Waterstones IPO slips to 2027 as banks wait
Bloomberg reported Elliott's bankers, including Goldman and JPMorgan, have lined up the London listing but Citi says most UK candidates are now deferring to 2027.
Elliott Management has selected banks and a chairman for a planned London IPO of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, but the outlet reported the listing will not happen this year and Waterstones has reportedly slipped to 2027. Bloomberg reported on 7 May that Elliott had lined up Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan to arrange a combined London listing of the two chains, after Sky News reported in April that Goldman, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley were all in contention and valued the bookseller at around £2bn. On 1 July, Michael Roney, chairman of Next and former chief executive of Bunzl, became non-executive chairman of the holding company, Waterstones Barnes & Noble Ltd.
Bloomberg reported on 13 July that Waterstones was among a group of UK listing hopefuls considering deferral to 2027, with Citi's head of UK investment banking quoted saying most candidates would now wait; Waterstones was said to be eyeing early 2027, after Christmas trading. Autumn FT-sourced roundups have listed Waterstones among London listings that have been postponed. The outlet noted no filing, prospectus or announced date exists, and it is not established whether a combined float with Barnes & Noble would be deferred as a single unit. Sky News had earlier warned that Middle East market volatility could push the float into the following year.
Here's what eight months of bank-shuffling tells me: this float is being built to look safe, not to look exciting. A Next chairman, an income-stock pitch, a bookseller that's also 107 stationery stores — that's not a company racing to market, that's a company waiting for the market to stop being scared. Watch the word "deferred." Delayed and dead are different animals, but nobody's told you which one this is yet, including Elliott.
There's no cheque coming from this one, but there's still something for you to clock: how the story is being told.
The pitch Elliott and Daunt are building isn't "books are back." It's "steady, dividend-paying retailer, think Next, not NASDAQ." That's a deliberate choice, and it matters because it tells you what kind of evidence they're going to lean on when they finally do file — predictability, not growth. For authors watching store counts as a proxy for how publishing is doing, this is your reminder that those numbers include 107 Paper Source gift shops alongside roughly 712 Barnes & Noble and 320 Waterstones stores. A rising store count is not the same as rising books sold. It can just as easily mean a bigger company buying up independents, which consolidates shelf space rather than creating new readers.
So what do you actually do with this? Nothing urgent — there's no filing, no prospectus, no date. But keep this on your watch list for 2027, not 2026. When a prospectus does land, that's the document that will tell you how much of this company's revenue is actually books. If Paper Source and gifts make up a meaningful slice, "bookselling stock" is marketing, not accounting, and that's worth knowing before anyone treats a B&N-Waterstones IPO as a referendum on reading itself.
For now: don't let anyone — including me — tell you this float validates a reading boom. Store openings measure real estate deals, not readers. The actual test is the one nobody's published yet: what the cash flow looks like when someone has to put a number on it for investors.
From the Coral Wire edition of Mon, Oct 26 2026 · Coral Index 22/100 (Storm warning)