UP to half of WHSmith's 500 high street stores "could face closure" if a buyer is secured for its high street division.
The retailer is actively seeking to offload its entire high street estate in order to focus on its fast-growing travel business of shops in airports and train stations.
WHSmith is working with advisers at Greenhill Investment Boutique.
It is hoped that a deal can be reached within three months, according to sources.
However, predictions for the eventual size of the chain, which employs about 5,000 people in its high street shops, range from no more than 250 stores, according to a report by The Guardian.
WHSmith is already in advanced talks to sell its high street stores, including 200 sites with integrated Post Offices, the Richard & Judy Book Club brand, and Toys R Us products.
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The sale is expected to fetch around £100million.
Potential buyers circling the retailer, which opened its first London shop over 200 years ago, include retail turnaround specialists Hilco and Alteri, along with Doug Putman, owner of HMV, and Modella Capital, owner of Hobbycraft.
However, one retail boss told The Guardian that any buyer was likely to want at most half the stores.
They said: "I can't see anybody who would want to run 500 locations of anything on the high street.
"Some sites are brilliant, but some clearly aren't."
With the average lease length being less than two years, some property experts suggested there was "an opportunity to streamline" WHSmith's operations by reducing its portfolio to a core group of stores.
The 200 outlets housing larger post offices are deemed the most likely to be retained.
WHSmith has been contacted for comment.
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The British Retail Consortium has predicted that the Treasury's hike to employer NICs will cost the retail sector £2.3billion.
Research by the British Chambers of Commerce shows that more than half of companies plan to raise prices by early April.
A survey of more than 4,800 firms found that 55% expect prices to increase in the next three months, up from 39% in a similar poll conducted in the latter half of 2024.
Three-quarters of companies cited the cost of employing people as their primary financial pressure.
The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has also warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down this year.
It comes on the back of a tough 2024 when 13,000 shops closed their doors for good, already a 28% increase on the previous year.
Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR said: "The results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting, with worse set to come in 2025."
Professor Bamfield has also warned of a bleak outlook for 2025, predicting that as many as 202,000 jobs could be lost in the sector.
"By increasing both the costs of running stores and the costs on each consumer's household it is highly likely that we will see retail job losses eclipse the height of the pandemic in 2020."
What's happening at WHSmith's?
Investors have not wanted WHSmith to spend any more money on its high street arm, which has no real growth prospects.
Russ Mould at AJ Bell said; "Exiting makes strategic sense and there have been plenty of clues it would happen one day soon.
"The travel arm is where most of the profits are made. It makes sense to sharpen the focus on what a company does best by offloading less important interests such as the high street operations."
In January, WH Smith said it planned to close 17 of its high street shops in 2025.
It has already closed sites in Bournemouth, Luton, Cambridgeshire and Hampshire.
A further 13 sites will close before the end of the first two financial quarters in:
- Newtown, Powys - February 15
- Winton branch in Bournemouth, Dorset - February 15
- Rhyl, Denbighshire - February 15
- Bolton, Greater Manchester - February
- Accrington, Lancashire - March 15
- Halstead, Essex - April
- Halesowen, West Midlands - April
- Diss, Norfolk - April
- Newport, Wales - April
- Haverhill, Suffolk - April 26
- Stockton, County Durham - May
- Oldham, Greater Manchester - May
- Orpington, Greater London - no date given yet
Which stores have already closed?
Over the past two years, WHSmith has shuttered 15 stores, including locations in Manchester, Bicester, Somerset, and Sale.
In June 2023, WHSmith confirmed it would not be opening any more high street branches in a blow for shoppers.
The retailer said opening more high street stores would "just be a duplication".
It added it intended to focus on expanding its portfolio outside the sector.
Here's the full list of stores which have closed over the past few years:
- Crewe, Cheshire - March, 2023
- Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire - March, 2023
- Bicester, Oxfordshire - August, 2023
- Manchester - December 2, 2023
- Alfreton, Derbyshire - January, 2024
- Ramsgate, Kent - January, 2024
- Oban, Argyll and Bute, Scotland - February, 2024
- Nantwich, South Cheshire - February, 2024
- Margate, Kent - April 20, 2024
- Sale, Manchester - September 2024
- Bournemouth - October, 2024
- Bournemouth Old Christchurch Road, Dorset - January 18, 2025
- Luton, Bedfordshire - January 18, 2025
- March, Cambridgeshire - January 25, 2025
- Basingstoke, Hampshire - February 1, 2025
Despite the closures, WHSmith still operates over 1,100 stores across the UK and remains focused on its expansion plans.
The retailer announced the opening of 110 new shops in 2024, with 15 in the UK and over 50 in the US.
Many of these new outlets are located in airports, railway stations, and hospitals.
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WHSmith has also introduced a series of Toys R Us concessions in its UK stores, part of its strategy to adapt to evolving market trends.
Why are retailers closing shops?
EMPTY shops have become an eyesore on many British high streets and are often symbolic of a town centre’s decline.
The Sun's business editor Ashley Armstrong explains why so many retailers are shutting their doors.
In many cases, retailers are shutting stores because they are no longer the money-makers they once were because of the rise of online shopping.
Falling store sales and rising staff costs have made it even more expensive for shops to stay open.
The British Retail Consortium has predicted that the Treasury's hike to employer NICs from April 2025, will cost the retail sector £2.3billion.
At the same time, the minimum wage will rise to £12.21 an hour from April, and the minimum wage for people aged 18-20 will rise to £10 an hour, an increase of £1.40.
In some cases, retailers are shutting a store and reopening a new shop at the other end of a high street to reflect how a town has changed.
The problem is that when a big shop closes, footfall falls across the local high street, which puts more shops at risk of closing.
Retail parks are increasingly popular with shoppers, who want to be able to get easy, free parking at a time when local councils have hiked parking charges in towns.
Many retailers including Next and Marks & Spencer have been shutting stores on the high street and taking bigger stores in better-performing retail parks instead.
In some cases, stores have been shut when a retailer goes bust, as in the case of Carpetright, Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins, Paperchase, Ted Baker, The Body Shop, Topshop and Wilko to name a few.
What's increasingly common is when a chain goes bust a rival retailer or private equity firm snaps up the intellectual property rights so they can own the brand and sell it online.
They may go on to open a handful of stores if there is customer demand, but there are rarely ever as many stores or in the same places.
The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down this year.
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