Attendees at NAED’s South Central region conference certainly have a mixed bag of economic prospects to discuss during their meetings this month in Las Vegas. It’s a massive region geographically that includes busy auto plants in the upper Midwest, Tennessee and South Carolina; downtown skyscrapers in the Windy City; construction of wind farms in Iowa; perennial construction hotspots like Washington, D.C., Nashville, Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte; the gigantic Atlanta metro, the many booming residential markets in Florida; and Louisiana’s petrochemical industry.
As you can see in the chart on page 2, the electrical sales potential in this region is huge, as more than 40 MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas) have electrical sales potential of more than $100 million. At $1.26 billion in electrical sales potential, the Chicago metro is the largest in the region and one of the very largest in the entire country.
Because this NAED region includes a rather puzzling array of states and market areas, constructing an overall sales forecast for this area probably isn’t as valuable as analyzing the health of the individual trading areas.
Pockets of prosperity exist here, particularly in the largest MSAs and in the many areas with industrials feeding the auto industry. But the crash of the oil market has had a dramatic impact on NAED members servicing the Gulf Coast and in other market areas that depend on the oil and gas market.
