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Housing market downturn hammers Wolseley
The news keeps getting worse for Wolseley, one of the world’s largest distributors of plumbing and building material products, as it warned that U.S. homebuilders could face the fewest housing starts since World War II.
And the company said, in an interim statement released today, that it expects market conditions to worsen because of the continuing decline of housing starts, global credit and the weak U.S. dollar.
To give an indication of how bad the housing market is, here are just a few statistics about Wolseley, the parent of Stock Building Supply and Ferguson in the United States.
• Wolseley, headquartered in the United Kingdom, has cut nearly 10,000 jobs worldwide over the past 18 months, slashing its workforce by 10 percent. Most of those losses have been in the U.S. Today the company announced another 250 job cuts, and more job losses are expected before July 31.
• Wolseley will close or consolidate 90 branches in North America (Ferguson, Stock Building Supply).
• Shares in Wolseley have dropped more than half after hitting a high a year ago.
Steve Webster, chief financial officer at Wolesley, told Times Online: “We haven’t seen less than one million U.S. housing starts in a year since the Second World War. But you can’t rule that out now.”
New housing starts in the U.S. have dropped dramatically following several years of more than two million starts annually. That drop has been caused by the bursting of the sub-prime mortgage bubble and tightening of credit restrictions.
Wolseley relies on the U.S. for 50 percent of its sales. Click here for our news report on it.
Housing market downturn hammers Wolseley
May 21, 2008
The news keeps getting worse for Wolseley, one of the world’s largest distributors of plumbing and building material products, as it warned that U.S. homebuilders could face the fewest housing starts since World War II. And the company said, in an interim statement released today, that it expects market conditions to worsen because of the continuing decline of housing starts, global credit and the weak U.S. dollar.
To give an indication of how bad the housing market is, here are just a few statistics about Wolseley, the parent of Stock Building Supply and Ferguson in the United States.
• Wolseley, headquartered in the United Kingdom, has cut nearly 10,000 jobs worldwide over the past 18 months, slashing its workforce by 10 percent. Most of those losses have been in the U.S. Today the company announced another 250 job cuts, and more job losses are expected before July 31.
• Wolseley will close or consolidate 90 branches in North America (Ferguson, Stock Building Supply).
• Shares in Wolseley have dropped more than half after hitting a high a year ago.
Steve Webster, chief financial officer at Wolesley, told Times Online: “We haven’t seen less than one million U.S. housing starts in a year since the Second World War. But you can’t rule that out now.”
New housing starts in the U.S. have dropped dramatically following several years of more than two million starts annually. That drop has been caused by the bursting of the sub-prime mortgage bubble and tightening of credit restrictions.
Wolseley relies on the U.S. for 50 percent of its sales. Click here for our news report on it.
Posted by Jack Keough on May 21, 2008 | Comments (0)
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