Crescent Electric Supply Co., East Dubuque, Ill., has expanded into Indiana by acquiring the net assets of Peerless Electric Supply Co.

Peerless Electric Supply, with headquarters in Indianapolis, has branches in Franklin, Martinsville and Noblesville, Ind. The addition of the four Peerless locations gives Crescent a total of 123 distribution facilities in 27 states. Crescent is ranked 11th on Electrical Wholesaling magazine’s 2003 listing of the 200 largest electrical distributors.

Joel Van Treese will remain with the company as the Indiana district manager, and Rick Gill will continue as the Indiana district operations manager, said Dick Schmid, Crescent Electric Supply’s vice president of marketing.

“Peerless represents an important strategic acquisition for us, and we are very excited to welcome the Peerless family to the Crescent organization,” said James Etheredge, president of Crescent. “There are very strong parallels between Peerless and Crescent. Like Peerless, we are a privately held, family owned business with a long history dating back 84 years,” he said.

Although the acquisition of Peerless Electric Supply gives Crescent Electric Supply a foothold in Indiana, Schmid said the acquisition is important for other reasons too. “It was a very good business with very good people and we’re delighted to see they’re staying. They’ll be able to take advantage of some of the things that we do that they don’t have the capabilities to do.”

Crescent Electric has expanded into several areas in the last couple of years. In 2002, the company acquired Missouri Valley Electric Co., Kansas City; Kennedy Electric Supply, Jamaica, N.Y.; and Computer Systems Products (CSP), a voice-data distributor in Plymouth, Minn. In 2003, the company purchased Northwest Controls, Defiance, Ohio.