Distributor Playbooks
A strategy teardown of every company on the 2026 MDM Top Distributors lists — how each one wins, how it got here, and what the rest of the channel can learn. Organized below exactly the way MDM organizes the industry.
New: Top Distributors 2026 — the same companies ranked, classified, and scored →Also see: Retailer Playbooks — the NRF Top 100, profiled →These charted on MDM's 2025 lists and do not appear on the 2026 ones. Most left by being acquired rather than by shrinking — MRC Global into DNOW, GMS into The Home Depot, Kodiak into QXO, BradyPlus into the merged Imperial Brady. The teardowns stay up.
Sector lists, rankings, and revenue figures from the 2026 MDM Top Distributors Lists, © Modern Distribution Management. Revenue shown is total company revenue per MDM; rankings are by revenue within each sector. Where MDM's own print contradicts itself or a figure we have already corrected, we publish the corrected figure and log it in the corrections log. The teardowns themselves are ours.