Hut chief Matt Moulding in fresh social media tirade over market woes

Matt Moulding has made no secret of his frustration since The Hut Group listed on the stock market in London three years ago – on one occasion saying the experience ‘just sucked from start to finish’.

The beleaguered entrepreneur was at it again this week on social media, with another self-pitying diatribe about life as a public company.

In a 512-word lament on Linkedin, he claimed that ‘a select few within the world of hedge funds, media and bank analysts’ are trying to undermine Britain’s listed companies.

His comments came just hours after THG, as the company is now known, posted record losses of £550million for 2022 and warned of a slump in revenues so far this year.

The results sent shares down 20 per cent, a day after they soared 45 per cent on news that private equity group Apollo was considering a takeover bid. 

Shares closed up 10.7 per cent, at 84.98p yesterday as the rollercoaster ride continued.

Seen as a lockdown darling, the blockbuster IPO was the largest since Royal Mail in 2013. The shares listed at 500p in September 2020 and rose to close to 800p in early 2021.

But as doubts about the business started to emerge – particularly about its Ingenuity tech arm which was meant to set it apart from other sellers of lipstick and protein drinks – the stock tumbled. 

By October 2021 it was worth little more than 30p. Investors, including Moulding, are nursing heavy losses though he made £830million when the company floated.

On Linkedin, Moulding said London stocks have suffered at the hands of a ‘small groups of industry professionals [coming] together to try and damage UK businesses, and their share prices’.

He went on: ‘It’s sadly become standard practice for a select few within the world of hedge funds, media and bank analysts to regularly build negative coverage against UK listed companies, including THG.

‘The purpose of “the game” is simple: bet that a share price will fall, and make sure you win the bet by doing everything possible to discredit the company.

‘The more aggressive the claims & actions, the bigger the share price impact. Strange work, I know, but it pays big. And if you repeat it time and again, against a plethora of UK listed companies, then the rewards are mind-boggling.’

Such attacks meant ‘there are minimal pension or institutional funds investing in the LSE’, he added. The 51-year-old said this explains why companies had been enticed to move their listings to New York.

Disappointments for London include construction giant CRH saying it will move its listing and Cambridge chipmaker Arm shunning London for its IPO.

But Moulding said the answer was not for the Government to make pension funds invest in UK listed shares. ‘Forcing the UK public to bail out the UK market can’t be a credible solution, and won’t end well.

‘Pensions will deliver much worse returns, negatively impacting the lives of the average Briton,’ he said.

Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell, said of THG: ‘You can’t argue with the numbers when they’re laying out huge losses in black and white for everyone to see.’

She said that although Moulding’s comments raise ‘thought-provoking questions’ amid calls for reform and modernisation of London’s market, they are made in anger ‘so must be treated with a degree of caution’.

It’s not the first time Moulding has used social media to express his unhappiness. In one Instagram post, he said he and his top team now have a ‘THG against the world’ mindset.

‘The way we’ve been treated since joining the LSE has done nothing but add fuel to our insatiable fighting spirit,’ he said. Although he said he was initially worried the listing would ‘dim’ its drive, he said he ‘couldn’t have been further wrong’ and THG had felt like even more of an underdog since.

His frustration has been evident for some time. In 2021, he said an obvious lesson from his experience was ‘don’t IPO in the UK’. 

He also said having a share price was ‘like having your homework marked every single day’. 

He is not the only boss to cast doubt on the allure of the London market in recent weeks. Intercontinental Hotels Group chief executive Keith Barr said London was ‘not a very attractive place’ to list shares.

Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG Group, said THG’s dismal performance ‘has inevitably (and rightly) raised questions’ about the London IPO process.

THG was a classic example of floats being ‘seen as vehicles for early-stage investors to get out at high prices, with no regard for whether the touted valuations can be sustained’, he added.

But he said Moulding’s broadside should be read ‘more as an internal memo to keep staff morale up’ although ‘inevitably they are out in the public sphere and look like sour grapes’.

While Moulding and his team have pointed to a 9.1 per cent revenue uplift on the THG Ingenuity side of the business, there have been doubts about the division’s growth prospects in recent years.

Such doubts were underscored in July last year when a deal between the company and Japan’s SoftBank to buy a $1.6billion (£1.3billion) stake in THG was ripped up.

Analysts reckoned SoftBank would be pleased to have escaped, although IG Group’s Beauchamp added that ‘there is a strong case that they should have bailed earlier given the tough year’.