• What Wolseley Does
• What Sets Us Apart
• The History of Wolseley
• The Board
• Key facts about Wolseley and its companies
• FAQ's
• Annual Report and Accounts

Key facts about Wolseley and its companies

olseley operates in 27 countries throughout Europe and North America with its global headquarters near London, UK. It employs around 79,000 people with more than 5,000 branches worldwide.

Key facts

• We are the World's number one heating and plumbing distributor to the professional market .
• A leading supplier of building materials.
• We have operations in 27 countries.
• We maintain more than 5,000 branches worldwide.
• We have around 79,000 employees.
• We're in the UK FTSE top 50 with a market capitalization of approximately £7 billion.
• We had £16.2 billion of sales and £877 million of trading profit in the year to 31 July 2007.
• We are London Stock Exchange and listed.
• Our Global headquarters is in Reading, UK .

What makes us different?

olseley plc aims each year to achieve 10% or higher for our sales growth figures whenever we report to the market – 5% coming from organic growth, through factors such as product expansion, service expansion, branch openings and expanding our customer base. The other 5% will come from new acquisitions, which brings us new customers, new business segments and geographic expansion. In addition we are aiming for a higher rate of profit growth, than sales growth, each year.

Growth is one of Wolseley’s key strategic drivers and it requires all of our operating businesses around the world to concentrate on organic growth through new store and distribution centre openings as well as the efforts of our M&A teams in acquiring new companies to grow the business as a whole.

Incredible sale and profits growth has been achieved over the last 20 years. Our business has doubled in size every 5 to 7 years over the last 20…

This impressive performance is appreciated by all our stakeholders, from employees, customers and suppliers to investors and the communities in which we operate.

We have a huge number of suppliers that we are able to source products from around the world. Our top 50 alone supply us with 1000s of different product lines.

As international companies our suppliers can often supply to many of our operating companies in different countries. Wolseley and its customers therefore benefit as we leverage our international position and provide cost savings through bulk buying.