James Daunt plots the next chapter for Barnes & Noble and Waterstones.

Get free updates

Register easily Retail and consumer industry myFT Digest — delivered straight to your inbox.

James Daunt, boss of both Barnes & Noble in the US and Waterstones in the UK, plans to open dozens more bookshops this year, eyeing a potential float in London or New York.

Daunt said there will be about 60 stores in the United States that will be added to Barnes & Noble, which already has about 1,000 stores across the country. The British-born bookseller plans to open 57 stores in the US and 12 in the UK by 2024 – what it calls a “really big expansion” – to “do that or more by 2025”.

Water stone In the year In 2018, it was sold by Russian billionaire Alexander Mammut to the Elliott Private Equity Group and bought by Paul Singer’s investment management firm in 2019, along with Barnes & Noble, the largest American business.

Daunt still controls an independent UK book chain, but that is not owned by Elliott.

He has run Waterstone since 2011 and has been able to see the challenge faced by Amazon, which sells books directly to consumers as well as through Kindle. There have been other rivals since then, such as Foyles, Hatchards and Blackwell. Purchased by WaterstonesThe combined entities owned by Elliott make it the largest bookseller by stores on both sides of the Atlantic.

He said it would be “logical” to watch Down One. Initial public offering Any decision on future combined businesses will depend on Elliott’s strategy. A person close to the fund manager said he had no plans to list chains at the moment, but said it was one of the possible options in the future.

For now, Daunt says he’s focused on consolidating IT and financial systems at Barnes & Noble and Waterstones into one platform.

Daunt has predicted another successful holiday season for the bookseller, boosted by the last weekend of shopping before Christmas Day.

The festive season has done well for last-minute shoppers, Daunt said, with many expected to wait until the weekend before Christmas to get their presents.

“If you’re in the ‘last minute’ game – and we are to some extent – then (. . .) it was a strong Christmas that came late because of the fall in the calendar,” he said. It was good even after Christmas,” he said.

He said there is no clear sales genre this year, selling in different categories. Booksellers tend to see a drop in sales after the January sales period, but Daunt’s new book by popular fantasy author Rebecca Yaross is expected to do business by the end of the month.

Daunt said wage inflation was “really good” for business, but backed the UK government’s move to increase national insurance costs, which was opposed by many executives in the retail and consumer industry sectors.

Instead, the most important issue for Waterstones in the UK is Brexit, he said, “It remains the biggest pain point, it adds cost and complexity and worsens our labor situation.”