By coincidence Wolseley put out its third-quarter trading statement just as Cobham was finalising its £507 million rescue rights issue. Last Friday Wolseley stunned the market by announcing that Simon Nicholls, its finance director designate, would not be moving from the aerospace engineer.
The market was not much more inclined to like yesterday’s announcement. Although the numbers for the quarter were acceptable enough, the American Ferguson side powering ahead while growth in the UK and on the Continent shrank, the main concern was over a slowdown in the fourth quarter.
In America, industrial, about 13 per cent of that business, remains sluggish because of the downturn in oil and gas investment, though commercial and residential are moving ahead. The real headwind, though, is price deflation,