IMARK joins IMELCO's global consortium of buying/marketing groups
IMARK Group, Bowie, Md., has joined IMELCO, a 20-year-old consortium of 12 buying/marketing groups from 16 European countries and Australia that in 2011 had combined sales of an estimated $8.4 billion. IMELCO's member associations include the United Kingdom's Associated National Electrical Wholesalers, which according to its web-site (www.anew.co.uk) has 37 members with 300 branches and GEMCELL, an Australian buying/marketing group with 34 members operating 258 locations. According to information on IMELCO's web-site, Associated National Electrical Wholesalers accounts for an estimated $853 million in sales and GEMCELL's members combined do an estimated $754 million in sales.
IMARK Group has 900 members operating more than 2,000 branches. IMARK estimates that its membership includes more than 80 members on Electrical Wholesaling's Top 200 listing and that its members combined has 18% market share of the U.S. electrical distribution market.
IMARK Group is a member-owned, member-governed cooperative made up of 900 independently owned electrical distributors throughout the United States. These companies serve their customers from over 2,000 branch locations.
In a press release announcing IMARK's decision to join IMELCO, Bob Smith, IMARK president and CEO said, “Given the increasing rate of industry globalization, we are confident that our group's membership in this organization will benefit IMARK members in the years to come. We anticipate that IMARK Group's membership in IMELCO will result in enhanced member profitability and expanded networking opportunities, as well as the chance to share best practices with leading independent electrical distributors from all over the world.”
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Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. 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 magazine 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 in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.