Deal extends AO’s reach beyond white goods into adjacent categories
The online electricals retailer AO World has completed the acquisition of the British camera retailer Jessops from the entrepreneur Peter Jones, the company said on Thursday. AO purchased the entire business, including Jessops’ seven remaining UK stores, for an undisclosed sum, with the deal funded from existing cash resources.
The acquisition is part of AO’s push to expand beyond the categories for which it is best known — white goods, mobile phones, and televisions — and into other types of electricals. “[The deal] supports our strategy of expanding into adjacent categories, giving customers and members more reasons to shop with AO and increase our share of wallet,” AO World said.
Jessops brings a “trusted brand and specialist expertise in cameras and optical technology,” AO said. Its re-commerce arm, Camera Jungle, which specialises in buying and selling secondhand digital cameras, lenses, and photography accessories, is “highly complementary to our existing musicMagpie operations and further strengthens our circular economy credentials,” according to the company. AO bought musicMagpie — a buyer and seller of used smartphones, tablets, consoles, video games, CDs, and DVDs — in December 2024.
The company said it expected Jessops to grow over the next 12 months as it leverages AO’s scale, web traffic, and operational expertise.
Jessops posted a 6.5% rise in revenues to £19.8m last year and recorded a pre-tax loss of £1m, down from £1.17m in 2024, according to its most recently filed accounts at Companies House.
Founded in 1935 by Frank Jessop in Leicester, Jessops has endured a troubled history over the past two decades and has called in administrators three times. Jones’s PJ Investment Group bought the chain out of administration in 2013. By 2021 the business had been left with 17 shops after being hit hard by Covid lockdown restrictions.
Jones, who made most of his £400m fortune selling mobile phones, bought the Jessops brand in January 2013 to run it as a purely online retailer and did not buy its 187 physical stores. More than 1,370 staff were made redundant at the time. Jones later reopened dozens of stores, but the company entered administration a second time in 2019 and again in 2021.
John Roberts, AO’s founder and chief executive, said: “I am delighted to welcome Jessops into the AO family and look forward to growing the existing business as well as integrating the category into the wider AO business.”
Roberts started AO in 2000 after making a £1 bet in a pub with a friend that he could change the way white goods were bought over the internet. The Guardian has contacted Jones for comment.