Steiner Bolsters Industrial Supply Offering with Purchase of Inland Cutting Products

Steiner Electric Co., Elk Grove Village, Ill., continued to expand far past the traditional borders of the electrical market with its purchases of Inland Cutting Products and the Industrial Sling Co., both of Countryside, Ill. The two industrial supply companies, which are two different divisions of the same company, will be part of Steiner’s Crown Industrial Supply Division.

Inland Cutting Products services a broad selection of industrial supply products such as band saw blades, cutting tools, metalworking fluids and lubricants throughout the Chicago metropolitan market and other parts of Illinois and northwest Indiana. Founded in 1982, the company is a distributor of metalworking supplies and equipment that focuses on the steel processing and metalworking industry in the greater Chicago area, northern Illinois and northwest Indiana, providing integrated supply solutions, product application and other services. According to information on its website, Industrial Sling is a58-year-old fabricators of wire rope, chain and nylon slings.

The acquisition will mesh nicely with Steiner’s Crown Industrial Supply Division, which started up in 1998 with the acquisition of Crown Industrial Supply Co. Overseeing the new organization will be Daniel Bruch, president and founder of Inland Cutting Products and Mark O'Brien, Crown Industrial Supply’s general manager.

Richard Kerman, Steiner Electric’s president and COO, told Electrical Marketing that Inland Cutting Products and Crown each have strengths in different niches of the industrial supply market, and that he expects the acquisition to help Steiner’s efforts to provide its industrial customers with a broader selection of industrial supplies.

While much of the growth that fueled Steiner’ Electric’s march to become one of the largest electrical distributors in the United States and to its #33 ranking on Electrical Wholesaling’s most recent Top 200 listing has been organic, the company has also made several acquisitions both inside and outside of the mainstream electrical wholesaling industry. In addition to its 1988 acquisition of Otto Frankenbush Electrical Supply Co.; its1992 purchase of motor repair and sales shop Excel Electric Services Co.; and the Crown Industrial Supply acquisition; in 1999 Steiner acquired Powertron, a generator service company.

The Inland acquisition will also help Steiner service integrated supply contracts through its Supplier Partnership Group (SPG), which assists customers in tool crib management and the supply of MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) products for an entire manufacturing facility. In other news at Steiner Electric, the company recently opened a new 50,000-square-foot branch in Tinley Park, Ill., to cover Chicagoland’s southern metropolitan area.