Home Depot Analysis

Home Depot (HD) is a home improvement retailer specializing in a high volume and low cost strategy. HD offers a variety of products spanning from lawn and garden to home improvement. Table 1 compares Home Depot to Lowes. HD overall market cap is more than 2 times Lowes. HD tends to be more affected by movement in the market than Lowes as demonstrated by their Beta values.

The Home Depot (Ticker: HD) is the world’s largest home-improvement retailer along with being an American Fortune 50 company. The company operates 2,259 retail building supply/home improvement “warehouse” type stores all across the United States, Canada and Mexico. The Home Depot has over 340,000 team members and is based in Atlanta, Georgia. The average store size is just over 100,000 square feet along with an additional 24,000 square feet set aside for seasonal gardening.

The Home Depot mission statement reads as follows: “The Home Depot is in the home improvement business and our goal is to provide the highest level of service, the broadest selection of products and the most competitive prices. We are a values-driven company and our eight values include the following: excellent customer service, taking care of our people, giving back, doing the “right” things, creating shareholder value, respect for all people, entrepreneurial spirit, and building strong relationships.”

Home Depot’s corporate-level strategy is one of internal growth. This conclusion was reached based on the increased focus that Home Depot has placed on growing its existing online and traditional retail operations. Between 2016 and 2018, Home Depot is expected to invest approximately four billion dollars into improvements in its online and physical retail locations in order to make both work more synergistically and grow sales (Petro, 2016). Home Depot hopes that these investments will continue to increase sales at both its physical and digital retail locations, thereby growing the company without adding significant numbers of physical locations.

By 1983 sales were more than $250 million. The company also began installing computerized checkout systems, and by 1984 inventory reordering was computerized. The same year the company acquired nine Bowater Home Centers in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. Home Depot then entered Southern California, Handy Dan’s home turf, opening six stores. The Bowater acquisition and rapid internal expansion caused Home Depot to falter and experienced the only dip in earnings in its history. Back on track in 1986, sales exceeded $1 billion in the firm’s 60 stores. Entering the competitive northeastern market, the company bought three Modell’s Shoppers World stores on Long Island. In 1989 Home Depot added 22 Stores, primary in California, Florida, and New England. Home Depot’s sales rose during the 1990-1992 recession. They opened more

Home Depot is the fastest growing retailer in the U.S. by some accounts. It has a fascinating history of innovation and entrepreneurship. The company had some difficulties in the mid-2000s that some attribute to cultural clashes. However, during this period the company was able to take full advantage of the housing boom. Yet when the bubble burst, Home Depot was forced to claim substantial losses. Despite these loses Home Depot has weathered the storm fairly well and is in prime position to take advantage of an economic recovery; if it ever comes.

In 2007, Home Depot showed $431 million in profits from HD Supply. Since the selling of HD Supply the Company acquired Ohio Water & Waste Supply, Inc. and Geosynthetics, Inc. These acquisitions operated were under HD Supply and were included in the disposition. The aggregate purchase price for acquisitions in fiscal 2007, 2006 and 2005 was $25 million, $4.5 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively, including $3.5 billion for Hughes Supply in fiscal 2006.

The Home Depot knows that they must stay on top of technology and management must be able to organize this function in a way that surpasses the competition, pleases the customers, and keep the employees satisfied.

The Home Depot (NYSE: HD) is a home improvement, construction products and services retailer operating over 2,000 big-box stores in the United States and abroad. The Home Depot was founded in 1978 by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank with the vision of one-stop shopping for do-it-yourself (DIY) customers, installation services for do-it-for-me (DIFM) customers and competitive products for the professional market. Their DIFM installation programs include products such as carpeting, flooring, cabinets, countertops, and water heaters. In addition, the company provides installation of various professional products like generators and HVAC systems.

$66.2 billion and $47.2 billion, respectively, which means Home Depot's returns were approximately $5.3 billion

Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement retailer operating in 45 states, Canada, Chili and Puerto Rico. Home Depot stores aim to serve both do-it-yourselfers and professional contractors with home improvement superstores carrying between 40,000 and 50,000 different products. Home Depot has also been listed as one of Fortune's most admired specialty retailers for the past six years. In order for companies to succeed in the competitive current marketplace they must consider not only the bottom line and their investors but also their impacts on the community, their employees, and their customers. Home Depot was founded on the idea that treating employees well is an important responsibility. Home Depot believes employees that are

Equity financing does not require repayment, therefore, Home Depot can utilize the funds for improvements or company growth. Unfortunately, Home Depot has to relinquish some ownership and decision-making authority to its shareholders. However, relinquishing some ownership means that shareholders assume some of the incurred debts and risks. Furthermore, lowering the debt-to-equity ratio enables Home Depot to secure debt financing. Since Home Depot has shareholders under equity financing, they need to distribute quarterly dividends. During 2014, Home Depot declared dividends to 132,000 common shareholders. Declaring quarterly dividends enables shareholders to invest back into the company by acquiring addition stock. “In addition to making disciplined decisions about capital allocation, we maintained our focus on expense control, which drove for higher returns on invested capital and allowed us to return value to the shareholders through $7.0 billion in share repurchases and $2.5 billion in dividends in fiscal 2014” (Home Depot, Inc. Form 10-K 2015) (Kokemuller

Home Depot 's target market is individual homeowners/small contractors. Even though the traditional ideology is that cost leadership and product differentiation business strategies are mutually exclusive, Home Depot was successful at using a combination strategy. First, Home Depot optimized the cost leadership strategy by offering low and competitive prices to its customers by emphasizing higher sales volumes with lower margins, while instituting a high inventory turnover. Home Depot successfully offered a warehouse product strategy to the individual consumer for the first time. Previously, this type of price discounting was only available to professional contractors who earned product price

The Company operates retail stores and call centers, and conducts online retail operations. Home Depot is considered a service based business. Home depot depends on people and the client experience and it also targets different markets in general.

In 1978, Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus, after having been fired from their jobs at Handy Dan hardware store, established The Home Depot (referred to as simply HD throughout the remainder of the audit) in Atlanta, Georgia with assistance from Kevin Langone, a marketing pundit, and Pat Farrah, a Wall Street investment banker. They built their first two 65,000 square foot stores in spaces leased from J.C. Penny. The young company began with a dream of offering up a retail space for the do it yourself (DIY) customer as a one stop shop for their home improvement needs. During HD’s infancy, there were several other home improvement retailers in the Atlanta area, yet HD’s creators aspired toward their goal of developing the finest retail establishment that would transform the entire industry. The founders of the company not only wanted to be distinguished from their competition, but wanted to be the largest amongst them. Mr. Blank once said that him and Bernie founded HD with the vision of creating a company that would retain the values that were important to them: respecting people regardless of circumstance, providing superior customer service, and paying it forward to the community and society that allowed them to build their empire.