Who owns Morrisons? | Highstreett
Who owns Morrisons?
An American private equity firm: Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, usually shortened to CD&R, which bought Morrisons in October 2021 after a bidding war, in a deal worth about £7 billion for the shares and roughly £10 billion once debt was included. The supermarket your grandparents knew as a Bradford family firm has been owned from New York for five years.
Of every entry in this series, this is the one where the ownership change shows up most visibly in the numbers, so this page leans on them.
What actually happened in 2021?
A takeover battle. Two US investment groups, Fortress and CD&R, spent the summer of 2021 outbidding each other for Morrisons, and it ended in a formal auction run by the Takeover Panel, which CD&R won. Shareholders were paid and the company left the London Stock Exchange after more than fifty years as a listed business.
The mechanics matter, because this was a leveraged buyout: a large part of the purchase price was borrowed, and the borrowing sits on Morrisons. Before the takeover, Morrisons carried around £3.2 billion of net debt. According to the most recent accounts of its ultimate parent company, filed in 2026, net debt now stands at about £7.5 billion, including nearly £2 billion of lease obligations, and on top of that sit £2 billion of preference shares carrying a fixed return payable to CD&R itself. In other words, one of the supermarket’s largest ongoing financial obligations is to its own owner.
To pay debt down, assets have been sold. The best-known example: in 2024 Morrisons sold its petrol forecourts for up to £2.5 billion to Motor Fuel Group, which is also owned by CD&R, meaning the same firm sat on both sides of the transaction. Warehouses have been sold and leased back, and a property deal on stores has followed. Morrisons points out, fairly, that more than 80% of its supermarkets are still owned freehold, that revenue is growing again, and that its recent headline losses are driven largely by accounting writedowns rather than cash leaving the business.
Wasn’t Morrisons a family firm?
For most of its life, and more genuinely than almost any big retailer. William Morrison started as an egg and butter merchant in Bradford in 1899. His son Sir Ken Morrison built the supermarket chain from the 1950s onward, floated it in 1967, ran it for decades, and took it national with the takeover of Safeway in 2004. Ken died in 2017, and the family era ended in practice long before the 2021 sale. The Bradford headquarters remains; the ownership does not.
How did Morrisons end up like this?
- William Morrison starts an egg and butter business in Bradford. 1950s to 1967. Ken Morrison builds the supermarkets and floats the company on the stock exchange.
- Morrisons buys Safeway and becomes a national big-four grocer.
- Sir Ken Morrison dies.
- Fortress and CD&R fight a summer-long bidding war; CD&R wins the auction and takes Morrisons private in a roughly £10 billion leveraged buyout.
- Morrisons buys the McColl’s convenience chain out of administration; much of it is later written down and partly closed.
- The petrol forecourts are sold for up to £2.5 billion to Motor Fuel Group, CD&R’s other British business. Now. Around the fifth-largest UK supermarket, revenue near £16 billion, parent-company net debt around £7.5 billion, working through a turnaround under a new chief executive.
So is Morrisons independent?
No, on every axis at once: a national chain, formerly listed, now owned by a US private equity firm. Under our definition it was never going to qualify, but Morrisons is in this series because it’s the cleanest example of what private equity ownership means in practice on a British high street: money borrowed to buy the business becomes the business’s own debt, assets get sold to service it, and a slice of what you spend at the till works its way toward New York. None of that is illegal or even unusual. It’s just invisible at the checkout, and we think you should be able to see it.
The butcher, greengrocer and baker that Morrisons’ own market-street branding pays tribute to still exist in most towns, owned by the people behind the counter. Finding them is a different search, and it’s the one we’re built for.
Last verified 29 August 2026. Figures from the ultimate parent company’s filed accounts as reported in August 2026, and business press coverage of the 2021 auction and 2024 forecourts sale.