Item 1. Business.

Introduction

The Home Depot, Inc. is the world’s largest home improvement retailer based on net sales for fiscal 2019. 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 2019, we had 2,291 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

The retail landscape has changed rapidly over the past several years, with customer expectations regarding how, when and where they want to shop constantly evolving. To meet this challenge, we have had to become more agile in our response to the changing competitive environment and customer preferences. As a result, in late 2017, we launched our transformational journey to create the One Home Depot experience, our vision of an interconnected, frictionless shopping experience that enables our customers to seamlessly blend the digital and physical worlds. We are now two years into our multi-year, approximately $11 billion accelerated investment program to create this experience. We are investing in our stores, associates, interconnected and digital experience, Pro customer experience, services business, supply chain, and product and innovation to drive value for our customers, our associates, our suppliers, and our shareholders. We are guided in our investments by a “customer-back” approach, focusing on the customer experience as we invest. This focus has driven investments aimed at providing an interconnected shopping experience, featuring curated and innovative product choices, personalized for the individual shopper’s needs, which are then delivered in a fast and cost-efficient manner. To accomplish this, we are executing against five key strategies designed to drive growth in our business:

•	Connect associates to customer needs

•	Interconnected experience: connect 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 leverage our competitive advantages and create the One Home Depot experience that our customers demand. To highlight our evolution and the capabilities we have developed for the benefit of our customers along this journey, we also changed our tagline in fiscal 2019 to “How Doers Get More Done™”, with a corresponding marketing campaign designed to show our customers the ways we are making home improvement easier, faster and more convenient for them. We discuss below many of our efforts and investments in the context of our five key strategies.

Connect Associates to Customer Needs

As noted above, we have been guided by a focus on our customers in our development of the One Home Depot experience, and we leverage our knowledgeable and engaged associates, guided by our culture and values, to address customer needs. We serve two primary customer groups and have developed different approaches to meet their diverse needs:

•	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.

•

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. The Home Depot Pro serves a number of business customers, including hotels, hospitals, apartment/condominium property managers, educational institutions, government agencies, commercial property managers and housing authorities. 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 that comprise our Pro ecosystem. Within this Pro ecosystem, we also 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, with our B2B website, 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 2019, our customers opened approximately 4.8 million new The Home Depot private label credit accounts, and at the end of fiscal 2019 the total number of The Home Depot active account holders was approximately 16.7 million. PLCC sales accounted for approximately 23% of net sales in fiscal 2019.

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 and make working at The Home Depot a better experience.

To this end, we have continued to focus on freight handling capabilities as part of a multi-year, end-to-end initiative to optimize how product flows from suppliers to our shelves. Among other benefits, this initiative improves on-shelf availability of products for customers while decreasing the amount of time a store associate spends locating product on the receiving dock or in overhead storage. Our overhead management application on our FIRST phones helps associates locate product stored in overhead storage quickly and accurately, saving time, improving the customer

experience, and assisting with inventory management. As part of our strategic investments, we have rolled out our new order management system, “Order Up,” which consolidates 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. We have also continued to leverage the enhanced labor model we launched in fiscal 2018 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 allows us to better allocate our workforce to provide a best-in-class customer experience. In addition, in fiscal 2019 we expanded our in-aisle mobile learning solution to all departments to further enhance our store associates’ learning and development and aid them in assisting customers. This application, which is on the FIRST phone, enables associates to integrate training into their everyday workstream as well as answer questions and assist customers in real time.

For our Pro sales associates, we have provided a number of tools aimed at helping them to better understand their top Pro customers. Our MyView system allows our Pro sales associates to access customer data and information, so they can proactively work with our Pro customers and determine how we can better serve them.

At the end of fiscal 2019, we employed approximately 415,700 associates, of whom approximately 29,500 were salaried, with the remainder compensated on an hourly basis. Our culture and values promote ongoing investment in our associates. To attract, reward, and retain qualified associates, we seek to maintain competitive wages in each market we serve, offer comprehensive benefits geared towards helping associates through various life experiences, and provide career growth and development opportunities that make working at The Home Depot a more rewarding experience. We also have a number of programs to recognize stores and individual associates for exceptional customer service. We measure associate satisfaction and engagement regularly through associate surveys and drive enhancements based on the feedback we receive. We believe that our employee relations are very good.

Interconnected Experience: Connect 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. 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 channels. Doing this well provides tremendous value to the customer, which in turn drives positive business results.

Our stores remain 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. To improve the customer’s experience in our stores, we have also empowered our customers with additional self-help tools, including mobile app-enabled store navigation. Our app provides store-specific maps, which allow customers to pinpoint the exact location of an item on their mobile devices. As part of our strategic investments, we have made significant progress with the implementation of our wayfinding sign and store refresh package, with over 1,400 of our U.S. stores completed by the end of fiscal 2019. This package includes new, more intuitive signage, better lighting, and other store enhancements. In fiscal 2019, we also continued the roll out of our re-designed front end area, including reconfigured service desks, 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 believe these investments are driving higher customer satisfaction scores.

The enhanced store experience is complemented by our continued investments in our website and mobile apps to drive a more interconnected digital customer experience. Enhancements to our digital properties are critical for our increasingly interconnected customers, who research products online and check available inventory before going into one of our stores to view the products in person or talk to an associate and then make their purchase in store or online. While in the store, customers may also go online to access ratings and reviews, compare prices, view our extended assortment and purchase products. Our investment in digital price labels for our appliance department has enabled us to incorporate ratings from the digital world into the store shopping experience, enhancing the overall customer experience in the category.

We believe that by connecting our stores to online and online to our stores, we drive sales not just in-store but also online. Our focus on improving search capabilities, site functionality, category presentation, product content, speed to checkout, and enhanced fulfillment options has yielded higher traffic, better conversion and continued sales growth. To create an enhanced customer experience, we have been expanding our use of technology, including advanced data science. We have also continued to improve our e-commerce platform with a goal of driving a more personalized customer experience, as discussed above.

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 2019, we continued to invest in merchandising resets in our stores to refine assortments, introduce a wide range of innovative new products to our DIY and Pro customers, and improve visual merchandising to drive a better shopping experience. At the same time, we remain focused on offering everyday values in our stores and online. To help our merchandising organization keep pace with changing customer expectations and expanding desire for innovation, localization and personalization, we are investing in tools to better leverage our data and drive a deeper level of collaboration with supplier partners. As a result, we have continued to focus on enhanced merchandising information technology tools to help us to build an interconnected shopping experience that is tailored to our customers’ personas, shopping context, and location; ensure we have the best value in the market; and 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, our online site for custom window coverings; and thecompanystore.com, our online site for textiles and décor products. We leverage our digital platforms to drive incremental growth from new and adjacent categories like HD Home, pool and workwear. We also routinely use our merchandising tools to refine our online assortment to balance the extended choice with a more curated offering.

In fiscal 2019, we introduced a number of innovative and distinctive products to our customers. Examples of these new products include the Cub Cadet® Ultima™ ZT1 zero turn mower, the DeWalt Atomic 20V platform, ReVent® bath fans, Jeld-Wen® fiberglass folding patio doors, the Rust-Oleum® HOME Interior Floor Coating System, Behr Ultra™ Scuff Defense™ Stain Blocking Paint & Primer in One, and the Setra™ kitchen faucet with Kohler® Konnect™ and voice-activated technology.

During fiscal 2019, we continued to offer value to our customers through a wide range of our proprietary and exclusive brands and products. Highlights of these offerings include Husky® products, including 144-position tight-fit ratchet sets and storage solutions; Everbilt® products; Hampton Bay® products, including cordless stock blinds; the GE® Smart Whole House water filtration system; Glacier Bay® bath fixtures and toilets, including sensor faucets and the Power Flush toilet; LifeProof® flooring, including rigid core vinyl plank flooring and new waterproof bamboo; Philips™ Smart Wi-Fi LED bulbs; Vigoro® lawn care products such as landscape fabric; Werner® 5-in-1 multi-position ladders; and RIDGID® and Ryobi® power tools. 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. As part of our strategic investment program, we are investing in more space, more tools, and better technology to improve the customer experience and continue to grow this differentiated service offering.

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. 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. As part of our One Home Depot initiative, we are investing approximately $1.2 billion in the multi-year development of our One Supply Chain network, which is designed to continue to improve productivity and connectivity across our supply chain platforms to achieve the fastest, most efficient delivery capabilities in home improvement. Our efforts are focused on ensuring product availability and increasing the speed and reliability of delivery for our customers while managing our costs, which results in higher returns for our shareholders.

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 Supply Chain, we have invested to further automate and mechanize our rapid deployment center network to drive efficiency and faster movement of product.

We are also expanding our fulfillment network, investing in approximately 150 new fulfillment facilities to drive speed and reliability of delivery for customers and help us meet our goal of reaching 90% of the U.S. population with same or next day delivery for extended home improvement and MRO product offerings, including big and bulky goods. These facilities include additional direct fulfillment centers, which deliver product directly to customers, and market delivery operations, or MDOs, which function as local hubs to consolidate freight for dispatch to customers for the final mile of delivery, with a focus on items like appliances. We are also adding flatbed distribution centers, which handle large items like lumber that are transported on flatbed trucks, and market delivery centers, which are focused on distribution of MRO products and fast-turning store-based products. As of the end of fiscal 2019, we have opened at least one of each of these four major types of fulfillment facilities and will continue to build out our fulfillment network over the next few years.

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. Our real estate footprint provides a distinct structural and competitive advantage. 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. As of the end of fiscal 2019, approximately 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 efficiency and customer experience in our store delivery program.

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 2019, 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. We support a cycle of productivity through technology development, improved processes, and simplified systems, driving productivity and speed across the value chain. This virtuous cycle has allowed us to improve the customer experience, increase our competitiveness in the market, increase sales, and deliver 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 look to increase our dividend every year as we grow earnings.

•	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 will look to return excess cash to shareholders in the form of share repurchases.

In fiscal 2019, we drove higher returns on invested capital, which allowed us to return value to shareholders through $7.0 billion in share repurchases and $6.0 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, very fragmented, 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. Further, online and multichannel retailers are increasingly focusing on delivery services, with customers seeking faster and/or guaranteed delivery times, as well as 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 Supply Chain.

Sustainability Efforts

Our environmental, social and governance efforts are focused on taking care of our people and communities while operating sustainably, 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 taking care of our associates, 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, associates and communities.

Environmentally Preferred Products and Programs. We offer a growing selection of environmentally preferred products that support sustainability and help 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 2019, our Eco Options® Program included over 25,000 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 2019 we helped customers save over $1.2 billion in electricity costs through sales of energy-saving products. We also estimate our customers saved over 52 billion gallons of water resulting in over $650 million in water bill savings in fiscal 2019 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 have a comprehensive wood purchasing policy that requires FSC certification for wood products from the Amazon basin, Congo basin, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Our 2019 Responsibility Report, available on our website at https://corporate.homedepot.com/responsibility, describes these efforts as well as 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 2019 we helped recycle over 800,000 pounds of CFL bulbs and over 1 million pounds of rechargeable batteries. Since program inception, we have helped recycle over 11 million pounds of rechargeable batteries. In fiscal 2019, we also recycled over 235,000 lead acid batteries collected from our customers under our lead acid battery exchange program, as well as over 250,000 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 2019, we have 47 stores with solar rooftop power and 204 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 40% reduction by 2030 and a 50% 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 2019, 157 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 2019 Responsibility Report provides more information on these and other sustainability efforts throughout our operations.

Awards and Recognition**.** Our commitment to corporate sustainability has resulted in a number of environmental awards and recognitions. Since 2008, we have received 21 significant awards from three EPA programs. Multiple times over these years, the ENERGY STAR® division has named us “Retail Partner of the Year – Sustained Excellence” for our overall excellence in energy efficiency, and we have 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 2020, for the second year in a row, we received a score of “A” from CDP, reflecting leadership and a high level of action on climate change mitigation, adaptation and transparency.

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 2019, in addition to our U.S. sourcing operations, we maintained sourcing offices in Mexico, Canada, China, India, Vietnam and Europe. To ensure that suppliers adhere to our high standards of social and environmental responsibility, we also have a global responsible sourcing program. 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 also 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, including conducting factory audits and compliance visits. Our 2019 Responsible Sourcing Report, available on our website at https://corporate.homedepot.com/responsibility/sourcing-responsibility, provides more information about this program.

Safety

We are committed to maintaining a safe shopping and working environment for our customers and associates. We are dedicated to ensuring the health and safety of our customers and associates, by empowering trained EH&S associates to 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 matters.

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 proprietary brands such as HDX®, Husky®, Hampton Bay®, Home Decorators Collection®, Glacier Bay®, Vigoro®, Everbilt® and Lifeproof®. 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.”