Motion Industries: Built by GPC, About to Fly on Its Own

Part of Distributor Playbooks — strategy teardowns of every company on the 2025 MDM Top Distributors lists.

Motion Industries ranks No. 1 in Power Transmission/Bearings, No. 2 in MRO, No. 2 in Industrial Supplies and No. 2 in Hose on the 2025 MDM Top Distributors list, the annual ranking from Modern Distribution Management that sizes up North America's largest distributors across 20 verticals. It posted $8.7 billion in 2024 revenue, per MDM, and by fiscal 2025 that had climbed to roughly $8.9 billion. Most people who buy a bearing or a conveyor belt from a Motion branch have never heard of the company that has quietly owned it since 1976: Genuine Parts Company, the NAPA parent.

That fact is about to stop being quiet. In February 2026, GPC announced it will split Motion and NAPA into two separate public companies, targeted for the first quarter of 2027. For the first time since Gerald Ford was president, Motion will report its own numbers, set its own capital priorities, and answer to its own board. That transition, more than any single branch count or SKU total, is the real story here.

From Owen Richards to Motion

The company started in 1946 as Owen Richards Co., an industrial supply outfit bought by Caldwell Marks and William Spencer III in Birmingham, Alabama, according to Motion's own account and a Wikipedia summary of the company's founding. First-year sales topped $500,000. In 1972 the founders renamed it Motion Industries, a name meant to signal what it sold: the parts that kept other people's machinery running. Four years later, in 1976, Genuine Parts Company bought it outright.

That's the part of the story worth sitting with. GPC didn't build Motion. It bought a going concern and then let two generations of GPC-appointed leadership keep doing what Marks and Spencer had started: buying smaller, well-run regional distributors one at a time and folding them into a national branch network without stripping out what made them good. M.B. McKee, a Lubbock, Texas bearings and power-transmission house serving customers since 1943, joined in January 2025. Sunset Industrial, a Cerritos, California power-transmission and lubrication distributor founded in 1979, joined that November, per Modern Distribution Management's reporting. Earlier deals brought in BC Bearing Engineers in western Canada, AST Bearings, Miller Bearings in Florida, and dozens more over five decades. None of those names survive as brands today. All of them survive as branches.

Depth over breadth

Motion's MDM placements tell you where the model is strongest and where it isn't:

That's a company built around one core competency, bearings and power transmission, radiating outward into adjacent categories where the same technical sales rep and the same branch counter can plausibly serve a maintenance manager. It is not trying to be the electrical distributor of record; it shows up at #23 there because electrical is somebody else's specialty, not Motion's. The rank order is a map of what the acquisition engine has actually been buying for eighty years: bearing houses, belt-and-chain shops, fluid power specialists. It's a company that grew by depth in one discipline rather than breadth across all of them, and the MDM table shows the seams exactly where you'd expect them.

Global Industrial, quietly

Motion has also been building outward from North America under the Global Industrial name, with close to 200 locations across Australia and New Zealand after GPC took a 35 percent stake in Sydney-based Inenco for roughly $70 million, an Australasian distributor with about US$325 million in sales and more than 160 branches of its own, according to Industrial Distribution's reporting on the deal. It's the same playbook exported: find a well-run regional bearing-and-PT distributor, take a stake or buy it outright, keep the branches and the customer relationships intact.

The tension in the spinoff

Here's the trade Motion is walking into. As a GPC subsidiary, it never had to raise its own capital, manage its own leverage, or answer analysts on its own quarterly call. Industrial MRO demand is more cyclical than the automotive aftermarket, GPC's other half; when factories cut shifts, bearing and power-transmission orders soften faster than the recurring flow of brake pads and oil filters that NAPA sells into cars people still have to drive. GPC's official separation announcement frames the split as sharpening focus and speed for both businesses, with Motion posting roughly $9 billion in 2025 sales and $1.1 billion-plus in EBITDA against a $150 billion addressable market. That's a real growth case. It's also a company about to lose the automotive side's steadier cash flow as a cushion for the first time in fifty years, right as it takes on the discipline of quarterly guidance and its own stock price. Whether the acquisition engine that built Motion keeps running at the same pace once it has to clear its own capital-allocation bar, rather than GPC's blended one, is the open question the 2027 spinoff will answer.

Distribution's biggest strategic bets rarely show up in a press release about a single product line. They show up in ownership structures, branch maps, and the quiet decision to keep buying family-run distributors long after everyone else stopped.