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After Solid Earnings, Here Are 5 Fun Facts About Home Depot
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Home Depot (HD - Free Report) reported strong first quarter earnings on Tuesday, with sales up 4.9% year-over-year to $23.9 billion. The home improvement giant posted net earnings of $2 billion and reaffirmed its fiscal 2017 guidance, which calls for sales growth of 4.6%.
While many other big retail chains have struggled over the past few years as e-commerce sites push further and further into the market, Home Depot has remained resilient. In fact, the company has been on a meteoric rise throughout the decade—and in the last seven years in particular. On Aug. 1, 2010 the company’s stock was trading at $27 per share. Today, shares of Home Depot hover at nearly $160.
One of the biggest reasons for the massive growth is the home improvement company’s continued focus and commitment to its do-it-yourself model.
With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at 5 facts you might not know about Home Depot and its history.
1: Its’ Founders Were Laid Off From a Hardware Store Before Starting the Company
Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank founded Home Depot in 1978 in Atlanta, Georgia after the two were fired from a local hardware store. The company opened its first two locations on June 22, 1979. At the time, the big-box store’s 60,000 square foot spaces were too big for the company’s actual inventory, so Marcus and Blank packed the stores’ upper shelves with empty boxes and even purposely nicked up the floors and shelves to give their new company a warehouse appeal. Home Depot began trading on the NYSE on April 19, 1984.
2: Current Retail Success
Today, Home Depot is the largest home improvement retailer in the world, operating more than 2,200 stores in the U.S., Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces, and Mexico. In 2004, Home Depot bought Home Mart Mexico, which helped it almost double its locations south of the border.
The company’s current market cap rests at $190.71 billion, far above rival Lowe’s (LOW - Free Report) at $73.55 billion.
3: Failed Expansions
In the mid-2000s, Home Depot tried to expand its business in multiple ways. First, the company announced in 2005 its plans to open convenience stores located in the parking lots of its big-box locations in order to attract more customers. The original plan was to open 300 Home Depot Fuel convenience stores by 2010. Home Depot opened a few locations in Tennessee and Georgia, but the original plan for mass expansion never materialized and the company moved on relatively quickly from the convenience store push to focus on its core business.
In December 2006, Home Depot announced it had purchased Chinese home improvement retailer The Home Way. The move provided the company 12 stores in six cities, right off the bat. But the move into China didn’t last long, and by 2012 the company had closed nearly all of its Chinese locations, conceding that it misread the market’s appetite for its DIY mantra.
4: Strong Connection to Sports
From 1992 to 2009, Home Depot employed hundreds of Olympic athletes and hopefuls. The idea was simple: give athletes a steady paycheck and flexible hours while they work towards their expensive and time consuming Olympic dreams. Home Depot was also a long-time sponsor one of NASCAR’s most popular drivers, Tony Stewart.
Home Depot’s co-founder Arthur Blank has owned the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons since 2002 after he stepped away from a more formal role at the company. Blank recently purchased one of Major League Soccer’s newest franchises, Atlanta United FC, which made its league debut in 2017.
The home improvement company will soon debut its new Home Depot Backyard park and tailgate center. According to the company’s website, the space will “feature unique arts, entertainment and cultural experiences that will bring together local residents” located directly next to Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium—United FC and the Falcons’ brand new state-of-the-art home.
5: Commitment to Sustainability
According to Home Depot itself, the company got a huge environmental wake up call in 1998 when protesters converged on the company’s Atlanta support center with signs reading, “stop selling old growth wood.” The complaints were levied at Home Depot for its use of lumber from environmentally fragile forests.
Since then, the company has strived to become a better environmental actor. By 2007, Home Depot had pushed to label a decent amount of its products to note what goods were manufactured with energy conservation, sustainable forestry, and clean water practices in mind. In a four-year span from 2010 to 2014, Home Depot reduced its in-stores energy use by 30%.
Today the company sources less than 0.15% of wood from the Brazilian Amazon. It now gets 94% of its lumber from North America. Home Depot earned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year Award” in 2013, 2014, and 2015. The company also recently won the EPA’s “WaterSense Partner” and “SmartWay Excellence” awards for its sustainable practices.
Home Depot sold more Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood than any other North American company in 2014.
The company sold 161 million ENERGY STAR-certified products in 2016—amounting to over $903 million in energy savings, also reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 4.9 million metric tons. The “WaterSense” products the company sells helped saved almost 76 billion gallons of water in 2016.
As you can see, sustainability is just one of the many defining characteristics of Home Depot—a brand that has etched its name into the fabric of American retail history.
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After Solid Earnings, Here Are 5 Fun Facts About Home Depot
Home Depot (HD - Free Report) reported strong first quarter earnings on Tuesday, with sales up 4.9% year-over-year to $23.9 billion. The home improvement giant posted net earnings of $2 billion and reaffirmed its fiscal 2017 guidance, which calls for sales growth of 4.6%.
While many other big retail chains have struggled over the past few years as e-commerce sites push further and further into the market, Home Depot has remained resilient. In fact, the company has been on a meteoric rise throughout the decade—and in the last seven years in particular. On Aug. 1, 2010 the company’s stock was trading at $27 per share. Today, shares of Home Depot hover at nearly $160.
One of the biggest reasons for the massive growth is the home improvement company’s continued focus and commitment to its do-it-yourself model.
With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at 5 facts you might not know about Home Depot and its history.
1: Its’ Founders Were Laid Off From a Hardware Store Before Starting the Company
Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank founded Home Depot in 1978 in Atlanta, Georgia after the two were fired from a local hardware store. The company opened its first two locations on June 22, 1979. At the time, the big-box store’s 60,000 square foot spaces were too big for the company’s actual inventory, so Marcus and Blank packed the stores’ upper shelves with empty boxes and even purposely nicked up the floors and shelves to give their new company a warehouse appeal. Home Depot began trading on the NYSE on April 19, 1984.
2: Current Retail Success
Today, Home Depot is the largest home improvement retailer in the world, operating more than 2,200 stores in the U.S., Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces, and Mexico. In 2004, Home Depot bought Home Mart Mexico, which helped it almost double its locations south of the border.
The company’s current market cap rests at $190.71 billion, far above rival Lowe’s (LOW - Free Report) at $73.55 billion.
3: Failed Expansions
In the mid-2000s, Home Depot tried to expand its business in multiple ways. First, the company announced in 2005 its plans to open convenience stores located in the parking lots of its big-box locations in order to attract more customers. The original plan was to open 300 Home Depot Fuel convenience stores by 2010. Home Depot opened a few locations in Tennessee and Georgia, but the original plan for mass expansion never materialized and the company moved on relatively quickly from the convenience store push to focus on its core business.
In December 2006, Home Depot announced it had purchased Chinese home improvement retailer The Home Way. The move provided the company 12 stores in six cities, right off the bat. But the move into China didn’t last long, and by 2012 the company had closed nearly all of its Chinese locations, conceding that it misread the market’s appetite for its DIY mantra.
4: Strong Connection to Sports
From 1992 to 2009, Home Depot employed hundreds of Olympic athletes and hopefuls. The idea was simple: give athletes a steady paycheck and flexible hours while they work towards their expensive and time consuming Olympic dreams. Home Depot was also a long-time sponsor one of NASCAR’s most popular drivers, Tony Stewart.
Home Depot’s co-founder Arthur Blank has owned the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons since 2002 after he stepped away from a more formal role at the company. Blank recently purchased one of Major League Soccer’s newest franchises, Atlanta United FC, which made its league debut in 2017.
The home improvement company will soon debut its new Home Depot Backyard park and tailgate center. According to the company’s website, the space will “feature unique arts, entertainment and cultural experiences that will bring together local residents” located directly next to Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium—United FC and the Falcons’ brand new state-of-the-art home.
5: Commitment to Sustainability
According to Home Depot itself, the company got a huge environmental wake up call in 1998 when protesters converged on the company’s Atlanta support center with signs reading, “stop selling old growth wood.” The complaints were levied at Home Depot for its use of lumber from environmentally fragile forests.
Since then, the company has strived to become a better environmental actor. By 2007, Home Depot had pushed to label a decent amount of its products to note what goods were manufactured with energy conservation, sustainable forestry, and clean water practices in mind. In a four-year span from 2010 to 2014, Home Depot reduced its in-stores energy use by 30%.
Today the company sources less than 0.15% of wood from the Brazilian Amazon. It now gets 94% of its lumber from North America. Home Depot earned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year Award” in 2013, 2014, and 2015. The company also recently won the EPA’s “WaterSense Partner” and “SmartWay Excellence” awards for its sustainable practices.
Home Depot sold more Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood than any other North American company in 2014.
The company sold 161 million ENERGY STAR-certified products in 2016—amounting to over $903 million in energy savings, also reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 4.9 million metric tons. The “WaterSense” products the company sells helped saved almost 76 billion gallons of water in 2016.
As you can see, sustainability is just one of the many defining characteristics of Home Depot—a brand that has etched its name into the fabric of American retail history.
5 Trades Could Profit ""Big-League"" from Trump Policies
If the stocks above spark your interest, wait until you look into companies primed to make substantial gains from Washington's changing course.
Today Zacks reveals 5 tickers that could benefit from new trends like streamlined drug approvals, tariffs, lower taxes, higher interest rates, and spending surges in defense and infrastructure. See these buy recommendations now >>