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The 2011 MDM Market Leaders lists are ranked in order of 2010 revenue size alone; no other factors were used to compile these lists.

This year we refined the lists to as accurately as possible reflect North American revenues where they are clearly broken out by the global distributors. For example, rather than list Wolseley plc as the top industrial distributor, we listed its North American subsidiaries, Ferguson/Wolseley Canada. Another example: Global fastener distributor Bossard falls in the top 40 industrial listing because we used just the revenues from its Americas segment.

We also added distributors that were excluded last year, including market-leading fluid power distributors SunSource and Berendsen Fluid Power. This changed the makeup of the top 40 industrial distributor list.

We collected data for this report in several ways. Companies were asked to fill out a form online providing data about revenues, trends and executives. In addition, forms were sent to companies known to be the largest players in their sectors. We also utilized SEC annual filings for public companies.

In the end, not every company was willing to provide us with revenue data for 2010, yet we deemed it important to include them anyway (e.g. McMaster-Carr, SunSource, etc.).

We utilized several resources to estimate where to place these companies on their respective lists. These resources included: past reported revenues, average revenue increases within the sectors, data from economic reports and conversations with industry experts.

All companies for which we estimated revenues and/or position are notated with “N/A.”

Revenues for all companies in this report are provided in U.S. dollars.

For companies who report their data in other currencies, we converted their revenues to U.S. dollars using the exchange rate in place on the last day of that company’s reported fiscal year to determine ranking.