nexAir: How a Family Gas Distributor Became a Linde Unit

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

nexAir lands on the 2025 MDM Top Distributors list in Gases & Welding Supplies, the annual Modern Distribution Management ranking of North America's largest distributors. What the list entry does not show is that the company it names has not been independent since January 2023. nexAir is a wholly owned subsidiary of Linde plc, and it has been acquiring other distributors, promoting new executives, and courting welding shops under its own name ever since. That gap between how the company looks and who owns it is the story.

A Memphis welding shop, three generations deep

The roots go back to 1940, when Standard Welders Supply opened in Memphis. Two years later R.Q. McEniry, who had transferred over from Linde's own Memphis office, bought the business outright, according to nexAir's own company history. His son Bob joined in 1963. In 1984 the company bought a Linde-owned plant in Memphis to add capacity. Bob's son Kevin, the third generation, came aboard in 1994.

Two years later, Standard Welders Supply merged with Mid-South Oxygen, a business owned by the Heppel family, and the combined company took the name nexAir. Bob McEniry became CEO, Bill Vaughan was named president, and the McEniry line kept running it: Kevin took over as CEO in 2007 with Bill Proctor as president. Through the 2000s nexAir pushed into Birmingham and Atlanta, formed a dry-ice subsidiary called nexAir Carbonic, and struck a joint-venture arrangement with Praxair in 2008 that would matter far more than it looked at the time.

Growing on the majors' castoffs

Between 2015 and 2017, nexAir did something distinctive for a regional player: it grew by absorbing pieces the global gas majors were shedding. It bought Air Liquide's liquid-carbon and dry-ice operation in Millington, Tennessee. It merged in Praxair Distribution Southeast. And it acquired Linde's LifeGas packaged-gas business across the Southeast, which became the seed of nexAir Healthcare. Each of those deals came from a major industrial gas company deciding a piece of Southeastern distribution wasn't worth running directly. nexAir was the local buyer with the balance sheet and the branch network to take it. In 2020, Deloitte Private and the Wall Street Journal named it a Best Managed U.S. Company, still framed as a family business built on other people's divestitures.

The 2012 joint venture that flipped the script

Here's the detail that changes the reading of everything before it: that 2008 Praxair joint venture had left Linde Gas & Equipment (LG&E) holding a 23 percent minority stake in nexAir since 2012, long before Linde and Praxair merged globally in 2018. On January 5, 2023, LG&E bought the remaining 77.2 percent, giving Linde full ownership of a company that had 2022 sales of roughly $400 million, per Linde's own announcement. LG&E president Ben Glazer called it consistent with "increasing network density and reinvesting in opportunities that meet the investment criteria." In plain terms, the regional distributor that had spent a decade eating the majors' discarded assets became one itself.

What ownership by a major actually looks like

That's the piece worth naming outright, because it runs against the instinct to read "family business" and "MDM-ranked independent distributor" as the same thing. They aren't, not anymore, and nexAir isn't alone in that: Air Liquide bought Airgas in a deal completed in 2016, and Airgas has operated as an Air Liquide company ever since without losing its own brand on the truck. nexAir is following the same script a decade later.

What's notable is how little changed on the surface after 2023. In July 2024, nexAir acquired WELSCO, an 80-year-old Arkansas and Oklahoma supplier of industrial gases and welding supplies with roughly 16 locations, extending nexAir's own footprint past 70-plus sites into two new states. The messaging to WELSCO's customers promised "the same trusted team you've relied on," per nexAir's transition page for the deal. A Linde-owned subsidiary was still out shopping for distributors under its own name, a year after being fully absorbed itself.

Leadership followed the same pattern of continuity dressed as change. For 2025, nexAir promoted longtime president Bill Proctor to CEO and named Robert Webb, a 20-year company veteran, as president, according to GAWDA's distributor news roundup. No outside executives, no rebrand, no Linde name on the door.

The tension worth sitting with: a fully owned subsidiary that keeps acting like an acquirer is either a genuinely durable model for running a regional brand inside a global parent, or a longer runway toward the same integration every other absorbed distributor eventually gets. Linde's own language, "network density," suggests the company sees value in nexAir looking and behaving exactly as it always has, for as long as that keeps working in the Southeast.

Distribution's real advantage rarely shows up on an org chart. It's in the branch that opens on time, the cylinder that gets tracked correctly, and the catalog data that turns a phone order into a fill rate a customer can plan around, no matter whose name is on the parent company's letterhead.