Octopus Group financial position

The coronavirus pandemic is having an impact on every business at the moment. At this difficult time, we’re focused on ensuring the wellbeing of our staff and helping our customers to navigate the challenging financial markets. 

While the scale of the impact of the coronavirus probably won’t be clear for weeks, if not months, we believe it makes sense, for the benefit of all stakeholders, for businesses to be transparent about their financial position.

As such, we wanted to share the following information, which demonstrates that Octopus remains in a very strong financial position.

  1. We have a strong balance sheet. The net assets of the Octopus Group as at 29th February 2020 were nearly £150m, including £75m of cash and £30m of holdings in our funds and products. 
  2. As a fund manager we are fortunate that our business model generates a high level of recurring revenues, in the form of the management fees, on the funds that we run. 
  3. We are a diversified business. Octopus invests in both quoted and unquoted assets across a range of different sectors and industries including real estate, venture capital, smaller companies, and renewable energy.
  4. We have modelled various scenarios for the year ahead which reflect different levels of potential inflows into our products. In all scenarios, even the most pessimistic case, our fund management business remains profitable.
  5. Octopus is a private business that is 75% owned by its employees. The majority of the remaining 25% is owned by people who have backed us since the start of our journey in 2000. This means we can think and make decisions for the long-term, always putting our customers’ best interests first

Our ambition when we started Octopus was to build a business that would last for generations. While we still like to think like entrepreneurs, the reality is we are now an established and sizeable business that has been going for 20 years, and we are very disciplined from a financial perspective. Octopus will never be a business which takes on lots of debt or which puts at risk the business we have built so far.

If you do have any questions, please feel to contact me directly at [email protected].

You can view our Business Continuity Plans here.