LONDON, March 30, 2026, 19:12 BST
- Simon Borrows and family trusts bought 350,147 3i shares at £25.55 each on March 26, a regulatory filing showed. 1
- The purchase was worth about £8.95 million and came after 3i shares slid 17.66% last Thursday. 2
- Action, 3i’s biggest holding, kept 2026 guidance for 4%-5% like-for-like sales growth and at least 400 net store openings. 3
3i Group’s chief executive Simon Borrows bought nearly £9 million of stock after last week’s rout in the FTSE 100-listed investment group, a regulatory filing showed on Monday. The filing said Borrows and related family trusts purchased 350,147 shares at £25.55 each on March 26. 1
The move matters because 3i’s shares are tightly tied to Action, the Dutch discount chain that is its largest portfolio company. Investors knocked the stock down 17.66% on Thursday after Action reported like-for-like sales growth — sales at stores open at least a year — of 4.0% in the first 12 weeks of 2026 while leaving full-year guidance unchanged. 2
That dependence is hard to miss. Materials released for 3i’s capital markets seminar showed Action was carried at £22.4 billion at the end of December and had generated about £5.8 billion of cumulative distributions to 3i over the ownership period; the group is due to report annual results on May 14. 4
3i’s investor relations page showed the shares at 2,358 pence on Monday, up 1.5% on the day but still below Borrows’ purchase price of 2,555 pence. That leaves the stock only modestly above the 2,299 pence level recorded on Thursday. 5
In the first 12 weeks of 2026, Action booked €3.7 billion of net sales, up 14.5% from a year earlier. France, its biggest market, posted like-for-like growth of 0.9%, against 5.8% in the rest of the business, and 3i said Action planned another dividend payment to shareholders in the coming weeks. 3
Action nonetheless kept its 2026 targets for 4%-5% like-for-like sales growth, at least 400 net store openings and a 14.8% margin. It also said it aimed to open its first stores in the southeastern United States by late 2027 or early 2028; chief executive Hajir Hajji said the region was chosen because it was “one of the fastest growing regions.” 3
In the seminar deck, 3i benchmarked Action against discount peers including B&M, Pepco Group and Dollar General. Those are the kind of listed yardsticks investors use when they read through Action’s sales numbers. 4
But the near-term picture is not clean. 3i said France was slightly below expectations in the first 12 weeks, store traffic in Northern Europe was hit by snow and cold weather, and high geopolitical uncertainty made it difficult to give a robust outlook for 2026. The U.S. plan adds another layer of execution risk, even though Hajji said Action was “strong and sizable enough” to make the move while keeping its focus on Europe. 3
3i said most of its private equity holdings and its infrastructure portfolio were still trading well. The next hard test comes on May 14, when investors will see whether France’s rebound and Action’s wider early-year sales pace are holding up. 3
