Branching Out: Electrical industry sees a surge of new distributor branch openings

While acquisition activity has slowed down so far in 2013, electrical distributors are opening up new locations like crazy.

Jim Lucy

Oct. 8, 2013

2 min read

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While distributor acquisition have slowed down a bit, Electrical Wholesaling’s editors don’t remember ever seeing a surge in branch openings similar to what’s going on right now.

In the past two years, electrical distributors have opened more than 40 new locations in the United States. That number is on the low side because it only counts the branches that EW’s editors were able to confirm through direct contact with the companies or through reports in the general press. Many other distributors have chosen to quietly open branches without publicizing them.

Several of these new locations have opened in areas where the oil and natural gas business is booming. In the Bakken region of North Dakota, over the past two years distributors have opened at least five branches. Consolidated Electrical Distributors Inc. opened branches in Williston and Dickinson, N.D.; QED and Graybar Electric Co. opened locations in Dickinson: and Crescent Electric Supply now has a branch in Sidney, Mont. And in Texas, Summit Electric Supply and Graybar and Elliott Electric Supply have all opened branches to service the oil and natural gas industries.

Elliott Electric Supply has opened up the most new branches, with 16 new locations since 2011; the chart on this page lists its 2013 branch openings and several of its 2012 openings. For EW’s complete listing of all branch openings since 2011 check out www.ewweb.com. This database is a work in progress and we will be glad to update this information in print and online as we receive it. Send any new branch information to Jim Lucy at [email protected].

About the Author

Jim Lucy

Editor-in-Chief of Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing

Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 40 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter, and as a contributing writer for EC&M magazine During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement.

Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted with his wife and three sons in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 30 years.