Jewson: How a humble East Anglian family business grew into a chain worth £740m

Jewson, one of the UK's biggest and oldest established builders' merchant chains, has changed hands for only the fifth time in its 186-year history.

The business, founded in Huntingdonshire by George Jewson in 1836, is being bought by Copenhagen-based Stark Group, which employs around 12,500 employees in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway.

The Stark Group has doubled in size during the last few years and claims to be one of Europe's fastest-growing retailers and distributors of building materials.

Jewson is being sold for £740m by its owner since 2000, the French building materials giant Saint Gobain, as the latter offloads its UK building distribution arm. Included in the sale are JP Corry, a Northern Ireland-based business and Gibbs & Dandy, another builders' merchant business almost as old as Jewson itself and which was once listed on the UK stock market.

Interestingly, Stark itself also has British origins.

It was once the Nordic arm of Ferguson, previously known as Wolseley, a storied old business whose activities spanned from agricultural equipment to heating oil and which very briefly owned the British carmaker of the same name.

Ferguson offloaded its Nordic business, which traded under the Stark Group name, in 2018 for £885m to funds controlled by the US private equity firm Lone Star.

The business was bulked up via acquisitions, including Saint-Gobain's German business, before being sold to another private equity firm, CVC, in early 2021. No figure for the deal - one of just a few to go through at a time when much of the world was still subject to COVID-19 lockdowns - was ever made public but a price tag of around $3bn (£2.4bn) was speculated at the time.

Since then, Stark has done further acquisitions, including another in Germany.

Stark's chief executive, Søren Olesen, said today: "We have a strategy that successfully focuses on professional craftsmen and the renovation and maintenance market, which this acquisition fits very well into.

"In 2019, we bought Saint-Gobain's German distribution business, and there are many similarities in this acquisition. We will do our utmost to develop, grow and invest behind the company making it the professional craftsmen's preferred choice in the UK. We have acquired a business with whom we can continue our growth journey.

"Despite the current tough macro-economic environment, the fundamental drivers for the renovation and maintenance market in the UK with its large need for energy renovation in the coming decades are attractive."

So Jewson, Gibbs & Dandy and JP Corry, which together employ more than 8,900 people and which trade from 600 outlets, now find themselves as part of a business more focussed on retail and distribution than they did as part of a company whose main activity was manufacturing building materials.

This may come as a comfort to employees. Sky's city editor Mark Kleinman reported in September this year that Saint-Gobain had hired bankers from JP Morgan to explore a sale and, subsequently, there was speculation that a number of outlets might have to close should no buyer be identified.

It is all a far cry from Jewson's East Anglia