Is Hut Group's vaulting ambition a leap too far in cutthroat online market?

The e-commerce retailer is looking for 920m and a huge valuation from its stock market debut - but there are reasons to be wary

We are invited to view the imminent arrival on the London stock market of The Hut Group, a Manchester-based e-commerce retailer, as an uplifting story of smart technology, clever marketing and endless growth. Here's a company that dodges Amazon's thunderbolts and attracts some of the world's biggest consumer companies - the likes of Nestle and Procter & Gamble - to its end-to-end" platform.

In a retail world dominated by shop closures and redundancies, The Hut Group sings a different tune. It claims the flotation will create more millionaires than any other listing of a British company, thanks to founder and chief executive Matthew Moulding's long commitment to employee share ownership.

The notion that big brand owners will flock to use The Hut Group's e-commerce platform has yet to be tested properly