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    2022's 50 Largest Electrical Distributors

    Sept. 16, 2022
    The largest electrical distributors see opportunities for growth in 2022 despite one of the most challenging economic environments the electrical market has seen in years.

    After successfully navigating through most of 2021’s COVID-induced challenges, the largest electrical distributors in North America are now struggling to overcome historic product price increases, supply chain snafus, and labor shortages in the field (and at their own companies).

    From what Electrical Wholesaling magazine’s editors saw in the survey responses for their annual listing of the largest electrical distributors in the United States and Canada, distributors don’t expect long lead times and big-time price increases to subside until 2023. While product availability for many electrical products has improved in recent months, lead times for switchgear and some types of distribution equipment can easily be six months or more, and products loaded with semiconductors (such as industrial controls and LED lighting systems) are still prone to stock-outs.

    However, the nation’s largest electrical distributors are confident they can overcome these challenges (see Rankings Table below). Over the past two years, they found that they could not only adapt to COVID-19 restrictions out in the field and hybrid work strategies at their own businesses, but also grow market share by investing in their businesses and focusing on service basics.

    Top50 Distributors 2022

    Grabbing more market share despite some tricky economic conditions

    Richard Booth, Electrical Division manager for Coburn Supply, Beaumont, Texas, anticipates a 20% increase in his company’s 2022 revenues. Booth said Coburn’s growth over the past year can be attributed to “price increases, increased market share, having inventory when other distributors didn’t, and not shutting down during COVID-19, which earned us many new customers in 2020.”

    Thomas Nelson, corporate communications director, Border States, Fargo, N.D., said inflation had some impact on its 2021 revenue growth, but the company also “identified a number of areas of the business where we grew market share and expanded our share of wallet with key customers.” In 2022, he says Border States is experiencing double-digit growth in all key market segments and that supply chain constraints have been the primary reason any of the segments have lagged.

    Julie Kingsley, controller, Electrical Equipment Co., Raleigh, N.C., sees plenty of large projects underway or on the drawing board in her company’s market area, including textile plant expansion, utility upgrades, and new facilities in the auto tire, aggregate, and cement plant niches. She said in her response that Electrical Equipment Co.’s bookings outpaced sales because of supply chain issues — and that this trend also holds for 2022. “Calendar year 2021 sales trended approximately 12% higher than 2020 with increases in OEM and MRO spend,” she said. “OEM sales and orders accelerated throughout the year. Industrial capital spend was limited, but it was a mirror of 2020 results. Utility spend and specifically solar grew in 2021.”

    Loeb Electric, Columbus, Ohio, is one of the distributors looking forward to the groundbreaking of Intel’s multi-billion semiconductor manufacturing facility near Columbus. Brandy Seich, Loeb Electric’s senior director of marketing, said data centers, medical center expansion, and other large commercial projects contributed to the company’s 2021 revenues and that Loeb expects a 15% increase in 2022 revenues due in part to “continued positioning as a service leader for our entire customer base.”

    No stranger to double-digit annual revenue growth, Jeff Metzler, CEO of Houston’s Lonestar Electric Supply, is expecting 25% growth this year because of inflation and market share. Matt Brnik, executive VP of Schaedler YESCO Distribution Services, Harrisburg, Pa., said his company gained more market share in the construction and commercial markets. The company made major investments in its logistical capabilities, adding 40,000 sq ft to an existing central distribution center; purchasing a larger facility in the Allentown, Pa., market; and purchasing a warehouse in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area to convert into a CDC. Schaedler YESCO is also seeing increased revenues from the branches in Pittson, Pa., and Johnson City, N.Y., which it purchased from Rexel in 2020.

    Dean Stier, marketing director of IEWC, New Berlin, Wis., was also very bullish on his company’s growth prospects. “We have much to celebrate,” he said in his response. “A record 2021, a strong start to 2022, our expansion into the telecom market via our recent acquisitions of Cablcon and Jupiter Communications, and our continued expansion of our OEM business in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) and APAC (Asia-Pacific) markets.”

    Larry Swink, president of Jackson Electric Supply, Jacksonville, Fla., says his company has gone from a privately owned, unknown start-up in 2013 to $54 million in 2021 revenues. He estimates that Jackson Electric Supply is now

    No. 2 in its local market with a national footprint selling lighting and gear to national retailers/global logistics companies. “Jackson exceeded projections for 2021 and grew from $25 million to $54 million year-over-year,” he wrote in his response. “Key investments in new salespeople and an increase in business with existing customers combined help the Jackson team reach new levels in 2021, and we are positioned for continued growth in 2022.”

    While few Top 150 respondents have seen federal dollars from Biden’s Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act for electrical grid modernization flowing freely, utility specialists are still seeing growth. Steve Gramling, president/CEO of Gresco Utility Supply, Forsyth, Ga., said fiber-to-home projects added to the company’s 2021 revenue growth, and Rusty Batch, CEO, Tri-State Utility Products Inc., Marietta, Ga., said grid modernization projects are underway in the Southeast.

    Several distributors saw growth in 2021 because of concerted efforts to stock up inventories. John Eggleton, Kirby Risk Corp., Lafayette, Ind., said in his response that his company saw sales increase in 2021 due to “less COVID-19 restrictions, increased on-site access vs. competition, pent-up demand, and strong inventory position.” The company also has a new customer relationship management (CRM) and digital transformation strategy, he said.

    New business ventures

    James DeRosa, general manager for YESCO Electrical Supply Inc., Columbiana, Ohio, said the company had a good year because of having products on hand from “enhanced purchasing in 2020.” DeRosa is forecasting a 20% increase in revenues for 2022, partly from a new General Services Administration (GSA) contract to supply goods to the federal government via the GSA Advantage program. The contract took more than a year to complete. “We already are seeing orders from the USDA, Navy, and other agencies within the federal government,” he said in his survey response.

    Warshauer Electric Supply Co., Tinton Falls, N.J., opened a state-of-the-art electrical training facility called “Warshauer Trade” and established a Green Energy Division that focuses on all green technologies and energy-saving initiatives. Joe Borkey, president of PEPCO, Eastlake, Ohio, said the company’s new “Audit and Efficiency” effort reviews all processes, procedures, operations, etc., and has led to “paradigm shifts in pricing and service models.” PEPCO also opened locations in Latrobe and Palmyra, Pa.

    Merger mania in the distributor world

    Mergers and acquisitions have had a huge impact on EW’s annual ranking of the industry’s largest distributors. In fact, over the past two years, no less than 18 distributors formerly ranked on the listing have been acquired. There’s no reason not to expect that this wave of M&A activity won’t continue. The 50 largest electrical distributors in EW’s ranking have been the most active acquirers, and their acquisitions over the past few years have helped them grab huge chunks of market share. In 2021, the Top 50 accounted for an estimated $76 billion in combined total sales (63% of the electrical wholesaling industry’s total) and ran at least 6,500 branches. If you want to find out if any of the local distributors in your market are in EW’s complete ranking of the 150 largest electrical distributors, go to www.ewweb.com/data-training/top-150

    About the Author

    Jim Lucy | Editor-in-Chief, Electrical Wholesaling & Electrical Marketing

    Over the past 40-plus years, hundreds of Jim’s articles have been published in Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and Electrical Construction & Maintenance magazine on topics such as electric vehicles, solar and wind development, energy-efficient lighting and local market economics. In addition to his published work, Jim regularly gives presentations on these topics to C-suite executives, industry groups and investment analysts.

    He launched a new subscription-based data product for Electrical Marketing that offers electrical sales potential estimates and related market data for more than 300 metropolitan areas. In 1999, he published his first book, “The Electrical Marketer’s Survival Guide” for electrical industry executives looking for an overview of key market trends.

    While managing Electrical Wholesaling’s editorial operations, Jim and the publication’s staff won several Jesse H. Neal awards for editorial excellence, the highest honor in the business press, and numerous national and regional awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors. He has a master’s degree in communications and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, N.J. (now Rowan University) and studied electrical design at New York University and graphic design at the School for Visual Arts.

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    In the typical facility, the plant manager has X amount of discretionary spending power that can be directed toward a single purchase. At each level of management down, discretionary spending is stepped down into smaller amounts. Anything beyond a given manager’s limit must be appealed to the next level up. For example, the Plant Engineer can’t quite swing a purchase of $5200 but the Plant Manager can approve it. This informal arrangement reduces corporate overhead and improves operational efficiency. It does not address whether the spending decisions would make financial sense to the Chief Financial Officer, but the cap at each level keeps any mistakes to a reasonably acceptable loss or misallocation of resources. Beyond the Plant Manager’s limit, there is usually a formal process for getting spending approval. It typically involves filling out a Capital Request (or similarly named form). In well-run companies, the form is very structured. It mostly wants some basic information that will give the reviewer(s) the ability to justify not just the purchase but also the cost of acquiring the capital to do so. Because the funds will typically be borrowed by the corporation, the cost of capital must be balanced against the return on investment. There will be at least one person crunching the numbers to make what is called “the business case” for the proposed spending. Making the business case is something you should do, in some way or another, when considering spending within your approved limits. If the spending is above your approved limits, then the manager above you will need a bit beefier of a business case. The business case must take into account the value obtained versus the money spent. Consider the purchase of a thermographic camera. If you intend to purchase a mid-range camera but nobody at your facility is trained and certified in its use, the purchase is probably a waste of money. You’d be better off getting an entry-level camera and then arranging for a path toward certification if you intend to have that ability in-house and it makes operational and financial sense to do so. And generally, it makes sense to have a person or two with Level I certification so they really understand how to get the most out of a camera system that’s beyond the basic level. On the other hand, if you were a manager at an electrical testing firm with several Level III Thermographers you would be wasting your thermographers if you decided to “save money” by equipping them with only basic or even intermediate camera systems. Your firm needs to be able to troubleshoot problems when that important client calls in a panic. Your thermographers need the tools to do that job, and “cost-saving” on camera systems won’t cut it. Presumably, your clients are smart enough to already have basic camera systems; they just don’t have the expertise to use advanced systems. Sometimes a different logic applies to other types of test equipment. In the typical plant, maintenance electricians need sophisticated DMMs. If they lack the training to use the features that are needed for most effectively keeping equipment running, simply choosing a less capable DMM they already know how to use is not the answer. They need the appropriate DMM along with the training on how to use those features correctly. So far, we haven’t looked at the need to crunch any numbers to make the business case. What we have done is think about the match between the purchase, the problem that needs to be solved, and the ability of the user to solve the problem using that purchase. This sounds like a common sense approach that everyone would naturally take, but people often lose sight of the reason for the purchase in the first place. The tendency is to either go all out on something they can’t use or don’t need, or to “save money” by shortchanging the end users with something that doesn’t allow them to do what they need to do. What about those numbers? When you do a purchase request, a bean counter is going to try to determine the cash flows involved (typically in monthly periods). If you write something like, “The payback period is three years,” they don’t find that helpful. Lenders care that a loan can be serviced, and cash flow is the critical factor in calculating whether it can. Thus, beancounters don’t use payback to determine whether they can afford to borrow. They use the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) or Modified Internal Rate of Return (MIRR). Formulas for both IRR and MIRR have been in spreadsheet programs for over two decades, but before that they were determined using a Business Math Calculator (about $150 in 1990). And before that, they were laboriously calculated by hand. The cash flows that are charted will be either additional revenue generated or losses prevented. To help the person who figuratively wears the green eye shade, tie the use of the test equipment to a revenue stream. A major appliance plant in Tennessee has several production lines that collectively produce $1,560,000 per hour of revenue. Thus each minute of unplanned downtime is quite costly. If the plant electrical engineer there wanted to upgrade test equipment in a way that exceeds the Plant Manager’s spending authority, he needs to help the green eye shade guy do the math. He can cite short case histories from the past two years and briefly explain how having X capability (present in the new equipment, absent in the existing equipment) would have saved Y minutes of downtime (which the green eye shade guy will calculate out in terms of revenue and cash flow). 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The motor shop forensic report shows the main motor failed due to winding insulation failure caused by transients. With a power monitor detecting and reporting those transients, we would have been able to intervene before outright failure, on a scheduled basis. That would have reduced downtime by 57 minutes twice last year alone.” Making the business case for your smaller purchases means simply thinking about what you are trying to accomplish and then making sure you are spending the funds correctly to achieve that goal. But as you go up the food chain, you need to make the picture more clear. And when you appeal to corporate for approval, you need to provide reasonably accurate downtime savings numbers that can be converted by them to revenue loss prevention in specific dollar amounts.
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