Recently Pergo was sold to a new company here in North America after a few years of difficult times. The Swedish based company had a series of challenges most of all massive competition after they created the category in North America back in 1996 starting with launching the line at Color Tile. (The old color tile was a nationwide group of stores that later went bankrupt – the new color tile is a buying group that licenses the name to dealers. We have been a color tile dealer in the past, but dropped it when they failed to pay us our rebates.)
Pergo’s high end products have always remained very strong and I think still represent great values even today. This strength is in contrast to some of the other challenges Pergo faced both internally and externally.
Pergo Select and Pergo World Traveler are both examples of very fashionable floors that are still very tough for demanding households. Flooring is meant to be lived on so toughness counts.
Kudos to Pergo for creating a market so prolific that their dominance remains viable to this day in laminate.
Who were they sold to? Another flooring manufacturer?
Yes, Pergo – aka Perstorp aka Pergo AB was acquired by Pfleiderer AG – http://www.pfleiderer.com/index_d.shtml which also owns Uniboard – one of North America’s largest producers of laminate and for that matter HDF core board.
As a component of the change George Kelly takes over as CEO from Tony Sturrus and will head both companies Pergo and Uniboard – assuming they remain separate. (I am sure that they will try to combine them at some point – it sure makes alot of sense to me.)
This is one case of a company acquisition where you can see the strengths of both companies really compliment each other.