State of the power transmission market

Contributed by: Paul Heney

Attendees at the Power Transmission Distributors Association’s 2013 Industry Summit at the JW Marriott Resort in Palm Desert, Calif., received an early look at the results of PTDA’s brand new Power Transmission & Motion Control Market Report. Tom Gale, Industrial Market Information and David Gordon, Channel Marketing Group, presented results to a mixture of manufacturers and distributors. 

The North American market size—using 14 PTDA product categories and combining both OEM and MRO consumption—is $68 billion, comprised of the U.S. market at $54 billion, the Canadian market at $6 billion, and the Mexican market at $7 billion. (As the data reflects PTDA membership, it may be skewed due to business mix.) Specific categories include bearings at $8.79 billion, motors at $8.35 billion, linear products at $3.19 billion, pumps at $2.61 billion and belt & chain drives at $2.47 billion.

Channels to market included power transmission distributors (99.3%), direct to OEMs (94.2%), direct to end users (55.8%), big box/online/e-distributors/direct (45.7%), and other types of distributors (44.9%).  The report even went into regional and state-by-state data, as well as examining some of the larger metro areas in each state. The metropolitan data breaks down, by component, the size of each market—a very helpful tool for distributors looking to expand.

Questions were also asked of survey respondents as to what they think that the future holds for distributors. The most popular answers were: More service offerings, increasing technical sophistication, increasing share of wallet for projects/MRO, and expanding product offerings. Additionally, by 2017, 17% of distributor CEOs think that services will account for more than 20% of their business.

For more information on the report, or to order any of PTDA’s publications, please visit https://store.ptda.org.