The Hut prices IPO at £5 a share

The Hut Group price its shares at £5 each as it prepared for the biggest initial public offering of a UK company since 2013.

The offer will value the online beauty and nutrition retailer at £4.5bn excluding offer proceeds, implying a market value of £5.4bn when the shares start trading.

The company will offer about 374m new shares making the total offer worth £1.87bn. It includes 184m new shares, raising gross funds of about £920m. Existing shareholders will sell stock worth about £950m.

The Hut said San Francisco-based Dragoneer Investment Group had agreed to buy £50m shares at the offer price, joining other investors such as BlackRock and Janus Henderson and taking the commitment from cornerstone investors to £615m.

The company is one of the few to opt for an IPO in London in 2020 amid choppy markets caused by the Covid-19 crisis. Its offer will be the biggest since Royal Mail's privatisation in 2013.

The Hut, based in Manchester, owns the Lookfantastic beauty website and sports nutrition firm Myprotein. It owns its websites, warehousing systems and a delivery network and earns money licensing this technology to other businesses.

The company, which started life as a web-based CD shop in 2004, is listing its shares partly in response to the boom in online sales during the Covid-19 crisis. Conditional dealing in the shares is expected on 16 September with unconditional dealing starting on 21 September.