 Office
Depot
Office Depot (NYSE: ODP) is one
of the world's leading suppliers of office products and services. The
Company's selection of brand name office supplies includes business
machines, computers, computer software and office furniture, while its
business services encompass copying, printing, document reproduction,
mailing and shipping. Office Depot's customers include small office/home
office, medium-sized and large businesses located in the U.S. and in 22
other countries around the globe.
The Company sells its products through multiple distribution channels,
including over 1,000 office supply stores, direct mail, Internet
websites, business-to-business e-commerce, and sales forces. Office
Depot operates under the Office Depot, Viking Office Products, Viking
Direct, Guilbert and 4sure.com brand names. An S&P 500 company, Office
Depot generates revenues of over US $15 billion annually and has 47,000
employees worldwide. It is headquartered in Delray Beach, Florida.
Office Depot was founded in Lauderdale
Lakes, Florida (near Fort Lauderdale) in 1986 by three partners: Pat
Sher, Stephen Dougherty, and Jack Kopkin. Sher, the company's first CEO,
died the next year from leukemia. Sher's estate donated the proceed of
his life insurance policy to the help the fledgling company meet its
payroll. The company retained professional executive recruiters
(so-called "headhunters") to find a replacement for Sher. The new
Chairman and CEO turned out to be a Sherwin-Williams executive named
David Fuente.
Fuente immediately launched an aggressive nationwide expansion program.
To finance it, he arranged for an initial public offering of stock in
1988. In 1991, Office Depot expanded to the West Coast region with the
purchase of competitor Office Club. By 1993, it was operating over 350
stores in the U.S. and Canada. This acquisition moved Office Depot onto
the national stage. Mark Begelman, founder and president of Office
Club, joined Office Depot as President and Chief Operating Officer.
Office Clubs store were slated to continued operations under the Office
Club brand and operate as a subsidiary of Office Depot. This was because
Office Club operated under a "Membership format" (Similar to what is
employed by Costco and Sam's Club) and the company was at first
reluctant to part with that. Within a year of the merger, Office Club
stores dropped the membership format and became fully assimilated with
Office Depot.
The company began to run into problems in the late 1990s when many key
North American markets became saturated with too many of the big three
office supply chains: Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples.
In search of new opportunities, Office
Depot began to expand overseas to many more countries. In 1998, it
launched its public Web site and merged with the catalog company Viking
Office Products.
In June 2003, Office Depot Inc. acquired Guilbert, formerly part of the
Pinault-Printemps Redoute Group (PPR). With this strategic acquisition,
Office Depot has doubled its presence in Europe to around 3 billion
Euros and with this move confirms its European market leadership (Office
Depot European headquarter is located in the Netherlands - Venlo).
During the dot-com collapse in late 2000, the company's sales took a
dive. Over 70 stores were closed and Fuente was reportedly forced out of
his job as CEO; he was replaced by the head of the company's
international operations, Bruce Nelson. On October 4, 2004, Office Depot
announced that Neil R. Austrian, former President of the National
Football League, was succeeding Nelson as Interim Chairman and CEO.
Succeeding Austrian was Steve Odland, formerly CEO of Autozone.
Source: Wikipedia - News Reports
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