Throwback Thursday is a weekly feature in which we dip into the archives of the Hardlines Weekly Report.
“Sodisco-Howden Group ended 1999 with a strong 16.5 percent increase in its sales,” we reported on April 3, 2000, twenty-five years ago.
Alas, all was not well with Montreal-based Sodisco-Howden, which was once Canada’s largest publicly-traded hardware wholesaler. It had structural problems and a lot of debt, and was hampered by an increasingly tough market for the independent dealers that it supplied. Four years later, in 2004, Sodisco-Howden was sold to CanWel Building Materials of Vancouver for $64 million. CanWel unloaded it to TIMBER MART (then Tim-BR Marts) in 2010 for $50 million, before the renamed company (Chalifour Canada) was sold to Memphis-based Orgill in 2015.
