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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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