Finance
Qatar cuts Sainsbury's stake to end near two-decade reign as top shareholder
Published by Global Banking and Finance Review
Posted on December 2, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 20, 2026
Global Banking and Finance Review
Company
Published by Global Banking and Finance Review
Posted on December 2, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 20, 2026
Qatar's sovereign fund cuts its Sainsbury's stake, ending its top shareholder status after nearly two decades. Sainsbury's market share rises to 15.3%.
By Kanjyik Ghosh and Anousha Sakoui
Dec 2 (Reuters) - Qatar's sovereign wealth fund plans to reduce its stake in Britain's second-largest supermarket group Sainsbury's by nearly 4%, a term sheet showed on Tuesday, ending its near-two-decade reign as top shareholder in the chain.
Qatar Investment Authority plans to offer shares at 317.6 pence ($4.20) per share in a secondary offering with JPMorgan as the sole bookrunner, according to the term sheet. Sainsbury's shares are up 23% this year and closed at 326 pence on Tuesday.
Qatar's sovereign wealth fund has been a Sainsbury's shareholder since 2007. That year its holding peaked at 25% and it abandoned a potential bid. It started selling in 2021.
In October last year, the fund reduced its holding by about 5% through a nearly $400 million share sale.
Qatar's fund plans to sell shares worth about 265.5 million pounds, reducing its stake to 6.82% from the current 10.48%, according to LSEG data. The fund would drop to the fourth-largest shareholder from first place.
Sainsbury's and the fund did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Sainsbury's, whose UK grocery market share has grown to a near-decade high of 15.3%, has said that it now expects to deliver retail underlying operating profit of more than 1 billion pounds for its year to March 2026.
It has a market capitalization of 7.44 billion pounds as of Tuesday's close.
($1 = 0.7570 pounds)
(Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh in Barcelona and Anousha Sakoui in London; Editing by Chris Reese and Lisa Shumaker)
Market capitalisation is the total market value of a company's outstanding shares, calculated by multiplying the share price by the total number of shares.
A secondary offering is the sale of new or closely held shares by a company that has already made an initial public offering (IPO), allowing existing shareholders to sell their shares.
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