Sainsbury's announced on Friday, 31 July 2026 that it has agreed to sell the Argos retail chain to a company called Swift Partners for £120 million. Sainsbury's said the sale will let it focus on its main business: selling food BBC News. The company expects to receive at least £120 million in cash from the deal, paid in upfront and other payments Sky News.

Swift Partners is a brand-new company, created just to buy Argos. It was set up by three men: Richard Pennycook, Trevor Strain, and Matt Truman. Pennycook used to run the Co-operative Group and helped fix the Morrisons supermarket chain when it was struggling. Strain also used to work at Morrisons. Having two people with experience turning around UK supermarkets gives the buyer group credibility, even though they have not yet said what they plan to do with Argos The Guardian.

Sainsbury's boss Simon Roberts said the company had been talking to Swift Partners for months before the announcement. Before that, Sainsbury's tried to sell Argos to a Chinese retailer called JD.com in 2025, but those talks fell apart. The earlier attempt shows that Sainsbury's had been looking for a way to sell Argos well before Swift Partners came along.

The price difference is dramatic. Sainsbury's bought Argos in early 2016 for £1.3 billion as part of a larger deal to take over a company called Home Retail Group. Now, ten years later, it is selling Argos for about one-tenth of that price. That number does not include the money Sainsbury's spent over the years combining the two businesses, but it does make the financial outcome clear.

Argos has more than 660 shops across the UK. About two-thirds of them are inside Sainsbury's stores, and the chain has more than 1,100 collection points where customers pick up orders. Because Argos shops are so physically woven into Sainsbury's stores, pulling them apart is complicated. The deal handles this with long-term agreements covering Argos shops that sit inside Sainsbury's locations and the Nectar loyalty card programme. A licensing deal for Habitat products is also included The Guardian.

The deal is expected to finish in early 2027, but the two businesses will not be fully separated until early 2029. That long timeline shows how hard it is to split up shared computer systems, store layouts, and other setups that were built over years of working together.

Sainsbury's shares rose by over 3% on the news. That suggests investors were happy with the sale, or at least relieved that Sainsbury's finally has a clear plan to leave Argos behind.

The broader context here is that UK supermarkets have spent years trying to balance selling food with selling other goods like toys and electronics. Sainsbury's originally bought Argos thinking it could use Argos's delivery network, online ordering system, and customers to earn money outside of groceries, which tend to bring in smaller profits. The strategy now being described by Roberts flips that idea. He wants to focus Sainsbury's money and attention on food at a time when UK supermarkets are under heavy pressure to keep prices low and profits healthy. The £120 million sale price, compared with the £1.3 billion Sainsbury's paid, gives a blunt measure of how that original plan worked out. And because the separation will not be complete until 2029, Sainsbury's will still be tied to Argos for almost three more years before the split is fully done.