Sears, officially named Sears, Roebuck and Co., is an American chain of department stores which was founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in the late 19th century. Formerly a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Sears[2] merged with Kmart in early 2005, creating the Sears Holdings Corporation.
From its mail order beginnings, the company grew to become the largest retailer in the United States by the mid-20th century, and its catalogs became famous. Competition and changes in the demographics of its customer base challenged the company after World War II as its rural and inner city strongholds shrank and the suburban markets grew. Eventually its catalog program was largely discontinued.
Sears Holdings Corporation (Holdings) is the parent company of Kmart Holding Corporation (Kmart) and Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears). Holdings is broadline retailer with 2,201 full-line and 1,354 specialty retail stores in the United States operating through Kmart and Sears and 483 full-line and specialty retail stores in Canada operating through Sears Canada Inc. (Sears Canada), a 92%-owned subsidiary. During the fiscal year ended January 29, 2010 (fiscal 2010), it operated three segments: Kmart, Sears Domestic and Sears Canada.
Kmart
As of January 29, 2011, Holdings operated a total of 1,307 Kmart stores across 49 states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands. This store count consists of 1,278 discount stores, averaging 93,000 square feet, and 29 Super Centers, averaging 169,000 square feet. Most Kmart stores are one-floor, free-standing units, that carry an array of products across many merchandise categories, including consumer electronics, seasonal merchandise, outdoor living, toys, lawn and garden equipment, food and consumables and apparel, including products sold under, such as Jaclyn Smith and Joe Boxer, and certain Sears brand products (such as Kenmore, Craftsman, and DieHard) and services. As of January 29, 2011, 268 Kmart stores sold an assortment of home appliances, including Kenmore-branded products. Kmart began operating its own footwear business, which had previously been operated by a third party. There are 981 Kmart stores that also operate in-store pharmacies. The Super Centers generally operate around the clock a day and combine a full-service grocery along with the merchandise selection of a discount store. There are also 20 Sears Auto Centers operating in Kmart stores. Sears Auto Centers offer a range of professional automotive repair and maintenance services, as well as an assortment of automotive accessories. In addition, the Company has expanded the ways its customers can receive their purchases, allowing its customers to buy online and pick up in store. This service, powered by MyGofer, is available in over 600 Kmart stores through either MyGofer.com or Kmart.com. Kmart also sells its products through its Website kmart.com.
Sears Domestic
As of January 29, 2011, Sears Domestic operations consisted of full-line stores, specialty stores, Lands’ End, Inc. (Lands’ End), commercial sales and home services. Full-line stores consisted of 894 broadline stores, of which 842 are full-line stores located across all 50 states and Puerto Rico. These stores are primarily mall-based locations averaging 133,000 square feet. Full-line stores offer an array of products and service offerings across many merchandise categories, including home appliances, consumer electronics, tools, sporting goods, outdoor living, lawn and garden equipment, certain automotive services and products, such as tires and batteries, home fashion products, as well as apparel, footwear, jewelry and accessories for the whole family. Its product offerings include Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Lands’ End, Covington, Apostrophe, and Canyon River Blues brand merchandise. In addition, as of January 29, 2011, it operated 52 Sears Essentials/Grand stores located in 24 states.
Specialty stores consists of 1,354 specialty stores (including the 30 free standing Sears Auto Centers noted above) located across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam, in free-standing, off-mall locations or high-traffic neighborhood shopping centers. Specialty store operations primarily consists of 938 Sears Hometown Stores, 59 Sears Home Appliance Showrooms, 106 Sears Hardware Stores and 89 Orchard Supply Hardware Stores, 12 The Great Indoors Stores, and 102 Outlet Stores. Lands’ End is a direct merchant of traditionally styled casual clothing, accessories and footwear for men, women and children, as well as home products and soft luggage. These products are offered through multiple selling channels, including Landsend.com, an apparel Websites, as well as catalog mailings, and international businesses. Lands’ End has 14 retail stores, averaging 8,600 square feet, which offer Lands’ End merchandise primarily from catalog and Internet channel overstocks. In addition, Lands’ End has 292 store within a store departments inside Sears Domestic broadline locations.
The Company sells Sears merchandise, parts, and services to commercial customers through its business-to-business Sears Commercial Sales and Appliance Builder/Distributor businesses. Sears Commercial Sales provides appliances and services to commercial customers in the single-family residential construction/remodel, property management, multi-family new construction, and government/military sectors. Its Appliance Builder/Distributor business offers appliance and plumbing fixtures to architects, designers, and new construction or remodeling customers, and is operating in seven markets with 26 facilities.
Home Services, product repair services provides services to more than 44 million households. This business delivers a range of retail-related residential and commercial services across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands under the Sears Parts & Repair Services and A&E Factory Service brand names. Commercial and residential customers can obtain parts and repair services for all brands of products within the home appliances, lawn and garden equipment, consumer electronics, floor care products, and heating and cooling systems categories. It also provides repair parts with supporting instructions for do-it-yourself customers through its PartsDirect.com Website. This business also offers protection agreements, product installation services and Kenmore and Carrier brand residential heating and cooling systems. Home Services also includes home improvement services (primarily siding, windows, cabinet refacing, kitchen remodeling, roofing, carpet and upholstery cleaning, air duct cleaning, and garage door installation and repair) provided through Sears Home Improvement Services.
Sears Canada
Sears Canada conducts retail operations in Canada similar to those conducted by Sears Domestic, with emphasis on apparel and other softlines than in the United States stores. As of January 29, 2011, Sears Canada operated a total of 122 full-line stores, 361 specialty stores (including 48 furniture and appliance stores, 268 dealer stores operated under independent local ownership, 4 appliance and mattress stores, 30 Corbeil stores, and 11 outlet stores), 20 floor covering stores, 1,822 catalog pick-up locations and 108 travel offices. Sears Canada also sells its products through its Website sears.ca.
The Company competes with Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, JC Penney, Macy’s, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Best Buy and Hudson’s Bay Company.
From then onward Sears became the holding company for most of Clore's business interests other than property. His first move was to sell to Sears his controlling stake in two other companies, Furness Shipbuilding and Bentley Engineering. Both were important companies in their own fields. The Furness shipyard on the River Tees was one of the largest in Great Britain, with berths for eight ships, while Bentley was the country's leading producer of hosiery knitting machinery, based at Leicester and selling its goods worldwide. The acquisition of these companies immediately trebled Sears's profits, and footwear became just one of three main subsidiaries. To reflect this change, the company was renamed Sears Holdings Ltd. in 1955. Over the next few years Clore acquired more companies in the footwear and engineering fields, and took Sears into another business, motor sales and servicing. However strange the mixture, it brought rapid growth in profits, and by 1959 Clore was in a position to mount a £20 million bid for one of the major brewery groups, Watney Mann. Had this bid succeeded, Sears might have developed along quite different lines, but Clore was rebuffed.
Meanwhile, the shoe business had become the fastest growing area of Sears's existing divisions. Within a year of taking over Sears, Clore had acquired two small shoe companies that added some 80 shops to his collection. Then, in 1956, he took over two much larger companies of the same kind. The first was Manfield, another Northampton firm, with some 200 shops and a history going back to 1844. The second was Dolcis, a more recently created chain with 250 shops. These purchases increased Sears's total of shops to nearly 1,500 and gave the company almost a quarter of the retail footwear market in Great Britain. Clore then integrated all the group's shoe companies into one, British Shoe Corporation (BSC). A huge new warehouse was built at Leicester to service all its outlets, the factories were rationalized, and large cost savings began to swell BSC's profits.
The success of this operation, in contrast to growing problems in shipbuilding, led Clore to invest increasingly in retailing. In the same year that he failed to win Watney Mann, he gained a new retail arm in Mappin & Webb, a jewelry and silverware business. Three years later he made a major addition to BSC by buying its largest remaining competitor, Saxone Lilley & Skinner. This was a recent union of two formerly independent businesses and had around 500 shops, taking BSC's total of 2,000 and its share of retail sales to almost one-third of the British market.
In 1965 Sears made its largest single acquisition, the Lewis's department store group. It included Selfridges and 10 other department stores in provincial cities, and cost Sears £63 million. Its recent profits had been poor and Clore lost no time in remedying this. Stores were modernized and in some cases enlarged, and buying was centralized. Another very successful innovation was the launch of Miss Selfridge. This began as a young women's fashion department in the main store, but the concept proved so popular that it was soon extended to the other stores and eventually became an independent chain of shops.
The takeover of Lewis's put Sears Holdings for a time among the top 30 industrial companies in Great Britain, and increased its workforce to 65,000 people. From this point onward it was predominantly a retailing business, but for another 20 years it had many other interests which, on the whole, were less successful.
The first to crumble was the engineering subsidiary, which had come to include shipbuilding. Furness Shipbuilding ceased to be profitable from about 1960, and ran into heavy losses over the next few years. Clore tried to reverse its decline by modernizing the yard at great expense, but to no avail, and in 1968 he decided to cut his losses and sell it. The Bentley textile machinery business continued to do well throughout the 1960s, but eventually demand for its products tailed off, and from 1974 onward Sears's engineering division produced more losses than profits. Clore was reluctant to let it go, but his successors disposed of it in the early 1980s.
Another diversification that had patchy results was Sears's attempt to build a small conglomerate in the United States. This began in 1964 with the purchase of a laundry and linen hire business called Consolidated Laundries. This company, renamed Sears Industries Inc., then bought a knitwear manufacturing business which faired poorly, and a retail jewelry chain which was never a great success. In 1981, more hopefully, Sears acquired a 500-branch chain of shoe shops, Butler Shoe Corporation, but this also brought more problems than profits and was sold in 1988.
Footwear manufacturing was another field in which Sears was forced to retreat. In the 1950s the company's own factories supplied roughly half the shoes sold in its shops, but with the coming of cheaper products from countries with lower labor costs, this proportion diminished to around 20% in the 1970s. Sears reduced its output by stages until in 1988 the last of its factories was sold. The company's share of the retail market was also eroded by new competition in the mid-1970s.
Against these setbacks Clore could claim some successful new ventures, even in his last years at Sears. The most important of these were betting and property. In 1971 Sears took over the William Hill chain of betting shops and although profits were somewhat erratic, it contributed as much as 10% of Sears's profits in its better years. Sears's involvement in property development began in 1975 with the purchase of a company called Galliford Estates. It specialized in house building in Great Britain, but also had a stake in some commercial developments in the Netherlands, and became the nucleus of what is still a thriving property development unit within Sears.
Charles Clore--by then Sir Charles--retired from the chairmanship of Sears in 1976, and died three years later. He was succeeded by Leonard Sainer, the lawyer who had been his closest colleague for 40 years. Under Sainer, a gradual rationalization of the group began. A number of troublesome subsidiaries were sold, and acquisitions were mainly concentrated in retailing, the area in which the company had always been most successful. Under Geoffrey Maitland Smith, who succeeded Sainer in May 1985, this rationalization was taken much further, to the point where the company's interests are now confined to retailing and property development. The parent company became Sears plc in 1985.
The positive side of this process was the acquisition of new retail businesses with good growth prospects. An early find was Olympus Sportswear, which had about two dozen outlets when Sears bought it in 1978 but has since been expanded into the leading chain of its kind in Great Britain. In 1980 the Wallis fashion group was acquired. In 1985 came Foster Brothers Clothing, with over 700 shops selling menswear, children's clothing--Adams--and outdoor pursuits gear--Millet's. Then, in 1987, Sears added further to its menswear business by buying the more upmarket chain of Horne Brothers.
Besides acquiring and developing these new outlets in the United Kingdom, Sears has made two more far-reaching changes in its retailing strategy. First, it has expanded into continental Europe on a large scale. This development began in the late 1970s with the acquisition of a chain of shoe shops in the Netherlands, and the company subsequently developed large retail interests--some jointly owned with Groupe André of France--in the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain. Second, the purchase of Freemans in 1988, Sears's largest acquisition of the late 1980s, has given the company a major-share of the mail-order market in Great Britain, an important sector of retailing in which it was not previously represented. With these developments, Sears has transformed itself from a largely illogical collection of businesses into a wide-ranging but integrated retailing group.
Principal Subsidiaries: Adams Childrenswear Ltd.; British Shoe Corporation Holdings plc; Freemans plc; Galliford Estates Ltd.; Hoogenbosch Beheer B.V. (Netherlands); Millets Leisure Ltd.; Miss Erika Inc. (U.S.A.); Miss Selfridge Ltd.; Olympus Sport International Ltd.; Sears Financial Services Ltd.; Sears Menswear plc; Sears Property Investments Ltd.; Selfridges Ltd.; Wallis Fashion Group Ltd.; The Warehouse Group plc.
OVERALL
Beta: 1.70
Market Cap (Mil.): $8,501.75
Shares Outstanding (Mil.): 108.43
Annual Dividend: --
Yield (%): --
FINANCIALS
SHLD.O Industry Sector
P/E (TTM): 63.36 27.55 21.07
EPS (TTM): -40.55 -- --
ROI: 0.96 2.90 1.78
ROE: 1.51 4.81 2.74
Statistics:
Public Company
Incorporated: 1912 as J. Sears & Company (True-Form Boot Company) Ltd.
Employees: 51,000
Sales: £;2.16 billion (US$4.04 billion)
Stock Index: London
Name Age Since Current Position
Edward Lampert 48 2005 Chairman of the Board
Louis D'Ambrosio 46 2011 President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Michael Collins 47 2008 Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President
W. Bruce Johnson 59 2011 Executive Vice President - Off-Mall Businesses and Supply Chain, Director
John Goodman 46 2009 Executive Vice President - Apparel and Home
Scott Freidheim 45 2011 Executive Vice President; President - Kenmore, Craftsman & DieHard
William Phelan 48 2008 Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer, Controller
Dane Drobny 43 2010 Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary
William Harker 38 2010 Senior Vice President
Lana Krauter 50 2011 Senior Vice President and President - Sears Apparel
Deidra Merriwether 2011 Senior Vice President and President - Retail Services
Robin Michel 50 2011 Senior Vice President and President - Food and Consumables & Health and Wellness
Chris Capuano 45 2011 Senior Vice President , President - Home Fashions
Steven Mnuchin 48 2005 Independent Director
Ann Reese 58 2005 Independent Director
Thomas Tisch 56 2005 Independent Director
Emily Scott 49 2007 Independent Director
William Kunkler 54 2009 Independent Director
Address:
40 Duke Street
London
W1A 2HP
United Kingdom
From its mail order beginnings, the company grew to become the largest retailer in the United States by the mid-20th century, and its catalogs became famous. Competition and changes in the demographics of its customer base challenged the company after World War II as its rural and inner city strongholds shrank and the suburban markets grew. Eventually its catalog program was largely discontinued.
Sears Holdings Corporation (Holdings) is the parent company of Kmart Holding Corporation (Kmart) and Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears). Holdings is broadline retailer with 2,201 full-line and 1,354 specialty retail stores in the United States operating through Kmart and Sears and 483 full-line and specialty retail stores in Canada operating through Sears Canada Inc. (Sears Canada), a 92%-owned subsidiary. During the fiscal year ended January 29, 2010 (fiscal 2010), it operated three segments: Kmart, Sears Domestic and Sears Canada.
Kmart
As of January 29, 2011, Holdings operated a total of 1,307 Kmart stores across 49 states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands. This store count consists of 1,278 discount stores, averaging 93,000 square feet, and 29 Super Centers, averaging 169,000 square feet. Most Kmart stores are one-floor, free-standing units, that carry an array of products across many merchandise categories, including consumer electronics, seasonal merchandise, outdoor living, toys, lawn and garden equipment, food and consumables and apparel, including products sold under, such as Jaclyn Smith and Joe Boxer, and certain Sears brand products (such as Kenmore, Craftsman, and DieHard) and services. As of January 29, 2011, 268 Kmart stores sold an assortment of home appliances, including Kenmore-branded products. Kmart began operating its own footwear business, which had previously been operated by a third party. There are 981 Kmart stores that also operate in-store pharmacies. The Super Centers generally operate around the clock a day and combine a full-service grocery along with the merchandise selection of a discount store. There are also 20 Sears Auto Centers operating in Kmart stores. Sears Auto Centers offer a range of professional automotive repair and maintenance services, as well as an assortment of automotive accessories. In addition, the Company has expanded the ways its customers can receive their purchases, allowing its customers to buy online and pick up in store. This service, powered by MyGofer, is available in over 600 Kmart stores through either MyGofer.com or Kmart.com. Kmart also sells its products through its Website kmart.com.
Sears Domestic
As of January 29, 2011, Sears Domestic operations consisted of full-line stores, specialty stores, Lands’ End, Inc. (Lands’ End), commercial sales and home services. Full-line stores consisted of 894 broadline stores, of which 842 are full-line stores located across all 50 states and Puerto Rico. These stores are primarily mall-based locations averaging 133,000 square feet. Full-line stores offer an array of products and service offerings across many merchandise categories, including home appliances, consumer electronics, tools, sporting goods, outdoor living, lawn and garden equipment, certain automotive services and products, such as tires and batteries, home fashion products, as well as apparel, footwear, jewelry and accessories for the whole family. Its product offerings include Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Lands’ End, Covington, Apostrophe, and Canyon River Blues brand merchandise. In addition, as of January 29, 2011, it operated 52 Sears Essentials/Grand stores located in 24 states.
Specialty stores consists of 1,354 specialty stores (including the 30 free standing Sears Auto Centers noted above) located across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam, in free-standing, off-mall locations or high-traffic neighborhood shopping centers. Specialty store operations primarily consists of 938 Sears Hometown Stores, 59 Sears Home Appliance Showrooms, 106 Sears Hardware Stores and 89 Orchard Supply Hardware Stores, 12 The Great Indoors Stores, and 102 Outlet Stores. Lands’ End is a direct merchant of traditionally styled casual clothing, accessories and footwear for men, women and children, as well as home products and soft luggage. These products are offered through multiple selling channels, including Landsend.com, an apparel Websites, as well as catalog mailings, and international businesses. Lands’ End has 14 retail stores, averaging 8,600 square feet, which offer Lands’ End merchandise primarily from catalog and Internet channel overstocks. In addition, Lands’ End has 292 store within a store departments inside Sears Domestic broadline locations.
The Company sells Sears merchandise, parts, and services to commercial customers through its business-to-business Sears Commercial Sales and Appliance Builder/Distributor businesses. Sears Commercial Sales provides appliances and services to commercial customers in the single-family residential construction/remodel, property management, multi-family new construction, and government/military sectors. Its Appliance Builder/Distributor business offers appliance and plumbing fixtures to architects, designers, and new construction or remodeling customers, and is operating in seven markets with 26 facilities.
Home Services, product repair services provides services to more than 44 million households. This business delivers a range of retail-related residential and commercial services across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands under the Sears Parts & Repair Services and A&E Factory Service brand names. Commercial and residential customers can obtain parts and repair services for all brands of products within the home appliances, lawn and garden equipment, consumer electronics, floor care products, and heating and cooling systems categories. It also provides repair parts with supporting instructions for do-it-yourself customers through its PartsDirect.com Website. This business also offers protection agreements, product installation services and Kenmore and Carrier brand residential heating and cooling systems. Home Services also includes home improvement services (primarily siding, windows, cabinet refacing, kitchen remodeling, roofing, carpet and upholstery cleaning, air duct cleaning, and garage door installation and repair) provided through Sears Home Improvement Services.
Sears Canada
Sears Canada conducts retail operations in Canada similar to those conducted by Sears Domestic, with emphasis on apparel and other softlines than in the United States stores. As of January 29, 2011, Sears Canada operated a total of 122 full-line stores, 361 specialty stores (including 48 furniture and appliance stores, 268 dealer stores operated under independent local ownership, 4 appliance and mattress stores, 30 Corbeil stores, and 11 outlet stores), 20 floor covering stores, 1,822 catalog pick-up locations and 108 travel offices. Sears Canada also sells its products through its Website sears.ca.
The Company competes with Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, JC Penney, Macy’s, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Best Buy and Hudson’s Bay Company.
From then onward Sears became the holding company for most of Clore's business interests other than property. His first move was to sell to Sears his controlling stake in two other companies, Furness Shipbuilding and Bentley Engineering. Both were important companies in their own fields. The Furness shipyard on the River Tees was one of the largest in Great Britain, with berths for eight ships, while Bentley was the country's leading producer of hosiery knitting machinery, based at Leicester and selling its goods worldwide. The acquisition of these companies immediately trebled Sears's profits, and footwear became just one of three main subsidiaries. To reflect this change, the company was renamed Sears Holdings Ltd. in 1955. Over the next few years Clore acquired more companies in the footwear and engineering fields, and took Sears into another business, motor sales and servicing. However strange the mixture, it brought rapid growth in profits, and by 1959 Clore was in a position to mount a £20 million bid for one of the major brewery groups, Watney Mann. Had this bid succeeded, Sears might have developed along quite different lines, but Clore was rebuffed.
Meanwhile, the shoe business had become the fastest growing area of Sears's existing divisions. Within a year of taking over Sears, Clore had acquired two small shoe companies that added some 80 shops to his collection. Then, in 1956, he took over two much larger companies of the same kind. The first was Manfield, another Northampton firm, with some 200 shops and a history going back to 1844. The second was Dolcis, a more recently created chain with 250 shops. These purchases increased Sears's total of shops to nearly 1,500 and gave the company almost a quarter of the retail footwear market in Great Britain. Clore then integrated all the group's shoe companies into one, British Shoe Corporation (BSC). A huge new warehouse was built at Leicester to service all its outlets, the factories were rationalized, and large cost savings began to swell BSC's profits.
The success of this operation, in contrast to growing problems in shipbuilding, led Clore to invest increasingly in retailing. In the same year that he failed to win Watney Mann, he gained a new retail arm in Mappin & Webb, a jewelry and silverware business. Three years later he made a major addition to BSC by buying its largest remaining competitor, Saxone Lilley & Skinner. This was a recent union of two formerly independent businesses and had around 500 shops, taking BSC's total of 2,000 and its share of retail sales to almost one-third of the British market.
In 1965 Sears made its largest single acquisition, the Lewis's department store group. It included Selfridges and 10 other department stores in provincial cities, and cost Sears £63 million. Its recent profits had been poor and Clore lost no time in remedying this. Stores were modernized and in some cases enlarged, and buying was centralized. Another very successful innovation was the launch of Miss Selfridge. This began as a young women's fashion department in the main store, but the concept proved so popular that it was soon extended to the other stores and eventually became an independent chain of shops.
The takeover of Lewis's put Sears Holdings for a time among the top 30 industrial companies in Great Britain, and increased its workforce to 65,000 people. From this point onward it was predominantly a retailing business, but for another 20 years it had many other interests which, on the whole, were less successful.
The first to crumble was the engineering subsidiary, which had come to include shipbuilding. Furness Shipbuilding ceased to be profitable from about 1960, and ran into heavy losses over the next few years. Clore tried to reverse its decline by modernizing the yard at great expense, but to no avail, and in 1968 he decided to cut his losses and sell it. The Bentley textile machinery business continued to do well throughout the 1960s, but eventually demand for its products tailed off, and from 1974 onward Sears's engineering division produced more losses than profits. Clore was reluctant to let it go, but his successors disposed of it in the early 1980s.
Another diversification that had patchy results was Sears's attempt to build a small conglomerate in the United States. This began in 1964 with the purchase of a laundry and linen hire business called Consolidated Laundries. This company, renamed Sears Industries Inc., then bought a knitwear manufacturing business which faired poorly, and a retail jewelry chain which was never a great success. In 1981, more hopefully, Sears acquired a 500-branch chain of shoe shops, Butler Shoe Corporation, but this also brought more problems than profits and was sold in 1988.
Footwear manufacturing was another field in which Sears was forced to retreat. In the 1950s the company's own factories supplied roughly half the shoes sold in its shops, but with the coming of cheaper products from countries with lower labor costs, this proportion diminished to around 20% in the 1970s. Sears reduced its output by stages until in 1988 the last of its factories was sold. The company's share of the retail market was also eroded by new competition in the mid-1970s.
Against these setbacks Clore could claim some successful new ventures, even in his last years at Sears. The most important of these were betting and property. In 1971 Sears took over the William Hill chain of betting shops and although profits were somewhat erratic, it contributed as much as 10% of Sears's profits in its better years. Sears's involvement in property development began in 1975 with the purchase of a company called Galliford Estates. It specialized in house building in Great Britain, but also had a stake in some commercial developments in the Netherlands, and became the nucleus of what is still a thriving property development unit within Sears.
Charles Clore--by then Sir Charles--retired from the chairmanship of Sears in 1976, and died three years later. He was succeeded by Leonard Sainer, the lawyer who had been his closest colleague for 40 years. Under Sainer, a gradual rationalization of the group began. A number of troublesome subsidiaries were sold, and acquisitions were mainly concentrated in retailing, the area in which the company had always been most successful. Under Geoffrey Maitland Smith, who succeeded Sainer in May 1985, this rationalization was taken much further, to the point where the company's interests are now confined to retailing and property development. The parent company became Sears plc in 1985.
The positive side of this process was the acquisition of new retail businesses with good growth prospects. An early find was Olympus Sportswear, which had about two dozen outlets when Sears bought it in 1978 but has since been expanded into the leading chain of its kind in Great Britain. In 1980 the Wallis fashion group was acquired. In 1985 came Foster Brothers Clothing, with over 700 shops selling menswear, children's clothing--Adams--and outdoor pursuits gear--Millet's. Then, in 1987, Sears added further to its menswear business by buying the more upmarket chain of Horne Brothers.
Besides acquiring and developing these new outlets in the United Kingdom, Sears has made two more far-reaching changes in its retailing strategy. First, it has expanded into continental Europe on a large scale. This development began in the late 1970s with the acquisition of a chain of shoe shops in the Netherlands, and the company subsequently developed large retail interests--some jointly owned with Groupe André of France--in the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain. Second, the purchase of Freemans in 1988, Sears's largest acquisition of the late 1980s, has given the company a major-share of the mail-order market in Great Britain, an important sector of retailing in which it was not previously represented. With these developments, Sears has transformed itself from a largely illogical collection of businesses into a wide-ranging but integrated retailing group.
Principal Subsidiaries: Adams Childrenswear Ltd.; British Shoe Corporation Holdings plc; Freemans plc; Galliford Estates Ltd.; Hoogenbosch Beheer B.V. (Netherlands); Millets Leisure Ltd.; Miss Erika Inc. (U.S.A.); Miss Selfridge Ltd.; Olympus Sport International Ltd.; Sears Financial Services Ltd.; Sears Menswear plc; Sears Property Investments Ltd.; Selfridges Ltd.; Wallis Fashion Group Ltd.; The Warehouse Group plc.
OVERALL
Beta: 1.70
Market Cap (Mil.): $8,501.75
Shares Outstanding (Mil.): 108.43
Annual Dividend: --
Yield (%): --
FINANCIALS
SHLD.O Industry Sector
P/E (TTM): 63.36 27.55 21.07
EPS (TTM): -40.55 -- --
ROI: 0.96 2.90 1.78
ROE: 1.51 4.81 2.74
Statistics:
Public Company
Incorporated: 1912 as J. Sears & Company (True-Form Boot Company) Ltd.
Employees: 51,000
Sales: £;2.16 billion (US$4.04 billion)
Stock Index: London
Name Age Since Current Position
Edward Lampert 48 2005 Chairman of the Board
Louis D'Ambrosio 46 2011 President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Michael Collins 47 2008 Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President
W. Bruce Johnson 59 2011 Executive Vice President - Off-Mall Businesses and Supply Chain, Director
John Goodman 46 2009 Executive Vice President - Apparel and Home
Scott Freidheim 45 2011 Executive Vice President; President - Kenmore, Craftsman & DieHard
William Phelan 48 2008 Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer, Controller
Dane Drobny 43 2010 Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary
William Harker 38 2010 Senior Vice President
Lana Krauter 50 2011 Senior Vice President and President - Sears Apparel
Deidra Merriwether 2011 Senior Vice President and President - Retail Services
Robin Michel 50 2011 Senior Vice President and President - Food and Consumables & Health and Wellness
Chris Capuano 45 2011 Senior Vice President , President - Home Fashions
Steven Mnuchin 48 2005 Independent Director
Ann Reese 58 2005 Independent Director
Thomas Tisch 56 2005 Independent Director
Emily Scott 49 2007 Independent Director
William Kunkler 54 2009 Independent Director
Address:
40 Duke Street
London
W1A 2HP
United Kingdom