The New Focus
Cerberus Capital purchased Focus DIY for £1 in June 2007 and appointed Bill Grimsey, formerly CEO of Wickes, as CEO.
In an attempt to tackle the financial problems the owners restructured the business, and injected fresh capital in the form of £200m via loans by the owners Cerberus Capital, Bank of Scotland and GMAC. Costs were slashed and under-performing stores were either closed or sold to other retails including Homebase, Wickes and Sainsbury's. In 2009 a programme of new store formats and further cost cutting was undertaken.
By early 2011, the number of stores had gradually been reduced from 256 in 2007 to 178.
Read more about this topic: Focus DIY
Famous quotes containing the word focus:
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)