ON TRACK: In line with its strategy to expand its presence in the contractor supply business,
The Home Depot has acquired Cox Lumber Co. of St. Petersburg, Fla., which posted sales of $396 million in 2005. Cox has 26 plants and 28 stores across Florida and joins Home Depot’s recently purchased Williams Bros. Lumber Co. of Suwanee, Ga., as a wholly owned subsidiary. The home improvement giant is seeking to make significant in-roads in the $410 billion contractor supply market. Earlier it paid $3.5 billion for Hughes Supply of Orlando, Fla. Home Depot is considering how to integrate its acquisitions and is doing branding studies to determine whether to keep the names of the supply businesses it is acquiring or rename them Home Depot Supply.
INVESTMENT: Buried in the Home Depot story was this gem, the ultimate “return on investment“ adventure: Linton Tibbetts, who sold Cox Lumber to Home Depot for an undisclosed sum, bought a half interest in the company in 1948 for $1,500 and 12 years later bought out his partner. What he paid his partner is not important, but Cox experienced phenomenal growth in the ensuing years, hitting an annual volume of $396 million last year. Whatever Home Depot paid him made his return on investment incalculable —befitting a
Warren Buffett maneuver. Tibbetts, an 82-year-old entrepreneur, came to St. Petersburg from the Cayman Islands in 1943 with just $16 in his pocket. He borrowed the $1,500 to buy the six-year-old lumber company from T.T. Cox; the first year revenues were $48,000. He said he has plenty to do and was “definitely not retiring.”
20-YEAR PLAN: In 1986,
Milliken Floor Covering introduced PVC-free carpet and that action has since removed more than 800 million pounds of polyvinyl chloride from production and ultimately from landfills; that’s enough to fill 100,000 garbage trucks. Amid rising concerns about the environment and public health, a growing number of municipalities in several states are adopting policies to reduce or eliminate PVC products. The healthcare industry is also becoming increasingly concerned and is exploring alternatives to disposable PVC products. Milliken has been lauded many times for its concern for the environment and its efforts to preserve it.
FINAL SCORE: China is a constantly growing marketplace that has garnered the rapt attention of business people around the world—both buyers and sellers of goods. That is evident in the latest, and final, figures released on Domotex asia/ Chinafloor 2006 held in Shanghai at the end of March. Asia’s biggest floor covering show played to 32,424, a 28% increase over 2005 and a record. The number of foreign visitors was up 34.8% and they came from 83 countries on all five continents. The largest growth in attendance came from North America and Australia. As for exhibitors, there were 833 this year, up from 588 in 2005—a 41% gain. And display space jumped from 46,000 square meters to 73,000. It seems the year-to-year growth of the market is parallel with the surging interest of Americans in doing business in China. I would like the venue better if they shortened the name to, say, Domotex asia, or Chinafloor.
STAR-GUIDE:
StarNet, the Commercial Flooring Cooperative, has published Moisture Mitigation Guide, a manual on handling topical moisture and pH suppression systems for concrete sub-floors. The Guide contains important information on the subject and uncomplicates some very complex issues. It discusses principal sources of moisture, open and closed slab systems, reactive penetrants, cementitious densification, specialty coatings, and a host of other pertinent data. They will never make a movie of it, but it’s worth reading, especially if you are a flooring contractor.
