For the past few years many have talked about eCommerce and have made investment plans. Now a number of these investments are coming to fruition and the conversation is evolving to “where is this going?”, “what are customers doing / […]
Corporate success, for many, is typically defined as sales success as sales revenue is an easily identifiable, and discussed / shared, metric. But in a quest to grow sales, and due to competitive pressures, gross margins for many distributors have […]
Lighting agents. Those two words conjure a range of emotions and business observations for many in the industry, and especially for electrical and lighting distributor. It’s almost as if this element of the channel is revered and either tolerated or […]
The company formerly known as Mayer Electric Supply made a small but subtle move recently and changed its name to Mayer. Along with the name change came an evolved brand and updated logo and mark. For a company that is […]
Over the past couple of weeks national chains and groups announced their Q2 performance, shedding insight for others regarding the health of the market. Below are Q2 2018 overviews from AD, Grainger, Anixter, Graybar, Rexel and WESCO. And, it appears, […]
Every year hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested / spent by manufacturers to solicit preference from distributors. In fact, about 10 years ago we estimated over $500M was spent in rebate funding. (Today we estimate over $1 billion!) […]
The industry, as we know, is going through change. In many people’s opinion, the three biggest drivers of this change are: Increased competition, especially through alternative channels (non- full-line electrical distributors) Personnel, with much of it stemming from an aging […]
We’re at the mid-year and we’re hearing a wide array of distributor and manufacturer performance. Industry forecasters state the market should be around 6% which begs the question, are you above the industry forecast and growing or are you letting […]
Grainger shared its 2018 Q2 performance earlier this week and, given their industrial MRO focus, highlighted continued strength in this customer segment. And while they are not focused in the electrical space, they are about a $1B electrical player as […]
Looking back over last quarter there were a number of acquisitions in the electrical / lighting industry. Reasons for the deals can be based upon: A desire for accelerated growth Expansion into geographic markets Desire to leverage infrastructure and/or support […]
