British building materials distributor Wolseley will this week outline plans to cut hundreds of jobs due to trading conditions that are bad enough to warrant a profits warning, the Sunday Telegraph reported. The newspaper said, without citing sources, that the company may not give a firm number of job cuts but that the number would be in the hundreds.
A Wolseley spokeswoman declined to comment in advance of the company's trading statement on Wednesday. Wolseley, the world's biggest distributor of plumbing and heating materials, and which has been hit hard by a general economic downturn and a weak US housing market in particular, said in May that it would cut a further 70 million pounds ($98 million) of costs.