BOUCHERVILLE, Quebec — During the fourth quarter ended on Dec. 31, 2010, Uni-Select doubled its earnings from continuing operations and increased its earnings by more than 9 percent in 2010. Sales reached $309.4 million compared to $315.6 million in 2009. The strength of the Canadian dollar and the sale of some corporate stores in Canada have generated a decline in revenue for the fourth quarter.
However, when excluding these elements, Uni-Select’s revenue shows a positive organic growth of 2.6 percent for the fourth quarter of 2010.
The earnings from continuing operations reached $11.8 million or 60 cents per share, compared to $5.3 million or 27 cents per share in 2009. The results from the fourth quarter take into account the non-recurring items of $1 million related to the sale of the operations of the Heavy Duty Group in 2009. The net earnings for this period reached $10.8 million, an increase of 50 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2009.
U.S. sales reached $183.2 million, compared to $189.6 million in 2009. Excluding the fluctuation effect of the exchange rate, the operations generated an organic growth of 3.6 percent during the fourth quarter. The Canadian operations recorded an organic growth of 1.1 percent during the fourth quarter and totaled $126.2 million, a performance comparable to 2009. It is worth noting that total revenues of the corporation have been impacted by sale of corporate stores concluded during preceding quarters.
“We are happy to report that for two consecutive quarters the U.S. operations have registered an organic growth of more than 3.5 percent. This growth reflects efforts put in place to improve loyalty amongst our wholesalers, level of service offered to our installers, sales to national accounts and the increase of sales via our new distributions channels. We shall pursue continuously these efforts to improve our operations. In the next few weeks, we will gradually start implementation of our operation modules to our integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) software,” said Richard Roy, president and CEO of Uni-Select.
“We are excited about the potential benefit that will be offered by the acquisition of FinishMaster. On Jan. 11, Uni-Select and FinishMaster combined their respective teams into one single team grouping more than 6,100 employees, 64 warehouses and 424 corporate stores throughout Canada and 35 states of the USA,” added Roy.
