Next boss Lord Wolfson sells £29m of his shares in the retailer

The boss of Next has sold £29 million of his stock in the FTSE 100 fashion and homewares chain.
Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise offloaded 290,000 shares, leaving him with about 950,000 shares in the business, according to a regulatory filing. His holding is now worth around £100 million.
News of the stake sale sent shares in Next down by 358p, or 3.5 per cent, to £97.42.
The sell-off comes after a 36 per cent rise in the retailers’ stock over the past year. Next, often considered a bellwether for the high street, has defied the odds despite the cost of living crisis and higher inflation. The company, which has made a habit of under-promising and over-delivering on its forecasts, recently raised its profit guidance for a second time in this fiscal year, after sales proved better than it had expected.
Wolfson, 56, has been Next’s chief executive since 2001 and is often credited for turning the retailer into a best-in-class operator. Under his leadership, it has grown into a multinational with headquarters near Leicester and 458 shops throughout the UK. Total Platform, its ecommerce hub, provides services that help third-party retailers to sell goods online.
The decision to offload shares is understood to be a form of “top slicing” by the retail boss, who last sold shares in January this year and before that in November 2020. His decision comes ahead of a widely anticipated budget from the new Labour government next month. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has refused to rule out inheritance and capital gains tax rises after Sir Keir Starmer warned that the budget would be painful. Wolfson is a Conservative peer in the House of Lords and was a vocal supporter of Brexit.
Analysts said company directors were restricted in dealing in shares for large parts of the year as they could do so only when internal information about a business became public.
Next published its results last week. It reported a 7.1 per cent rise in pre-tax profits of £452 million for the six months to July 27 and said it was on course to make annual profits of almost £1 billion. Sales rose to £2.95 billion in the first half of the year, up 8 per cent from £2.73 billion during the same period last year.