Merchants Gains New Client

A major new client and two new lines of business promise to make 1993 a strong year for Merchants Home Delivery Service Inc., an Oxnard-based company that is the nation’s largest provider of home deliveries for furniture and appliance retailers.

Roger E. Payton, chief executive officer of the British-owned firm, expects revenues to reach $155 million in the fiscal year that will end Sept. 30. That would represent a 35% increase over the $115 million of fiscal 1992.

The new client, Montgomery Ward, joins Levitz Furniture, Sears, Roebuck & Co., Circuit City, Bloomingdale’s and other large retailers that use Merchants to deliver big-ticket items to customers.

The Ward account alone will hike revenues 10%, Payton said.

Merchants also recently acquired Service Furniture Delivery, a Long Island City, N.Y., long-haul delivery service, and started In-Home Services, which repairs and restores furniture in homes.

“We expect the Service Furniture Delivery acquisition to take us into several new fields, including deliveries to mail-order customers,” Payton said.

Merchants Home Delivery, founded in 1970, is a unit of NFC, a British holding company. The Oxnard firm, a sister company of Allied Van Lines, has 500 employees, 75 of them at its headquarters on Latigo Avenue.

In addition to its employees, the firm has contracts with 1,000 independent truck owner-operators who make deliveries throughout the United States and Canada. This year, Merchants will deliver more than $3.5 billion worth of goods, or 11% of all home-delivered furniture and appliances, Payton said.