Ocado Group plc is reportedly set to appoint a successor to co-founder and CEO Tim Steiner.
Steiner founded the company in 2000 with former Goldman Sachs colleagues Jonathan Faiman and Jason Gissing.
Now, weeks after it unveiled a new online retail partnership with Asda, Sky News reports that Niklas Heuveldop – chief executive of Vonage, a subsidiary of Sweden’s Ericsson – has been approached about potentially taking over as CEO.
Ocado Group is a builder of warehouse automation technology. John Lewis was an early backer and it also provided the tech for the online business of its Waitrose subsidiary.
Steiner floated the group in London in 2010 and in 2019, after nearly two decades, Ocado ditched Waitrose and agreed a joint venture (Ocado Retail) with rival M&S – which saw the latter pay £750 million – to sell its food instead on the online-only supermarket platform.
In February 2024, Ocado Group said M&S had withheld a final £190 million payment and threatened legal action. The situation has not been resolved and now Ocado is getting into bed with Asda.
Steiner chairs Ocado Retail, which is profitable – but the same cannot be said of the tech business.
As beauty and fitness retailer THG found with its technology division Ingenuity, R&D and robotics require a constant stream of investment and are rarely profitable compared with their retail counterparts.
THG eventually demerged Ingenuity, which like Ocado has retail clients, in January 2025 to protect the value of its retail arm’s shares, which had dropped dramatically since IPO.
Ocado’s valuation remains higher than at flotation in 2010, but that may not be the case forever – and at 173 pence today, it is some way short of the more than 2,200p it reached at the height of COVID. It is down 26% in the year to date.
Back then Steiner declared that robotics fulfilment technology was the future of supermarket trading as vast swathes of the population were forced to order from home.
However, despite securing global deals including with Casino in France and Alcampo in Spain, its flagship clients in the United States and Canada – Kroger and Sobeys, respectively – have closed their Ocado-powered fulfilment centres.
The firm admitted that in the US, people prefer to make immediate grocery orders – fulfilled by the likes of Uber Eats – and are more likely to collect an order from a shop.
The search for a successor is said to be being led by Adam Warby, who took over as chair from Rick Haythornthwaite – now chair of NatWest Group – 18 months ago.
This morning Ocado Group plc stated: “Ocado confirms that the CEO and the board continually engage in long-term succession planning and regularly engage with potential candidates.”