Item 1. Business.

Introduction

The Home Depot, Inc. is the world’s largest home improvement retailer based on net sales for fiscal 2018. We offer our customers a wide assortment of building materials, home improvement products, lawn and garden products, and décor products and provide a number of services, including home improvement installation services and tool and equipment rental. As of the end of fiscal 2018, we had 2,287 The Home Depot stores located throughout the U.S. (including the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the territories of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam), Canada, and Mexico. The Home Depot stores average approximately 104,000 square feet of enclosed space, with approximately 24,000 additional square feet of outside garden area. We also maintain a network of distribution and fulfillment centers, as well as a number of e-commerce websites. When we refer to "The Home Depot," the "Company," "we," "us" or "our" in this report, we are referring to The Home Depot, Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries.

The Home Depot, Inc. is a Delaware corporation that was incorporated in 1978. Our Store Support Center (corporate office) is located at 2455 Paces Ferry Road, Atlanta, Georgia 30339. Our telephone number at that address is (770) 433-8211.

Our Business

Our Strategy

Our two primary objectives are growing market share with our customers and delivering shareholder value. We have historically been guided by three principles to drive growth: delivering an exceptional customer experience, leading in product authority, and maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. These principles reflect how we fundamentally run our business. As the retail landscape continues to evolve, we must become more agile in responding to the changing competitive environment and customer preferences. Our customers expect to be able to buy how, when and where they want. We believe that providing a seamless and frictionless shopping experience across multiple channels, featuring curated and innovative product choices, personalized for the individual shopper’s need, which are then delivered in a fast and cost-efficient manner, is a key enabler for our future success. This is what we call the One Home Depot experience. In late 2017, we announced that we would be investing approximately $11 billion over a multi-year period in our stores, associates, digital experience and supply chain to drive value for our customers, our associates, our suppliers and our shareholders. To accomplish this, we are executing against five key strategies designed to drive growth in our business:

•	Connect associates to customer needs

•	Interconnected experience: stores to online, and online to stores

•	Connect products and services to customer needs

•	Connect product to shelf, site and customer

•	Innovate our business model and value chain

Taken together, these strategies are helping us to create the One Home Depot experience that our customers demand. Below are some of the ways we have been investing in that experience during fiscal 2018.

Connect Associates to Customer Needs

We serve two primary customer groups and have different approaches to meeting their needs:

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DIY Customers. These customers are typically home owners who purchase products and complete their own projects and installations. Our associates assist these customers both in our stores and through online resources and other media designed to provide product and project knowledge. We also offer a variety of clinics and workshops both to share this knowledge and to build an emotional connection with our DIY customers.

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Professional Customers (or “Pros”). These customers are primarily professional renovators/remodelers, general contractors, handymen, property managers, building service contractors and specialty tradesmen, such as electricians, plumbers and painters. These customers build, renovate, remodel, repair and maintain residential properties, multifamily properties, hospitality properties and commercial facilities, including education facilities, healthcare facilities, government buildings and office buildings. We recognize the great value our Pro customers provide to their clients, and we strive to make the Pros' job easier and help them

grow their business. We believe that investments aimed at deepening our relationships with our Pro customers are yielding increased engagement and will continue to translate into incremental spend. As part of our continued commitment to invest in Pro customer relationships and the significant market opportunity these customers represent, we have created an enhanced Pro customer experience, both online and in-store.

At the end of 2018, we announced a new consolidated, go-to-market strategy for all of our Pro initiatives, including our MRO business (formerly known as Interline), under “The Home Depot Pro” banner. With The Home Depot Pro, Pros have access to a comprehensive offering that includes a combination of our vast store network, a best-in-class dedicated sales force, quality and affordable products from trusted brands, an extensive delivery network and online business solutions. We provide specialized programs such as an expanded MRO assortment, inventory management solutions, custom product offerings, in-store Pro desk and Pro services, and enhanced credit programs. We also provide and are continuously working to improve our delivery options for Pros, including pick up in-store, direct to job site delivery or ship-to home, to allow us to deliver when, where and how our customers demand. Online, our Pros receive a personalized experience based on their business, their needs, their industry and their purchasing behavior.

Pro customers are not one-size-fits-all, and The Home Depot Pro offers the level of value-added services that our diverse Pro customers demand. Our Pro loyalty program, Pro Xtra, provides Pros with benefits related to useful business services, exclusive product offers and a purchase monitoring tool to enable receipt lookup and job tracking of purchases across all forms of payment. We will continue to invest in the Pro customer experience to provide the services, solutions, support, and online tools they need to grow their businesses.

Intersecting our DIY customers and our Pros are our DIFM customers. These customers are typically home owners who engage with Pros to complete their project or installation, instead of completing the project or installation themselves. DIFM customers can purchase a variety of installation services in our stores, online or in their homes through in-home consultations. Our installation programs include many categories, such as flooring, cabinets and cabinet makeovers, countertops, furnaces and central air systems, and windows. We believe that changing demographics are increasing the demand for our installation services, particularly for our "baby boomer" customers who may have historically been DIY customers but who are now looking for someone to complete a project for them. We also believe our focus on serving the Pros who perform services for our DIFM customers will help us drive higher product sales.

We help our customers finance their projects by offering PLCC products through third-party credit providers. Our PLCC program includes other benefits, such as a 365-day return policy and, for our Pros, commercial fuel rewards and extended payment terms. In fiscal 2018, our customers opened approximately 4.8 million new The Home Depot private label credit accounts, and at the end of fiscal 2018 the total number of The Home Depot active account holders was approximately 16 million. PLCC sales accounted for approximately 23% of net sales in fiscal 2018.

We strive to provide an outstanding customer experience by putting customers first and taking care of our associates. Our customer experience begins with excellent customer service, and our associates are key to delivering on that experience. Our goal is to remove complexity and inefficient processes from the stores to allow our associates to focus on our customers. To this end, in fiscal 2018 we continued to invest in freight handling capabilities as part of an end-to-end initiative to optimize how product flows from suppliers to our shelves. Among other benefits, this initiative improves our on-shelf availability while decreasing the amount of time a store associate spends locating product on the receiving dock or in overhead storage. We deployed our new overhead management application on our FIRST phones, our web-enabled handheld devices, in fiscal 2018, which helps associates locate product stored in overhead storage quickly and accurately, saving time, improving the customer experience, and assisting with inventory management. In addition, we launched a new order management system called “Order Up” to consolidate certain of our existing legacy systems into a simple and intuitive user interface that requires minimal training and significantly decreases associate time required to create, sell, manage and edit orders. These efforts allow our associates to devote more time to the customer and make working at The Home Depot a better experience.

During fiscal 2018, we also enhanced our labor model to better align associate activity with customer needs, shifting from a model based on the number of transactions to one that correlates to the specific volume of activity within each store down to the department level. This change, which is now live in all stores, allows us to better allocate our workforce to provide a best-in-class customer experience.

At the end of fiscal 2018, we employed approximately 413,000 associates, of whom approximately 29,000 were salaried, with the remainder compensated on an hourly or temporary basis. To attract, reward, and retain qualified

personnel, we seek to maintain competitive salary and wage levels in each market we serve. We also have a number of programs to recognize stores and individual associates for exceptional customer service. In fiscal 2018, as part of our strategic investments, we made a number of investments in our associates, including changes to our benefits programs to eliminate a waiting period for new hires and an enhanced paid maternity and parental leave program. We measure associate satisfaction regularly, and we believe that our employee relations are very good.

Interconnected Experience: Stores to Online, and Online to Stores

Our customers are shopping and interacting with us differently today than they did several years ago. As a result, we have taken a number of steps to provide our customers with a seamless and frictionless interconnected shopping experience across our stores, online, on the job site, and in their homes.

We do not view the customer experience as a specific transaction; rather, we believe it encompasses an entire process from inspiration and know-how, to purchase and fulfillment and to post-purchase care and support. From the inspirational point of the purchase journey to providing product know-how, we are investing in the infrastructure and processes needed to deliver the most relevant marketing messages to our customers based upon what is important for them today. This means adjusting messages so that they are personalized to the customer, such as showing product that completes their project based upon what was recently purchased, or highlighting products and services that are most relevant based upon changing weather conditions. Customers desire more personalized messaging, so we are focusing on connecting marketing activities with the online and in-store experiences to create a seamless series of contacts across all channels. Doing this well provides tremendous value to the customer, which in turn drives business results.

Our stores are the hub of our business, and we are investing to improve the customer shopping experience through easier navigation and increasing the convenience and speed of checkout. For several years, our associates have used our FIRST phones to help expedite the online order checkout process, locate products in the aisles and online, and check inventory on hand. In fiscal 2018, we empowered our customers with additional self-help tools. As part of our strategic investments, we have made progress with the implementation of our wayfinding sign and store refresh package, with almost 1,300 of our U.S. stores completed by the end of fiscal 2018, ahead of our original plan. This package includes new, more intuitive signage, better lighting, and basic store enhancements. We also continued the roll out of our re-designed front end area, including optimized layouts in all checkout areas and expanded and enhanced self-checkout options, as well as the addition of self-service lockers at the front entrance to offer convenient pick up of online orders.

We continue to make investments in our website and mobile apps. Enhancements to these digital properties are critical for our increasingly interconnected customers who research products online and then go into one of our stores to view the products in person or talk to an associate before making their purchase. We also continued to invest in a better digital navigation experience through store-specific maps, which allow customers to pinpoint the exact location of an item on their mobile devices. While in the store, customers may also go online to access ratings and reviews, compare prices, view our extended assortment and purchase products. During fiscal 2018, we continued to improve our e-commerce platform with a goal of driving a more personalized customer experience, as discussed above. To create an enhanced customer experience, we have been expanding our use of technology, including machine learning and data sciences. In fiscal 2018, we continued to enhance our search and mobile functionality, our checkout speed, and our chat functionality with our online contact centers.

We believe that by connecting our stores to online and online to our stores, we drive sales not just in-store but also online. In fiscal 2018, we saw increased traffic to our online properties and improved online sales conversion rates. Sales from our online channels increased over 26% during fiscal 2018. We will continue to leverage our physical and digital assets in a seamless and frictionless way to enhance the end-to-end customer experience.

Connect Products and Services to Customer Needs

We strive to be the number one retailer in product authority in home improvement by delivering product innovation, assortment and value and by offering a range of home improvement services. In fiscal 2018, we continued to introduce a wide range of innovative new products to our DIY and Pro customers, while remaining focused on offering everyday values in our stores and online.

To enhance our merchandising capabilities, we continued to make improvements to our information technology tools in fiscal 2018 to build an interconnected shopping experience that is tailored to our customers’ persona, shopping context, and location; to ensure we have the best value in the market; and to optimize our product assortments.

A typical The Home Depot store stocks approximately 30,000 to 40,000 items during the year, including both national brand name and proprietary products. Our online product offerings complement our stores by serving as an extended aisle, and we offer a significantly broader product assortment through our websites, including homedepot.com, blinds.com, and thecompanystore.com, an online retailer of textiles and décor products that we acquired in late fiscal 2017 to expand our offering of online décor categories. We also routinely use our merchandising tools to refine our online assortment to balance the extended choice with a more curated offering.

In fiscal 2018, we introduced a number of innovative and distinctive products to our customers at attractive values. Examples of these new products include the Halo Color Selectable LED Downlight Retrofits, Behr Quick Dry Oil-Based Wood Finish, EGO® 56V Carbon Fiber PowerLoad Technology™ Trimmer, Andersen® LuminAire™ Retractable Screen, and Loctite® PL® Premium Max Construction Adhesive.

During fiscal 2018, we continued to offer value to our customers through a wide range of our proprietary and exclusive brands. Highlights of these offerings include Husky® hand tools, tool storage and work benches, water resistant gloves, dual beam flashlights, diamond tip screwdrivers, and 15-in-1 screwdriver/nut drivers; Everbilt® products, including hardware fasteners, plumbing parts, pumps and garbage disposals; Hampton Bay® lighting, ceiling fans and kitchen cabinets; Glacier Bay® bath fixtures and toilets; LifeProof® flooring including carpet, carpet with PetProof® technology, rigid core vinyl plank flooring, and new slip resistant tiles; EcoSmart® lighting, featuring all-glass LED light bulbs; Vigoro® lawn care products; Stanley® hand tools; Troy-Bilt® outdoor snow throwers; and RIDGID® and Ryobi® power tools, featuring Ryobi® 40V cordless push mowers. We will continue to assess our merchandising departments and product lines for opportunities to expand the assortment of products offered within The Home Depot’s portfolio of proprietary and exclusive brands.

We also offer a number of services for our customers. As noted above, we provide a number of special programs for our Pro customers to meet their particular needs, and for our DIY and DIFM customers, we provide a number of installation services. We also provide tool and equipment rentals at over 1,200 locations across the U.S. and Canada, providing value and convenience for both our Pro and DIY customers.

Connect Product to Shelf, Site and Customer

We continue to drive productivity and efficiency by building best-in-class competitive advantages in our information technology and supply chain. These efforts are designed to ensure product availability for our customers while managing our costs, which results in higher returns for our shareholders. We recognize that our customers’ expectations are changing rapidly and that our supply chain needs to be responsive to their expectations for how, when and where they choose to receive our products and services. We will continue to improve productivity and connectivity across our supply chain platforms to achieve the fastest, most efficient delivery capabilities in home improvement. We refer to this process, which encompasses a multi-year effort, as One Home Depot Supply Chain. During fiscal 2018, we continued to build the foundation to meet this goal.

We centrally forecast and replenish over 98% of our store products through sophisticated inventory management systems and utilize a network of over 200 distribution centers to serve both our stores' and customers' needs. This network includes multiple distribution center platforms in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico tailored to meet the needs of our stores and customers based on the types of products, location, transportation, and delivery requirements. These platforms primarily include rapid deployment centers, stocking distribution centers, bulk distribution centers, and direct fulfillment centers. As part of our investment in One Home Depot Supply Chain, we will add a number of different fulfillment facilities designed to help us meet our goal of reaching 90% of the U.S. population with same or next day delivery for an extended home improvement product offering, including big and bulky goods. These facilities include more direct fulfillment centers and market delivery operations, or MDOs, which function as local hubs to consolidate freight for dispatch to customers for the final mile of delivery. In fiscal 2018, we began piloting these facilities.

In addition to our distribution centers, we leverage our almost 2,000 U.S. stores as a network of convenient customer pick-up, return and delivery fulfillment locations. For customers who shop online and wish to pick-up or return merchandise at, or have merchandise delivered from, our U.S. stores, we have fully implemented our four interconnected retail programs, BOSS, BOPIS, BODFS, and BORIS, which we believe provide us with a competitive advantage. For example, as of the end of fiscal 2018, almost 50% of our U.S. online orders were picked up in the store. We also continue to focus on developing new capabilities to improve both the efficiency and customer experience in our store delivery program. For example, as of the end of fiscal 2018, we have rolled out van and car delivery to over 70% and 40% of the U.S. population, respectively, which provides our customers with a fast and affordable service for smaller deliveries.

A key component of our strategy is enabled through our technology portfolio, which consists of a network of systems that help us centrally manage customer orders and optimize where, when and how we fulfill them in order to maximize speed, efficiency, and the customer’s experience. During fiscal 2018, we continued to improve our customer order management platform, or COM, and our delivery management system, which substantially improves our ability to sell and execute deliveries from our stores.

Innovate Our Business Model and Value Chain

In the changing retail environment, we must increase our investments to enhance the interconnected customer experience and position our Company for the future. Our customers view us as One Home Depot and expect us to function in an interconnected, seamless manner. To fully realize the One Home Depot experience, we will continue to connect the various aspects of our business and leverage our scale. We will also invest in our physical locations, our digital properties, our associates, products and innovation, our Pro and DIY customers, our services business, and our supply chain. Underlying all of these investments is our continued investment in information technology, which provides the backbone of the One Home Depot experience.

We continue to focus on driving productivity throughout the business. This process includes lowering our costs and reinvesting in the business to drive higher sales, creating what we refer to as a virtuous cycle. Through technology development, we drive productivity and speed. By focusing on the elimination of waste across the value chain, improved processes, and simplified systems, we support a cycle of productivity. This virtuous cycle has allowed us to improve the customer experience, increase our competitiveness in the market, increase sales, and deliver on shareholder value.

Our strategy to create the One Home Depot experience is driven by our desire to create value for all stakeholders, including our customers, our associates, our supplier partners, the communities we serve, and our shareholders. We are accelerating our investments in the business within our disciplined approach to capital allocation. Our first use of cash has been and will continue to be investing in our business, with use of the remainder guided by our shareholder return principles:

•	Dividend Principle. We target a dividend payout of approximately 55% of prior year earnings per share, with the goal of increasing our dividend every year.

•	Return on Invested Capital Principle. Our goal is to maintain a high return on invested capital, benchmarking all uses of excess liquidity against the value created for our shareholders through share repurchases.

•	Share Repurchase Principle. After meeting the needs of the business, we use excess cash to repurchase shares as long as it is value creating.

In fiscal 2018, we drove higher returns on invested capital, which allowed us to return value to shareholders through $10.0 billion in share repurchases and $4.7 billion in cash dividends, as discussed in Item 7, "Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations."

Competition

Our industry is highly competitive and evolving. As a result, we face competition for our products and services from a variety of retailers, suppliers, and service providers, ranging from traditional brick-and-mortar, to multichannel, to exclusively online. In each of the markets we serve, there are a number of other home improvement retailers; electrical, plumbing and building materials supply houses; and lumber yards. With respect to some products and services, we also compete with specialty design stores, showrooms, discount stores, local, regional and national hardware stores, paint stores, mail order firms, warehouse clubs, independent building supply stores, MRO companies, home décor retailers, and other retailers, as well as with providers of home improvement services and tool and equipment rental.

We compete, both in-store and online, primarily based on customer experience, price, quality, availability, product assortment, and delivery options. With respect to our stores, we also compete based on store location and appearance as well as presentation of merchandise. Our customers routinely use a variety of electronic devices and platforms to shop online, read product reviews, and compare prices, products, and delivery options, regardless of where or how they shop. Further, online and multichannel retailers are increasingly focusing on delivery services, with customers seeking faster, guaranteed delivery times and low-price or free shipping. Our ability to be competitive on delivery times and delivery costs depends on many factors, including the success of our investments in One Home Depot Supply Chain.

Sustainability Efforts

The Home Depot is committed to sustainable business practices – from the products that we offer to our customers, to the environmental impact of our operations, to our sourcing activities, to our involvement within the communities in which we do business. We believe these efforts continue to be successful in creating value for our customers, shareholders, and communities.

Environmentally Preferred Products and Programs. We offer a growing selection of environmentally preferred products, which supports sustainability and helps our customers save energy, water and money. Through our Eco Options® Program introduced in 2007, we have helped our customers more easily identify products that meet specifications for energy efficiency, water conservation, healthy home, clean air and sustainable forestry. As of the end of fiscal 2018, our Eco Options® Program included over 20,000 products. Through this program, we sell ENERGY STAR® certified appliances, LED light bulbs, tankless water heaters, and other products that enable our customers to save on their utility bills. We estimate that in fiscal 2018 we helped customers save over $1.2 billion in electricity costs through sales of energy-saving products. We also estimate our customers saved over 59 billion gallons of water resulting in over $655 million in water bill savings in fiscal 2018 through the sales of our WaterSense®-labeled bath faucets, showerheads, aerators, toilets, and irrigation controllers.

In 2017, we announced customer energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and water goals, anchored by our sale of ENERGY STAR® and WaterSense® products. We are committed to providing innovative products that, through proper use, will help to reduce North American customers’ electricity costs by more than $2.8 billion; greenhouse gas emissions by 20 million metric tons; and water consumption by 250 billion gallons by 2020. We also updated our wood purchasing policy to require FSC certification for wood products from the Amazon basin, Congo basin, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Our 2018 Responsibility Report, available on our website at https://corporate.homedepot.com/responsibility, describes many of our other environmentally preferred products that promote energy efficiency, water conservation, clean air, and a healthy home.

We continue to offer store recycling programs in the U.S., such as an in-store CFL bulb recycling program launched in 2008. This service is offered to customers free of charge and is available in all U.S. stores. We also maintain an in-store rechargeable battery recycling program. Launched in 2001 and currently done in partnership with Call2Recycle, this program is also available to customers free of charge in all U.S. stores. Through our recycling programs, in fiscal 2018 we helped recycle over 888,000 pounds of CFL bulbs and over 1 million pounds of rechargeable batteries. Since program inception, we have helped recycle 10 million pounds of rechargeable batteries. In fiscal 2018, we also recycled over 230,000 lead acid batteries collected from our customers under our lead acid battery exchange program, as well as over 247,000 tons of cardboard through a nationwide cardboard recycling program across our U.S. operations. We believe our environmentally-preferred product selection and our recycling efforts drive sales, which in turn benefits our shareholders, in addition to our customers, the communities in which we work and live, and the environment.

Commitment to Sustainability and Environmentally Responsible Operations. The Home Depot also focuses on sustainable operations and is committed to conducting business in an environmentally responsible manner. This commitment impacts all areas of our operations, including energy usage, supply chain and packaging, and store construction and maintenance. In 2015, we announced two major sustainability commitments for 2020. Our first goal is to reduce our U.S. stores’ energy use by 20% over 2010 levels, and our second goal is to produce and procure, on an annual basis, 135 megawatts of energy for our stores through renewable or alternate energy sources, such as wind, solar and fuel cell technology. As of the end of fiscal 2018, we have 45 stores with solar rooftop power and over 202 fuel cell systems that are either operational or in development, which puts us on track to exceed both of our goals before the end of 2020. In 2018, we set a Science Based Target goal in connection with our annual CDP reporting (discussed below) with commitments to a 2.1% annual reduction in carbon emissions. Our goal is to achieve a 39.9% reduction by 2030 and a 50.4% reduction by 2035. We are committed to implementing strict operational standards that establish energy efficient operations in all of our U.S. facilities and continuing to invest in renewable and alternative energy. Additionally, we implemented a rainwater reclamation project in our stores in 2010. As of the end of fiscal 2018, 148 of our stores used reclamation tanks to collect rainwater and condensation from HVAC units and garden center roofs, which is in turn used to water plants in our outside garden centers. Our 2018 Responsibility Report, which uses the Global Reporting Initiative, or GRI, framework for sustainability reporting, provides more information on sustainability efforts in other aspects of our operations.

Awards and Recognition. Our commitment to corporate sustainability has resulted in a number of environmental awards and recognitions. From 2008 to 2017, we received 21 significant awards from three EPA programs. Multiple times over these years, the ENERGY STAR® division named us "Retail Partner of the Year – Sustained Excellence"

for our overall excellence in energy efficiency, and we received the WaterSense® Sustained Excellence Award for our overall excellence in water efficiency. We have also received the EPA’s "SmartWay Excellence Award," which recognizes The Home Depot as an industry leader in freight supply chain environmental performance and energy efficiency.

We participate in the CDP reporting process. CDP is an independent, international, not-for-profit organization providing a global system for companies and cities to measure, disclose, manage and share environmental information. In January 2019, we received a score of A from CDP, reflecting a high level of action on climate change mitigation, adaptation and transparency. We also were named an industry leader by CDP.

Sourcing and Quality Assurance

We maintain a global sourcing program to obtain high-quality and innovative products directly from manufacturers around the world. During fiscal 2018, in addition to our U.S. sourcing operations, we maintained sourcing offices in Mexico, Canada, China, India, Southeast Asia and Europe. Our suppliers are contractually obligated to ensure that their products comply with applicable international, federal, state and local laws. All of our vendors and service providers must comply with our responsible sourcing standards, which cover a variety of expectations across multiple areas of social compliance, including supply chain transparency, sources of supply, and child and forced labor. In addition, we have both quality assurance and engineering resources dedicated to establishing criteria and overseeing compliance with safety, quality and performance standards for our proprietary branded products. We also have a global responsible sourcing program designed to ensure that suppliers adhere to high standards of social and environmental responsibility. Our 2018 Responsible Sourcing Report, available on our website at https://corporate.homedepot.com/responsibility/sourcing-responsibility, provides more information about this program.

Safety

We are strongly committed to maintaining a safe shopping and working environment for our customers and associates. Our EH&S function is dedicated to ensuring the health and safety of our customers and associates, with trained associates who evaluate, develop, implement and enforce policies, processes and programs on a Company-wide basis. Our EH&S policies are woven into our everyday operations and are part of The Home Depot culture. Some common program elements include: daily store inspection checklists (by department); routine follow-up audits from our store-based safety team members and regional, district and store operations field teams; equipment enhancements and preventative maintenance programs to promote physical safety; departmental merchandising safety standards; training and education programs for all associates, with varying degrees of training provided based on an associate’s role and responsibilities; and awareness, communication and recognition programs designed to drive operational awareness and an understanding of EH&S issues.

Intellectual Property

Our business has one of the most recognized brands in North America. As a result, we believe that The Home Depot® trademark has significant value and is an important factor in the marketing of our products, e-commerce, stores and business. We have registered or applied for registration of trademarks, service marks, copyrights and internet domain names, both domestically and internationally, for use in our business, including our expanding proprietary brands such as HDX®, Husky®, Hampton Bay®, Home Decorators Collection®, Glacier Bay® and Vigoro®. We also maintain patent portfolios relating to some of our products and services and seek to patent or otherwise protect innovations we incorporate into our products or business operations.

Seasonality

Our business is subject to seasonal influences. Generally, our highest volume of sales occurs in our second fiscal quarter, and the lowest volume occurs either during our first or fourth fiscal quarter.

Available Information

Our internet website is www.homedepot.com. We make available on the Investor Relations section of our website, free of charge, our Annual Reports to shareholders, Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, Proxy Statements, and Forms 3, 4 and 5, and amendments to those reports, as soon as reasonably practicable after filing such documents with, or furnishing such documents to, the SEC.

We include our website addresses throughout this report for reference only. The information contained on our websites is not incorporated by reference into this report.

Other Financial Information

For information on key financial highlights, including historical revenues, profits and total assets, see the "Selected Financial Data" on page F-1 of this report and Item 7, "Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations."