Every Year, one of my favorite webcasts to participate in is the Modern Distribution Management (MDM) top distributor webinar where we announce the rankings for electrical and industrial channel with the MDM Team. MDM has been ranking the largest North American distributors across 20 different distribution sectors for many years.
What makes it even more fun is that I get to work with MDM on the final rankings for the Top 50 Industrial Distributors list. *At Channel Marketing Group, David Gordon and I also get the opportunity to work on the Electrical Channel Rankings.
The rankings were announced last week, and many Industrial Supply Association (ISA) Members were in the top 50 including: Grainger, MSC Industrial Supply, Vallen Distribution, WESCO, Blackhawk Industrial, R.S. Hughes, Kimball Midwest, and more.
This year, building the final 50 Industrial Ranking was interesting as we have had some major movers in 2024 up and down the top industrial distributors ranking list.
The 2025 Rankings were released on June 12, 2025 on a MDM live webcast.
What has made it challenging is that after riding the inflation wave in 2022, distributors of industrial, commercial and building supply products saw slower growth in 2023 as pricing was less of a tailwind. This led to modest annual sales growth or declines for most of the companies on MDM’s 2024 Top Distributors Lists. What didn’t change was the pace of acquisitions and growth rates of certain key industrial distributors.
There were some notable big acquisitions between ISA leaders like Vallen acquiring Wesco’s integrated supply business
More than 70% of the list has changed ranking positions in 2025, and ranking Industrial is one of the hardest categories to rank. For example: McNaughton McKay Group is a billion-dollar-plus Rockwell Automation distributor who serves primarily industrial customers but historically has been considered in the electrical channel, but they sell a considerable amount of MRO product not just Automation.
Many distributors in many channels (like Motion Industries) do the majority of their business in the Industrial Channel, but primarily sell products like Power Transmission and Fluid Power in addition to MRO solutions. For our rankings we tried to navigate this to as close to Industrial Supplies (MRO, Metal Working, etc.) as possible.
This free webcast was hosted by Executive Editor Mike Hockett and a handful of experts (including the Channel Marketing Team, David Gordon and myself) and we analyzed the key factors that influenced our different lists, which serve as the definitive who’s-who of the largest market movers across the distribution landscape.
We took a deep dive into macro elements that impacted many distributors, and granular items that led certain distributors to jump or fall on the MDM lists.
Key Takeaways for the Industrial Channel
The definition of the Industrial Channel is blurring. As distributors are what I term “Channel Drifting” to find opportunities. For example: Ferguson is in Plumbing, HVACR, Residential Lighting, PVF, and Industrial (they publicly share they are in 9 segments).
They are a good example of finding ways to grow by adding new product categories and going after new segments to grow. They are adjusting to this modern channel less environment to drive growth.
Is your Industrial Channel business (manufacturer or distributor) challenging your team to bring new products to market and find new customer segments to pursue?
You can download the Free MDM 2025 Top Distributors list here.
As always we appreciate your comments and support. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions- jgunderson@channelmkt.com
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