‘Distracted’ Travis Perkins sees revenues decline as new chief exec takes action

Travis Perkins, the Northants builders merchant, has seen group revenue decline by 5.7% in its third quarter.

New figures show that, to the end of September, show that the firm’s merchanting arm is, in particular struggling, with its new chief executive complaining that the company has “become distracted and overly internally focused”.

In brighter news, Toolstation delivered a “robust” performance with growth of 2.9% in the quarter in the UK and Benelux like-for-like sales up 9.6%.

Travis Perkins now says it expects its full year profits to come in at around £135m.

Pete Redfern, chief executive of Travis Perkins, said: ““My first few weeks at Travis Perkins Group have reaffirmed that this is a business with many strengths – the quality of our nationwide branch network, strong customer and supplier relationships and, above all, an experienced team of branch managers and commercial leaders within the business.

“However, it is clear that the group has allowed itself to become distracted and overly internally focused which has led to the underperformance in recent periods. We now need to get back to a focus on operational execution – delivering great products and great customer service and better leveraging our reach and scale.

“Over the last nine months the team has made good progress on implementing cost discipline, improving working capital management and exiting Toolstation France. In addition to supporting these ongoing actions, my immediate priorities are driving and incentivising branch-led performance and motivation, identifying further ways to make the business run more efficiently and ensuring that we turn and face the anticipated recovery in the UK construction market.

“During this important period, I will combine the roles of group chief executive and managing director of the Travis Perkins General Merchant business. This will allow me to shorten reporting lines and develop our new strategy, working closely with the operational leaders of this business as well as the Group Leadership Team. I am confident that together we can bring significant improvements in performance and the execution of change.”