NTP-STAG, a company based in Tualatin, Ore., and the market’s largest wholesale supplier of RV parts and accessories, has waded into the marine distribution business.
This story by J. George Gorant originally appeared in Trade Only Today.
“Marine is a new adjacent space focus for us that we have decided to pursue in a much bigger and more focused way for 2020,” said Bill Rogers, the president of Keystone Automotive Operations, which owns NTP-STAG.
NTP-STAG’s arrival is the latest move in what has been a tremor of activity among distributors that either already did or wanted to work in both marine and RV. The process started in 2014, when Brunswick Corp. bought Bell Recreational Products, a Midwest-based distribution company that served boat and RV dealers. Brunswick made Bell part of subsidiary Land ’N’ Sea Distributing, the largest U.S. marine distributor.
Other crossovers have included Keller Marine and RV in Port Trevorton, Pa., which started in the marine distribution business in 1958 and added RVs to its menu in 1968. It opened a new distribution center near Tampa, Fla., in 2018, solidifying its position as an East Coast power.
Northern Wholesale Supply in Hugo, Minn., which serves the upper Midwest, maintained its existing facilities while expanding into new territories. And two years ago, Derema Group, a national marine representative agency based in West Chester, Pa., moved into the RV business.
“We saw opportunities in the RV sector from feedback from our dealers that were handling marine and RV products in their stores,” said Michael Conners, president of Land ‘N’ Sea Distributing. “We decided to explore the opportunity to expand further into RV with our current marine service model, and it has been tremendous.”
As is often the case with business-model shifts, the causes of this one are multiple and intertwined, but a big one is timing. As the boating industry struggled to recover from the economic meltdown of 2008, the RV market took off, starting at roughly 166,000 units sold in 2009 and increasing annually until it broke 500,000 units in 2017. Sales have declined slightly the past two years, but “RVs are not hurting by any means,” said Dan Staples, division manager at Northern Wholesale. “It seems the inventory has steadied as far as new sales, but the aftermarket is as strong as ever.”
Boating sales bottomed out near 130,000 units in 2012 and had only bounced back to roughly 200,000 by 2018. The industry has thrived by selling fewer boats for more money, which is fine for boatbuilders but is not as beneficial for parts and accessories distributors. For some of those companies, RVs have offset the losses.