A group of investors this week set plans in motion to take Hudson’s Bay Co. private, hoping to fix the business out of the public eye. But going private won’t solve the company’s biggest problem: It owns department stores, a segment of retailing that has been losing share for years to discount chains, e-commerce companies and other upstarts, the Wall Street Journal reported. Along with its namesake Canadian chain, the company owns Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor. Its stock was down nearly 50 percent over the past year before the roughly $1.3 billion takeover offer that was made public on Monday sent its shares soaring. Analysts and investment bankers say that they expect more retailers to try to go private as they struggle with the shift to online shopping. Hudson’s Bay Co. Chairman Richard Baker and his partners say that they will be better able to invest for the long term without public scrutiny and the need to report quarterly earnings. The group, which controls 57 percent of the outstanding Hudson’s Bay Co. shares, plans to finance the deal mostly with proceeds from the sale of its German operations, forgoing the need to raise a large amount of debt. Read more. (Subscription required.)
Occupancy issues are at the heart of many significant retail cases, as detailed in the ABI publication Retail and Office Bankruptcy: Landlord/Tenant Rights, available at the ABI Store.
