• What Wolseley Does
  • Distribution and Supply Chain
  • Business areas
  • Where we operate
  • Our customers
  • Group Strategy
    • The Wolseley Way
    • Earn, Turn, Grow
• What Sets Us Apart
• The History of Wolseley
• The Board
• Key facts about Wolseley and its companies
• FAQ's
• Annual Report and Accounts

Group Strategy

The Group's strategy continues to be to grow the business both organically and by acquisition and pursue geographic, customer, product and business segment diversity to help underpin the resilience in its performance over economic cycles. 

The Group's scale, diversity, operational excellence and emphasis on customer service represent a clear competitive advantage and it will continue to invest to build on this strength. 

Our strategic direction is called "The Wolseley Way" and is key to our future success

Our strategic direction is called "The Wolseley Way" and is key to our future success.It outlines five key areas: Leadership Development,
Business Improvement, Sourcing, Supply Chain and Growth , our main competitive advantages.

Our Earn, Turn, Grow initiative reflects the strategy and the framework behind the Wolseley Way, which details the five key areas that differentiate us from our competition: Growth, Business Improvement, Supply Chain, Sourcing, & Leadership Development.

Recently, the Group has placed an increased emphasis on increased working capital efficiency and margin enhancement, in order to support its investment programme and drive greater efficiency across the business.

The initiatives in the areas of supply chain, sourcing, business improvement, leadership development and growth have delivered positive results and will continue to drive the future benefits.

The Group will focus agressively on driving the full benefit from the step-up in its investments over the last few years (and those still to come) in people, technology and infrastructure. 

There will be no change to the Group's overall financial targets of double digit sales growth and a higher rate of profit growth whilst maintaining an incremental return on gross capital employed of at least 4% more than the pre-tax Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC).

The Group still believes it has the potential to double its size over the next five to seven years in the fragemented markets in which it operates, which is equivalent to a compound annual growth rate of 10% to 14%.

The Group's business improvement initiatives and increased scale and leverage should produce a trading margin of at least 7% within the next four years, subject to buisness conditions and the mix of businesses within the Group at that time. The Board will continue to carefully monitor its progress against this target.