Leadership

IW U.S. 500: Top Electrical Equipment and Appliances Manufacturers (slideshow)

Oct. 31, 2022

We didn't set out to make a list where every company was a least a century old, but it turns out that the electrical and appliance manufacturers that laid the groundwork for the U.S. manufacturing boom of the 1900s are mostly still dominating that field.

Robert Schoenberger

A century ago, Westinghouse created a division to handle shipping and distribution for its electric equipment, and Wesco International was born. By then, the company that become Diebold Nixdorf was already 63-years-old. The magazine that would one day become IndustryWeek might have covered the Wesco news... in its 40th year in print.

The IW US 500 list of the largest publicly traded manufacturing companies in the country has a strong mix of old and new with names such as Apple, Dell and Tesla taking top spots. Even with the electrical equipment and appliances segment, Roomba maker iRobot made the list. But the top 10 companies have 1,296 years of experience between them. Only three of the top 10 were founded in the 20th century with the rest coming from the 19th.

And, like most manufacturers, they did quite well in 2021. The electrical/appliance sector reported $194 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in profits for a collective 2.3% profit margin. And, that low margin was almost entirely due to massive losses at list leader General Electric. Minus GE, the group brought in $120 billion in revenue and $10.9 billion in profits for a 9.1% collective margin.

With most of these slideshows, we only offer one image per company. Because of the ages involved here, we're using two—the first showing recent products or operations, the other from as far back as we could find pictures.

Rank	Primary Industry	Name	2021 Revenue (in millions)	2021 Profit Margin	2021 Net Income (in millions)	2021 Revenue Growth
17	Electrical Equip., Appliances	General Electric Co.	$74,196	-8.79%	-$6,520	-2.2%
62	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Whirlpool Corp.	$21,985	8.11%	$1,783	13.0%
78	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Emerson Electric Co.	$18,236	12.63%	$2,303	8.6%
79	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Wesco Int'l. Inc.	$18,218	2.55%	$465	47.8%
182	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Rockwell Automation	$6,997	19.41%	$1,358	10.5%
267	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Hubbell Inc.	$4,194	9.53%	$400	13.9%
268	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Lennox International Inc.	$4,194	11.06%	$464	15.4%
276	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Diebold Nixdorf Inc.	$3,905	-2.02%	-$79	0.1%
297	Electrical Equip., Appliances	A.O. Smith Corp.	$3,539	13.76%	$487	22.2%
302	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Acuity Brands Inc.	$3,461	8.85%	$306	4.0%
309	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Middleby Corp.	$3,251	15.03%	$489	29.3%
325	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Energizer Holdings Inc.	$3,022	5.33%	$161	10.1%
326	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Spectrum Brands Holdings Inc.	$2,998	6.32%	$190	14.3%
331	Electrical Equip., Appliances	EnerSys	$2,978	4.82%	$143	-3.6%
333	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Atkore Inc.	$2,928	20.08%	$588	65.9%
334	Electrical Equip., Appliances	First Solar Inc.	$2,923	16.03%	$469	7.8%
364	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Belden Inc.	$2,408	2.65%	$64	29.3%
380	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Woodward Inc.	$2,246	9.29%	$209	-10.0%
392	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Edgewell Personal Care Co.	$2,087	5.61%	$117	7.1%
411	Electrical Equip., Appliances	John Bean Technologies Corp.	$1,868	9.44%	$176	8.1%
443	Electrical Equip., Appliances	Franklin Electric Co. Inc.	$1,662	9.26%	$154	33.2%
449	Electrical Equip., Appliances	iRobot Corp.	$1,565	1.94%	$30	9.4%
456	Electrical Equip., Appliances	SMART Global Holdings Inc.	$1,501	1.42%	$21	33.7%
462	Electrical Equip., Appliances	IPG Photonics Corp.	$1,461	19.06%	$278	21.7%
479	Electrical Equip., Appliances	SunPower Corp.	$1,324	-2.83%	-$37	17.7%
497	Electrical Equip., Appliances	GoPro Inc.	$1,161	31.97%	$371	30.2%

Data provided by Seeking Alpha and S&P Global.

About the Author

Robert Schoenberger

Editor-in-Chief

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robert-schoenberger-4326b810

Twitter: @Rschoenb

Bio: Robert Schoenberger has been writing about manufacturing technology in one form or another since the late 1990s. He began his career in newspapers in South Texas and has worked for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi; The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky; and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland where he spent more than six years as the automotive reporter. In 2013, he launched Today's Motor Vehicles, a magazine focusing on design and manufacturing topics within the automotive and commercial truck worlds. He joined IndustryWeek in late 2021.

Editorial mission statement: Manufacturing is an endlessly fascinating world. Nearly every object that we touch or use daily came out of a factory and is the result of design, engineering, procurement, supply chain, inventory control and management processes. My goal is to keep leaders in the $42 trillion manufacturing world up to date on developments in their industry in ways that inform and entertain them without wasting their time.

Why I find manufacturing interesting: Several years ago, I visited a plant in Pennsylvania that used laser equipment to etch fine lines in large plastic injection molds used to create dashboards on cars. The laser-etched lines created the faux-leather pattern on the dashboard, a vast improvement of the photo-chemical process that automotive suppliers had used for decades to create the illusion of natural products. The idea that designers had crafted the faux-leather patterns, that engineers had developed machines that could generate the fine lines needed, that machine shops could cut the complex shape of the dashboard into the mold shape—all for an aesthetic feature in a car that most drivers would never consciously notice (but the car would feel odd in its absence)—drove home the massive amount of human effort that goes into everything produced with modern machinery.