Who owns Waterstones? | Highstreett

Who owns Waterstones?

Waterstones is owned by Elliott, an American hedge fund, and they bought it in 2018. So no, it is not an independent bookshop and it does not pass our independence test.

Hello, I wanted to write this one up because of a story in Angus Hanton's book Vassal State where somebody told him they would not buy his book on Amazon because they wanted to support a British company so they said they would go to Waterstones instead, and he had to tell them that Waterstones is owned by an American fund. That person did the right thing and still got it wrong because there is nothing on the shopfront that tells you, so I thought I would just write it down properly.

Is Waterstones American owned?

Yes it has been since 2018. Elliott is headquartered in West Palm Beach in Florida although the bit of the company that actually did the buying was its London arm which is called Elliott Advisors (UK) Limited, so on paper the immediate owner is a UK registered company but the money and the control sit in America.

They bought it from Alexander Mamut who is a Russian businessman and who had owned it since 2011. The deal was announced in April 2018 and completed that June.

One thing worth saying because it is the sort of thing we are meant to get right, Elliott gets called private equity all the time including by Hanton in his book but it is actually an activist hedge fund which is a slightly different animal.

Is Waterstones independent?

No it is a chain of over 300 shops owned by an investment fund.

I will say that Waterstones shops can genuinely feel independent and that is on purpose because branch managers get a lot of say over what they stock which is unusual for a chain that size, but feeling like one and being one are two different things and this page is about who actually owns it.

Who owns Foyles and Blackwell's?

Elliott owns those as well and this is the bit that most people do not know.

Foyles was bought in September 2018 which was only a few months after Elliott took over Waterstones. Blackwell's was bought in February 2022 and that sale included Heffers in Cambridge, and Blackwell's had been owned by the Blackwell family in Oxford since 1879 so when it sold Toby Blackwell described it as the end of 143 years of family ownership. One detail on that one, Blackwell's was bought by funds advised by Elliott Advisors (UK) Limited rather than by Waterstones itself, so the shops trade as part of the group but the company structure is not a straight line.

So that is three bookshop names that look independent from outside and they all have the same owner.

Hatchards on Piccadilly and Hodges Figgis in Dublin are also Waterstones shops but they came along a long time before Elliott did, back in the HMV days. I am mentioning it because it would be easy to lump them in with the rest and it would not be true.

Has Waterstones always been a chain?

Pretty much, and it has been sold five times now.

Tim Waterstone opened the first shop on Old Brompton Road in London in 1982 and he paid for it with a £6,000 redundancy payment from WH Smith where he had worked for eight years. The idea was to stock far more titles than anybody else and stay open longer and hire staff who had actually read the books, and it worked.

Then WH Smith bought it outright in 1993 for a reported £47 million, so the company that made him redundant bought the company he built with the redundancy money. WH Smith sold it on in 1998 to HMV Media which was a group made up of EMI, Advent International and Tim Waterstone himself, and Dillons got folded in the year after that and Ottakar's in 2006. Then in 2011 HMV was in trouble itself and sold Waterstones to Alexander Mamut for £53.5 million, and that is when James Daunt was brought in to run it. Then Mamut sold to Elliott in 2018.

So it was genuinely independent from 1982 to 1993 which is eleven years out of forty four.

Where can I buy books that isn't American owned?

Your actual local independent bookshop is the answer here and it is not close. They can order in basically anything, it usually takes a couple of days, and the money stays with whoever owns the shop. That is the whole thing really.

If you want to do it online then it gets more complicated and I should be honest about it because otherwise I am doing exactly what this page is complaining about. Bookshop.org is the one everybody points at including us, and it does send its profits to independent bookshops and the UK orders get fulfilled by Gardners who are a British wholesaler, but Bookshop.org itself was founded in America in 2020 by Andy Hunter who is based in Brooklyn and who still owns most of it. So it is American founded even though the money ends up with British indies.

I do not think that makes it a bad option and we use it ourselves, but if what you care about is specifically not American then you should know that before you click, and the honest version of my own view is that where the money ends up matters more than which country the founder is from. That is the same argument I make about Greene King being owned in Hong Kong and TGJones being owned by British private equity, neither of which are American and both of which fail our test for the same reason.

Is Waterstones still a good bookshop?

Probably better than it was and I would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

James Daunt's turnaround worked and it worked by making the chain behave less like a chain, so head office stopped telling every shop what to stock and the paid promotional tables mostly went and branch managers got real control, and Waterstones went back into profit in 2016 after years of losses. Daunt also still personally owns Daunt Books which is a genuinely independent group of shops in London so he is not somebody who dislikes independents.

None of that changes who owns it which is the point of this page, but if you like your local Waterstones then you are not wrong to.

What happens to Waterstones next?

Elliott has been reported as looking at floating Waterstones and Barnes & Noble together on the stock market and possibly in London. Nothing has actually happened yet so treat that as reported intent rather than a fact, and if it does happen I will update this.

Questions people ask

Is Elliott private equity? No it is an activist hedge fund. Private equity usually buys a company outright to restructure it and sell it on, whereas activist funds normally take a stake and push for changes in how a company is run, although with Waterstones Elliott did buy the whole thing.

Does Waterstones own Barnes & Noble? Not directly, they are both owned by Elliott which bought Barnes & Noble in 2019 for $683 million. James Daunt runs both of them which is why they have started to look a bit similar.

How big is Waterstones? Around 316 shops as of 2025 with revenue of about £528 million and roughly 3,600 staff, going off the most recent accounts.

Should I stop buying books from Waterstones? That is your call and I am not going to make it for you. Waterstones employs thousands of booksellers and the shops are better than they were fifteen years ago, but if what you want is your money staying with a shop owned by the people running it then Waterstones is not that, and there is probably a proper independent nearer to you than you think.

How do I check who owns a shop myself? Search the company name on Companies House and then look at the persons with significant control register which lists whoever ultimately controls it, and it is free. The annoying part is that the name above the door and the registered company name are usually different, which is most of the reason nobody does this while they are standing in a shop.

Last checked 10 August 2026. This sort of thing gets sold every few years so if something here is out of date email alex@digitalhighstreett.com and I will fix it.

Disclosure: we earn a commission on books bought through Bookshop.org which competes with Waterstones. The ownership facts above stand up on their own but you should know that.