Ocado shares fall as founder Tim Steiner sets 2028 date to step down as CEO

Ocado’s co-founder will lead the company until the 2028 financial year before moving into a founder role, the group said on Monday.

Ocado Group said on Monday that founder and chief executive Tim Steiner will step down at the start of the 2028 financial year, ending his run as the only boss the company has had since he set it up in 2000. Shares in the online grocery technology group fell in early trading as markets weighed the succession timeline.

Shares in Ocado (OCDO.L) were down 2.6% at 178.90p in Monday morning trading, having earlier fallen as much as 3.1% to 178.04p at 0900 BST.  The stock has traded between 165.7p and 397.9p over the past 52 weeks, and remains close to the multi-year low it touched last month.

A long-planned handover

Updating on its long-term leadership transition, Ocado said Steiner will continue as chief executive through the 2027 financial year and up to the completion of a succession process expected to conclude around the start of the 2028 financial year. During that period he will work with the board to identify and prepare the next generation of leadership. “Together, they will ensure a smooth and orderly transition of executive responsibilities, maintaining continuity for colleagues, clients and shareholders,” Ocado said.

Once a successor is appointed, Steiner will move into a founder role, providing “strategic guidance, deep market expertise and support to the board, management team and customers” through 2029, the company said. Monday’s statement formalises plans that were already emerging: Ocado confirmed on 22 June that its board was “regularly engaging with potential candidates,” after Sky News reported that Niklas Heuveldop, chief executive of Vonage, a subsidiary of Sweden’s Ericsson, had been approached about the role.

Steiner co-founded Ocado in 2000 after eight years as a bond trader at Goldman Sachs and has run the business ever since. The succession plan follows a difficult stretch for the group: Ocado has been cutting around 5% of its global workforce since February, and its warehouse partnerships with US grocer Kroger and Canada’s Sobeys have both been scaled back or closed. The Financial Times reported that the transition plan follows boardroom pressure to remove him.

Bloomberg and the Financial Times both covered the announcement as the resolution of a succession question that had been building for weeks. Ocado shares trade well below Wall Street’s average analyst target of 255.5p, reflecting continued caution about the pace of the company’s turnaround even as the leadership question is settled.

Ocado is due to report half-year results on 16 July, its next scheduled test of market confidence. The succession process itself is expected to run through the 2027 financial year, with the board yet to name Steiner’s replacement. For a company that has never known another chief executive, how smoothly that handover unfolds will shape whether markets believe Ocado’s long-running turnaround is finally taking hold.