Hut chief lowers firm stake after donation pledge
THE founder, executive chairman and chief executive of The Hut Group has watered down his shares in the listed retail giant days after it was revealed he was to donate £100m to charity.
It was announced last week that Matthew Moulding had informed the board ahead of the IPO in September that he was to donate £100m of shares to charity.
The move was revealed as the Manchester-headquartered e-commerce giant confirmed that its revenue surged to more than £1.6bn during its latest financial year in what has been called a ‘milestone’ period for the firm, which also saw it rack up losses of more than £500m.
The firm is one of the world’s largest beauty and wellbeing businesses and last year raised £1.88bn in a huge UK flotation as it began trading on the London Stock Exchange. It was valued at £6.8bn at the end of 2020.
Ahead of the share transfer, Mr Moulding and his wife hold 319.3 million shares in THG (25 per cent of the group) on a fully diluted basis.
It is anticipated that they will hold c.305 million shares (c. 24pc of the group) on a fully diluted basis after the transfer.
Newly-filed documents to the London Stock Exchange show that Mr Moulding’s investment vehicle, FIC Shareco, has lowered its stake from 7.74pc to 6.27pc.
Another document shows that Mr Moulding has disposed of 14,285,715 shares while a further 14,204,546 has been given the The Moulding Foundation.
The Hut Group is one of Greater Manchester’s five unicorns – privately owned tech start-ups with a valuation over $1bn – which also includes Boohoo Group, Autotrader, AO.com and Onthebeach.com.
It sells its own-brand and third-party products covering health and beauty, fashion, accessories and sport across 160 websites in 35 languages including Hut.com.
Founded in 2004 by Mr Moulding and John Gallemore with a £500,000 investment it was initially a white label e-commerce provider before acquiring and building brands of its own.