Wolseley
Revenue £6.4bn Dividend 30.25p
One analyst has suggested that Wolseley’s respective operations in America and Europe, including Britain, are travelling in such radically different directions that they might as well be two separate businesses.
In the United States, which accounts for 61 per cent of revenues and 76 per cent of profits, Wolseley has achieved four or five years of decent growth on the back of the recovering construction industry.
In Europe, though sales are rising in the Nordic countries and the UK, it has been at the expense of margins and profits are falling, as they are in its remaining Swiss and Dutch businesses. In those Nordic countries, a second writedown of £245 million in the halfway figures to the end of January