M&S to ‘transform online grocery shopping in UK’ with Ocado deal

M&S is paying Ocado up to £750m for its 50% stake in the JV; £562.5m on completion and up to £187.5m, plus interest, payable after five years, conditional on reaching agreed financial and operational targets.

The JV will trade as Ocado.com but access to the M&S brand, products and customer database from September 2020 at the latest.

Ocado has terminated its existing agreement with Waitrose.

The JV provides M&S with a profitable, scalable presence in online grocery, where currently it has a minimal presence. 

The Ocado OSP technology provides an infrastructure solution to automate order fulfilment. Ocado serves over 700,000 customers, offering over 50,000 products and fulfilling over 290,000 orders a week. 

For the 52 weeks ended 2 December 2018, the newly created JV would have generated revenue of £1,468m and EBITDA  of £34.2m.