Electrical Wholesaling's 2014 Top 200 List

Methodology. To compile this listing, in April of this year Electrical Wholesaling’s editors sent out a survey to several hundred distributors of electrical supplies that have either been on the listing in the past or have at least $10 million in annual sales, according to our data sources. In addition, we get data from publicly held distributors and other companies that make their sales and company data public. This year we got information back from 147 Top 200 distributors, which is our best response ever. It’s quite an accomplishment to get this much sales and company data because the vast majority of companies on this listing are privately held. Many of these companies do ask us to use their sales data confidentially and only for placement on the listing.

You will also notice that we rank companies that have been acquired in either 2013 or 2014. Our general rule of thumb here is that when a company has been acquired, we include their sales (or a sales estimate) for that calendar year, but take them off the Top 200 listing the next year, when they are fully integrated into the acquirer.

In those situations where a distributor is large enough to make the listing but did not respond to our surveys, if we have reliable sales or employee data from the past few years, we will place them on the listing, using a sales-per-employee average, or the average sales increase based on responses from Top 200 respondents or other Electrical Wholesaling sales data. However, if we haven’t heard from you for a while and your company is on this year’s listing, there’s no guarantee it will be ranked again next year. We make every effort to make this listing as accurate as possible, and can’t rely on sales estimates or other company data that’s more than a few years old.

Strictly by the numbers. With an estimated $62 billion in North American sales, EW estimates the Top 200 distributors controlled approximately 65% of sales through electrical distributors in North America. According to EW estimates, these 200 companies have 88,900 employees and run at least 5,965 North American branches. From the 140 companies that provided both sales and employee data, Electrical Wholesaling’s editors estimated that Top 200 full-line distributors averaged $668,515 in sales per employee.