Who Owns Marks and Spencer?

Marks and Spencer has no owner. Marks and Spencer Group plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange with no controlling shareholder and is exempt from PSC reporting. The founding Marks and Sieff families sold down generations ago. The register keeps the original company alive beneath the modern one: Marks and Spencer p.l.c. was incorporated in 1926 and is still active. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns Marks and Spencer today?

The listed parent is MARKS AND SPENCER GROUP P.L.C. (04256886), incorporated 23 July 2001 and registered at Waterside House, Paddington. Its PSC page carries an exemption rather than an owner: from 23 July 2017 the company is exempt from the requirement to obtain information of its PSC because it has voting shares admitted to trading on a UK regulated market.

Beneath it, MARKS AND SPENCER P.L.C. (00214436) — incorporated 17 June 1926 — remains active as the principal trading company. The 2001 group company was created above it in a reorganisation, which is why M&S has a holding company younger than most of its stores and an operating company nearly a century old.

Ultimate parent and corporate structure

Nothing sits above Marks and Spencer Group plc. Its shareholders are institutions — index funds, pension funds and asset managers — with no holder near control, alongside a substantial retail shareholder base built up over decades.

The group includes M&S Financial Services, its long-running banking joint arrangement, and a large property estate held through subsidiaries.

Major shareholders or controlling persons

There is no controlling person. The Marks and Sieff families, descended from Michael Marks and his partners, controlled the company for much of the twentieth century, but successive share issues and sales have left them without a significant stake.

M&S has been the subject of takeover interest more than once without ever being acquired — most prominently Sir Philip Green’s approach in 2004, which the board rejected and which was followed by Stuart Rose’s turnaround.

Because the exemption applies, holdings are disclosed through FCA notifications rather than the PSC register, and no holder has approached the level that would attract attention as a controlling stake.

Official records and evidence

Companies House gives the corporate structure and the exemption; the ownership question is answered through FCA major-holdings notifications and the substantial shareholders section of the annual report.

The register is also unusually rich for M&S in one respect: it carries a long tail of individually incorporated store and property companies — Marks and Spencer (Bradford), Marks and Spencer Chester and many more — reflecting how the property estate was assembled. One of them, Marks and Spencer France Limited, was previously named after a Norwich store, which is a reminder that a company’s name need have no relation to what it does.

Ownership history and changes

Michael Marks began with a market stall in Leeds in 1884 and took Thomas Spencer as partner in 1894. The company incorporated in 1926 and floated the same year.

Its ownership has been dispersed ever since, with the founding families’ influence persisting through management rather than through control — Simon Marks and Israel Sieff ran the company for decades without owning it outright in the way a modern controlling shareholder would.

The significant recent event is not a change of owner but a change of what M&S owns. In 2019 it bought 50% of Ocado Retail for a reported £750m, replacing Waitrose as the supplier on Ocado’s platform. As this site’s Ocado page records, that makes M&S the joint owner of the grocery business customers order from, while the listed company called Ocado is a technology business that owns the other half.

Related companies and brands

The group owns the M&S brand and its own labels, and holds 50% of Ocado Retail.

It does not own Ocado Group, the listed technology company. It does not own Waitrose, its competitor, which belongs to the John Lewis Partnership and is held in trust for that company’s staff — as this site’s Waitrose page sets out, an ownership model as different from M&S’s as it is possible to be while selling similar food.