Plumbing Africa Plumblink's first hundred stores | Page 4

Gary Chandler, commercial director. Lurvyo Mgidlana, operations director. Peter Wilson, KZN general manager, recently retired.
– which was to subsequently become part
of the Boumat group and consequently
ultimately Plumblink – was established
shortly after in 1911. In 1951 the company – H Incledon & Co
(South Africa) – was listed on the London
Stock Exchange, but with a South African
constituted board of directors. management in a management buy-out
with the financial assistance of Investec.
Incledon opened a branch in Durban
in 1930 at 17 Hunter Street, where it
remained for over half a century – only
moving to the present Plumblink premises
in Riverside Road in 1985. Durban at
that time was to be a centre of rapid
expansion for the company. During the
Great Depression years, Gerald Incledon,
Herbert’s son, took control of the newly-
established stock-point in Durban and
surrounded himself with a team of
enthusiasts, which soon expanded the
branch. This Durban branch is the only
remaining direct ascendant of the original
H Incledon & Co. This expansion fever
reached the Johannesburg operation and
was further fuelled by the acquisition by the
company of the sole South African agency
for the products of Robert Blakeborough, a
Yorkshire valve manufacturer. According to historical statistics, the South
African construction industry had a strong
boom in the 1960s through to the early
1970s – a period during which H Incledon
& Co was acquired by Boumat Limited, a
business which had been acquiring a variety
of smaller businesses though retaining
their brand names. Boumat established a
plumbing holding company for its plumbing
interests called Plumbware, and this was
subsequently changed to Plumblink. Other
plumbing businesses had been acquired
by Boumat, including Waud and Blackman,
Saffer, Lamika Plumbing – all of which were
reconstituted within Plumblink.
World War II brought a five-year hiatus to the
company’s expansion drive as the majority
of personnel enrolled in active service, while
workshops and factories were converted to
munitions manufacture and war supplies.
Life slowly returned to normal after the
end of the war, and by the mid-1950s the
company was well re-established as a
supplier to the engineering and building
industries, as well as public authorities.
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In 1996, the Imperial Group bought
Boumat Limited at a time when the
construction industry was experiencing
yet another boom on the back of new
legislation opening up the gambling
industry to casinos, as well as the rush
of South African businesses out of the
Johannesburg CBD to Sandton and later
Midrand and Rosebank. There was a
simultaneous entry to our market of foreign
companies, including manufacturers and
plumbing suppliers which resulted in a
boost for Plumblink as a trader to the
market. Boumat was unbundled at this
time, and Plumblink was acquired by
Your local plumbing store
Ethos Private Equity in turn acquired
Plumblink in 2006 premised on a buoyant
outlook for the South African building
and construction market. For the first 24
months that rationale was correct, but in
the wake of the global financial crisis, the
business struggled – as have many others
in the construction value chain right up to
the present time.
This resulted in a strategic change in
direction for the business – its people,
the business model, operations, finances,
information systems and customer
segments. With management as partners,
changes were made. Ethos twice injected
additional capital to make headway, a
gamble which paid off. Today, Plumblink
is a different business to the extent that
nine years later, in 2015, it was acquired
by JSE-listed Bidvest. At the time of
this transaction Plumblink had 61 stores
throughout South Africa – in 2019 it has
over 100, and one in Namibia.
One of the biggest changes was the
group’s melding into a single unit. Prior to
this time, all branches had been managed
as separate and even independent
business units. For the first time, the
group was able to exploit group synergies
and economies of scale – transcending
to a monolithic brand and becoming
Plumblink - Proudly Bidvest
www.plumblink.co.za