Builders Merchants Journal – BMJ Publishing to Builders Merchants and the UK merchanting industry for more than 95 years
The UK’s largest builders merchant group, Travis Perkins, saw revenue rise by 24% from £3.69bn to £4.58bn for the full year ended December 31 2021. The rise was 14.4% ahead of 2019.
The merchant group’s final year results, released this morning (March 1), also showed adjusted operating profit of £353m (including £49m of property profits) which was 19% ahead of 2019 and a massive 175% ahead of the pandemic-affected 2022.
During the year the group saw the Wickes demerger go through and also sold off the Plumbing & Heating business.
Nick Roberts, Chief Executive Officer, said: “2021 has been a year of significant operational and strategic progress for the Group, completing our portfolio actions and subsequently setting out our ambition to be the leading partner to the construction industry. Whilst the rapidly recovering market created challenges around inflation and product availability, we have navigated them well to deliver an outstanding financial performance, enabled once again by the hard work of our fantastic colleagues. The Group has built a strong platform for growth and, given robust end market demand and a positive start to the new year, we remain confident of making further progress in 2022. We continue to develop new capabilities to complement our market leading positions and we see exciting opportunities in both new and adjacent markets, driven by our desire to be at the forefront of delivering change and decarbonisation within our industry. The long-term fundamentals of our end markets continue to be robust and the Group is well placed to invest in growth opportunities to create value for all of our stakeholders.”
The Merchanting businesses delivered an excellent performance, underpinned by the robust recovery in domestic RMI demand and new housebuilding, alongside continued investment in UK infrastructure. Overall Merchanting revenue was £3.82bn, up 24.8% versus 2020, where trading was significantly affected by the pandemic, and 3.3% ahead of 2019. Factoring in the 2020 branch closure programme, like-for-like revenue growth was 28.2% and 11.9% when compared to 2019. The robust sales performance, combined with solid gross margins and cost benefits from the restructuring programme, delivered an adjusted operating profit of £320m, up 13% versus 2019, and an operating margin of 8.4%, some 70bps ahead of 2019.
2021 saw Toolstation achieve 20.2% revenue growth to £761m demonstrating the strength of the customer proportion and representing further market share gains. Toolstation has now more than doubled its revenue in the last three years and, on the back of this sustained outperformance, the Group continues to drive the expansion of the branch network in both the UK and Europe. In the UK, a net 70 new branches were opened during the year as the Group’s more focused capital allocation strategy enabled the acceleration of planned openings.
