Waterstones plans dozens more UK stores as it mulls possible London or US IPO
Waterstones boss James Daunt has said he plans to open dozens more bookshops this year in the UK, along with considering a potential flotation in London or New York.
He told the Financial Times it would be “logical” to look at an initial public offering of a consolidated combination of Waterstones and Barnes & Noble – he runs both – in the future.
Daunt, who is the boss of both Barnes & Noble in the US and Waterstones in the UK, has steered the businesses through challenges like e-books and the rise of Amazon to make Waterstones the largest bookseller by stores on both sides of the Atlantic.
Daunt has been the managing director of Waterstones since May 2011 but has been in the bookselling business for decades, founding the eponymous chain Daunt books in 1990.
The British-born bookseller oversaw the opening of 12 new stores in the UK in 2024 — what he dubbed a “really significant expansion” — with plans to “do that or more in 2025”, he told the FT.
Daunt last explored an initial public offering (IPO) of Waterstones in 2018 ahead of its sale to private equity group Elliott, but has previously said the timing wasn’t right.
A source close to the fund manager told the FT there were no plans at present to list the chains but that it would be one of the possible options in the future.
Waterstones, which also owns Foyles, Hatchards and Blackwell’s, has been a winner of the push on social media towards reading, with Gen Z increasingly turning back to physical books.
Dubbed BookTok, an online community has sprung up encouraging young people to read books across a range of genres. It’s now the largest community on TikTok, with over 243bn views under #booktok.
In 2023, 669 million physical books were sold in the UK, the highest overall level ever recorded.
Last year, Waterstones Piccadilly hosted a BookTok festival. One sales assistant told the Observer: “I can’t stress how much BookTok sells books.
“The demographic is almost exclusively teenage girls, but the power it has is huge. We have a ‘BookTok recommended’ table – and you can tell which books are trending by the speed at which they sell.”