HMV Group Sells Waterstone’s For £53ms
Mr Mamut already owns 6% of HMV, which has issued a string of profits warnings this year.
The sale to his firm A&NN Capital Fund Management still needs shareholder approval, but HMV said the deal should be finalised by the end of June.
HMV has estimated debts of £170m and is under pressure to raise cash.
Only last month it said it expected annual profits to be about 25% lower than it had hoped.
The retailer has been struggling to cope with declining sales in the face of increasingly fierce competition from supermarkets and online retailers such as Amazon and iTunes.
It announced on Friday that like-for-like sales, which strip out the impact of sales from stores open less than a year, for the 12 months to the end of April slumped by 13.7%. Like-for-like sales at Waterstone's fell by 3.8% over the same period.
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“Start Quote
James Daunt
It is important. Waterstone's is a national bookseller. For an enormous number of places it is the only bookshop”
End Quote James Daunt New managing director of Waterstone's
* Waterstone's boss's daunting task
The sales slide has become worse since the start of the year. In the 17 weeks to 30 April, like-for-like sales at HMV stores in the UK and Irish Republic fell 15.1%, and were down 8.4% at Waterstone's.
Amazon said this week that it was selling more e-books in the UK than hardbacks, underlining the pressure on High Street book chains such as Waterstone's.
Globally, the online retailer is now selling 105 e-books for every 100 printed books.
It added that sales of e-books so far this year were three times the number sold in the same period of 2010.
Read more: bbc
