Beginning a New Year

After a little hiatus for the holidays, it’s time to get back to work.

First order of business … Happy New Year and may your 2010 bring your sales and profit growth, or at least stability, and may 2009 remain in the rear view mirror!

A couple of things to get us started:

• We are in the process of completing our 2010 Channel Challenges surveys and will be posting them on ElectricalTrends in the next day or so.  Your input is critical to understanding the challenges and opportunties manufacturers, distributors and reps will face in 2010. Respondents have the opportunity to receive an executive summary of the report, so be on the look-out and thank you in advance for participating.
• This year we are also launching a Contractor Challenges survey to gain a better understanding of their issues, especially as it relates to interacting with distributors. If you are interested in participating by sending it to your contractors, we’ll compensate you with results exclusive to your customers. Give either of us a call (or email David or Allen).  If you are interested in the overall results, let us know.

And, a couple of industry highlights from the end of the year:

• As you may know, IMARK integrated the Equity/EDN members, so they are all IMARK members.  The group now has over 1100 members, 2000 locations and $15 billion in sales Or, think of it this way, about 30% of industry volume.
• The winners in the merger / acquisition … the Equity/EDN members.  They receive increased rebates (presumably through enhanced negotiations with many manufacturers), access to more premier manufacturer brands and access to IMARK’s marketing, training and networking tools.  Pretty good deal for not doing much. The members should collectively thank Matt Roos for putting more profit on their bottom line.
• The losers … those manufacturers who were deemed “repetitive” (our word) and not asked to join the combined group. And here’s a thought … IMARK now has mor than 2x the number of members than NAED has!
• With GE selling NBC to Comcast and generating cash, plus Jeff Immelt talking about GE as a manufacturer, there has been Wall Street comments about GE possibly acquiring Rockwell.  Jim Pinto, a noted automation expert, also commented on this (and for a Rockwell blog, click here). And, we’ve heard from a few GE distributors that GE’s gear business will be reporting to GE Energy and that GE Lighting will continue to report to GE Appliances. GE Energy also has solar and wind turbine products.