid from Asda is thought unlikely.
Littlewoods says its wants to sell all the stores as a single lot and is looking for a price in excess of £600m. The announcement of the sale came Littlewoods announced its 1996 results. Operating profits at the stores division increased from £17.9m to £33.3m last year, on sales up by £31m to £479m.
- Financial Times 05/03/97 page 27
- The Daily Telegraph 05/03/97 page 31
- The Times 05/03/97 page 25, page 27 (Pennington), page 29
- The Guardian 05/03/97 page 18
