Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan tapped for Barnes & Noble, Waterstones London listing

Elliott Investment Management has lined up Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to lead a combined London listing for Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, a mandate that could value the book-retail group at more than £3 billion, or about $4 billion. For Goldman’s equity capital markets bankers, the deal is notable not just because another IPO is in motion, but because it would bring a sponsor-backed, cross-border consumer asset to London at a time when the market has been short on marquee floats.

The structure itself is the point. Barnes & Noble and Waterstones sit on opposite sides of the Atlantic, but both are already under Elliott’s ownership, and both are run by James Daunt, who became chief executive of Barnes & Noble after Elliott acquired the U.S. chain in 2019. Elliott bought Waterstones in June 2018 and later agreed to acquire Barnes & Noble for $6.50 a share in cash, a deal valued at about $683 million including debt. Barnes & Noble said that price represented a 43% premium to the 10-day volume-weighted average share price before the deal leaked, and by the August 6, 2019 tender deadline Elliott had secured 82.15% of the company’s shares.

That history matters because it shows how much operating scale is already packed into the prospective listing. Barnes & Noble said in 2019 it operated 627 bookstores across all 50 U.S. states, while Waterstones said it had 293 bookshops in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium. Putting those businesses into one public-market story would give Goldman and JPMorgan a rare chance to market a consumer listing that is neither a pure U.S. deal nor a simple domestic UK float.

It also lands against a difficult backdrop for London. EY said there were just two UK IPOs in the first quarter of 2026, as global uncertainty and valuation resets kept issuers cautious. That makes any sponsor-backed float with meaningful scale more important than it would look in a normal year. If Barnes & Noble and Waterstones do come to market, the transaction would become a test case for whether London can still clear larger non-tech assets when the sponsor, the valuation and the story line up.

For Goldman bankers, the takeaway is less about books than about pipeline. A deal like this can open doors to follow-on financing, future M&A advice and a broader relationship with an active owner that still has room to move capital around. In a thin ECM market, winning one transaction like this can matter as much for franchise positioning as for fees.