Rexel USA CEO Roger Little sat down with tED magazine at the end of 2024 to talk about key issues impacting our supply chain. That included the continued use of technology, workforce development, electrification, and mergers and acquisitions.
In the third of this four-part series, Little discusses Rexel’s electrification strategy.
Part 1: Roger Little Discusses Rexel’s Mergers and Acquisitions Strategy
Part 2: Roger Little Discusses Rexel’s Future With Technology
tED magazine: Let’s switch into electrification. And data centers kind of plays into this electrification thing because we don’t have the grid strength to power all these data centers. According to the reports that I’m seeing, we don’t have the grid strength to power of the country in general coming up here in the next 5 or so years. It’s an issue, and we have to stay ahead of it as distributors because we’re the ones who are going to do the work. We are the ones who are going to provide the products and keep the projects going. From a Rexel USA side of things, and I know we’re still in the beginning stages. What is the Rexel strategy right now in this opportunity worth hundreds of billions of dollars? And what are you doing now to say we better be ready for a year from now, or two years or five years from now because we’re not going to be able to have power the country if we don’t do anything.
Roger Little, CEO Rexel USA: The fundamental of that is we’re making sure we as Rexel are aware of the upcoming trends of what’s happening in other parts of the world where there are much greater levels of grid instability or at least lack of electrical energy. We’re watching to see what they do to answer that because obviously what happens in one country will eventually happen in another. Instability seems to be an inevitable result of a lot of what is going on today, so it’s not even the lack of energy, it’s just the stability of the grid itself. We’ve seen large projects get cancelled or postponed just in the last three or four months because studies were done, and they realized by injecting this large data center or large project on to the existing grid they were going to cause havoc. So, they just said OK, we are going to fix the problem, and It’s not that they need six months to fix the problems, they need two years to fix the problem. We are going to see some legislation, or at least some reactions from the government, to see if they can accelerate those times because I don’t think anybody wants to hear in two or three years that people are worried about power. The new administration is banking on good news stories on how they’ve driven the economy. They don’t want a news article on how it took them three years just to get some energy. Those are the things we’re watching very closely, making sure we’re ready to pivot to them quickly and it’s happening relatively fast. We don’t have time to do a study about that down the road and keep it on the shelf. When you start to see the trend, you have to jump on it fast, so you need a lot of agility. As a large companies, we have to be much more agile than we ever have been in the past.
tED magazine: We talked about you’re constantly meeting about merger and acquisition activity, and you have a team for that. You’re constantly meeting about digital technology, and you have teams for that to make sure you’re ahead of the curve. Now you have to think that you need an electrification team and meet on that on a regular basis, too. What is Rexel doing right now to be ready to spring into action quickly?
Little: The short answer is yes, can we do it better, absolutely. But I think one of the things that we’ve got to our benefit is we do have peers around the world that maybe already up against some of the challenges that we may see in the U.S. or North America in the weeks, months, and years to come. We are making sure we share those best practices as those teams of subject matter experts are evaluating and telling us as senior leadership what’s coming. They’re talking to their peers in other countries, saying here’s what just happened in Germany, and they want to decide if they’re going to put in heat pumps. Then they realize they’ve got a big problem because they haven’t got the energy, so they start to put a lot of photovoltaic into the system. They’ve got great instability because of all the PV, so here’s what they’re doing about that. It’s really making sure that we have products to answer those challenges at least available to us or we know what it looks like because it will likely happen, and it will happen fast. Making sure we talk across our enterprise about what we’re dealing with, including our vendor partners, and seeing what they’re doing and what they’re observing globally. Typically, partners have global reach as well.
tED magazine: I was going ask about talking with partners about what’s happening. I’m sure they’re sharing the same concerns. Are you strategizing together for 3-4 years from now or are you just having conversations about being as ready as you can possibly be?
Little: We are talking about what we think is coming, what they think is coming, what we should be prepared for as distributors, and as channels. What kind of expertise do they think will needed in the future, not that there were necessarily out there grabbing it today, but we may be training or assisting folks toward it. If I think about that, I’ll just pick automation or PV but making sure that the trends that we’re seeing and they’re seeing as our partners are at least being looked at by a small group that can be mobilized across greater organization. Once we do see if it does have that direction, we’ll be ready for it.