Having a diverse range of customers helped Travis Perkins’ merchanting division outperform the market in the first half of the year and achieve a 4.7% growth in revenue.
This put revenue for the first half of 2008 at £1.17bn, compared to £2.25bn for the whole of 2007, equating to a 1.7% growth in like-for-like turnover per trading day for general merchanting businesses and 1.3% for specialist merchanting operations.
Overall, the Travis Perkins group achieved a 5.4% growth in revenue to £1.67bn and a 0.2% rise in operating profit during the first six months.
“We expect to continue to gain market share on a like-for-like basis across our merchanting and retail brands which will partially compensate for lower market activity,” said group chief executive Geoff Cooper.
“Whilst the outlook is more challenging than we have experienced for some years, we have the management and resources to deal with these difficulties and position the group for further growth when more favourable condition return.”
Travis Perkins added that continued strength in the government and commercial construction markets had underwritten some of the fall in housing activity, with general repair, maintenance and improvement markets also holding up well.
