The Top 300 Rides Again

Special report: Here are the 300 leading hardware and building supply dealers.
8/3/2021

We will pass over without extended comment an overview of the pandemic and its dramatic impact on the Industry Scoreboard during the year 2020. Reams have already been written at HBSDealer.com and elsewhere. But let the record show: demand for home improvement products was “unprecedented.” And the numbers back it up.

The Full Top 300 list is attached at the bottom of this article. Here are the top 10 movers of hardware or building supply products.

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source: Company reports, HBSDealer research. (* indicates estimate.)

The 2021 Scoreboard has also been dramatically altered by acquisitions and consolidations – none bigger than the Builders FirstSource-BMC merger. That blockbuster deal was closed in 2021, and therefore the BMC brand remains on the Scoreboard, for one last time (at no. 14).

In terms of incidence, no Top 300 company scored more acquisitions than US LBM over the past 2 years. The Buffalo Grove, Ill.-based consolidator charged through the pandemic with acquisitions of Zeeland (Mich.) Lumber and Jennings Builders Supply in North Carolina, among others. It saved its biggest deal for 2021 — American Construction Source, no. 34 on the Scoreboard.

The growth of hardware and building supply companies is reflected in statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, which shows a 13.6% year-over-year gain for NAICS 4441 businesses -- building material and supplies dealers -- and a 13.9% gain for the subset of NAICS 44413 businesses -- hardware stores. 

NAICS sales in $millions

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Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Attached below is the Top 300 Industry Scoreboard, ranking the leading companies by sales in their most recently completed fiscal year. 

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