Mr. Webster: Wolseley is a holding company based in the UK and quoted on the London Stock Exchange. It currently has a market capitalisation of approximately GBP2.6 billion and is ranked around 109th in the FTSE Index. Wolseley is an international group of companies engaged principally in the distribution and supply of plumbing and heating products and building materials with operations mainly in the US, representing 65% of group sales and Europe the other 35%. The company was actually started in 1889 under the name of Wolseley Sheep Shearing Machine Company, and in the early years, manufactured sheep-shearing machines. In the 1950s, Wolseley started to manufacture a range of electric fencing and various other products. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s Wolseley acquired various other engineering companies including some companies involved in heating products, such as radiators and boilers. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, Wolseley expanded its business through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions in the US and Europe. The first entry into the USA was back in 1982 when Wolseley acquired Ferguson, a distributor of building materials and plumbing products based in Newport News, Virginia. The first entry into Continental Europe was in 1992 when it acquired Brossette in France. There have been various other acquisitions since then in the US (in particular, our acquisition in 1986 of Carolina Holdings, the principal building materials distribution company), the UK and Continental Europe. Wolseley decided to exit from the manufacturing businesses a couple of years ago and embarked upon a program of disposal of the manufacturing businesses. That exit from manufacturing was completed in February 2001. So Wolseley now is totally focused on the distribution of plumbing and heating products and building materials. In terms of core markets, Wolseley is the world's largest specialist distributor of heating and plumbing supplies. We are number one in plumbing supplies in the USA. We are number one in building materials in the USA. We are number one in plumbing and heating in Europe.
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