Demand for motors increased in the fourth quarter of 2012 as the Motors Shipments Index published by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) Rosslyn, Va., grew 6.5% from the previous quarter. This improvement follows on the heels of a 17.3% decline posted in the third quarter. Since bottoming out in the second quarter of 2009 during the depths of the Great Recession, the index has climbed a cumulative 30.9% percent but has dropped below its pre-recession high for the last two quarters.
Growth in the fractional horsepower segment of the motors market rebounded strongly in the first half of 2012 but plummeted in the third quarter and continued to fall in the fourth quarter of 2012 while integral horsepower motor shipments recorded a more moderate decline for the second consecutive month. The inflation adjusted dollar value of fractional horsepower motors shipments has increased by over a third between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2012, while the value of integral horsepower motors shipments increased almost 2% over the same period. Details
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Jim Lucy Blog
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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.