Good morning, and welcome to everyone that is joining us today. I am Scott Gaffner, Head of Investor Relations at WESCO. We are pleased to have you with us and appreciate your time and interest in the company. Just a quick reminder, today's discussion is intended to provide additional context around the capabilities, strategic positioning, and growth opportunities that underpin our confidence and our ability to create long-term shareholder value, along with our preliminary 2027 framework that calls for a mid to high single-digit sales growth with continued margin expansion. In the long term, we remain fully committed to our 10%+ EBITDA margin target for the company, but we will not be providing any broad updates on our long-term planning assumptions that we originally discussed with you back in September of 2024 at our Investor Day at our Innovation Center in Glenview.
We will save some of those updates for our next Investor Day, and we will be back to you with more details as that comes together in 2027. Before we get started, I did want to remind you that certain statements made on this call contain forward-looking information. Forward-looking information and statements are not guarantees of performance, and by their nature, are subject to uncertainties. Actual results may differ. You can see our webcast slides in the company's SEC filings for additional risk factors and disclosures, all of which can be found on the company's website at wesco.com. Today, you will hear from John Engel, our Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and our three business unit leaders. They are going to talk about the opportunities that we see in the data center market, which are large and diverse.
We are going to talk about how WESCO supports our customers across the infrastructure life cycle and how those capabilities come together through our Power to Compute value proposition. With that, I will turn it over to John.
Well, good morning, everyone, and I am John Engel. Pleasure to be with you today. We have assembled a team, and we have got a great discussion on WESCO's leading value-added position in the data center market that we will take you through today. So, we look forward to our engagement with you and your questions, and we think this will be a powerful session. Our unique comprehensive Power to Compute solution supports our global customers across all phases of the data center life cycle. Data centers are one of WESCO's largest and fastest-growing markets. Today, we are going to focus on how our One WESCO strategy, our differentiated capabilities, and our end-to-end value proposition enables us to help our customers build, connect, power, and protect what has become their increasingly complex data center infrastructure around the world. Each of our three business units is a market leader in its own right.
Dirk leads our CSS business, and Communications & Security Solutions provides leadership in datacom, security, and the white space infrastructure. Danny leads our EES business, that's Electrical & Electronic Solutions, and EES brings deep expertise in electrical infrastructure in the gray space environment. Jim leads our UBS business, Utility & Broadband Solutions, and UBS contributes utility, power, and grid infrastructure capabilities that are required well before a data center is even built. What truly differentiates WESCO, however, is that these capabilities come together through our One WESCO strategy. Each business creates unique value, and they do it independently, but the real power comes from the ability to support our customers across the entire data center life cycle, from power generation and site readiness to electrical infrastructure, connectivity, compute, and ongoing data center operations.
As data centers become larger, more complex, and more power-intensive, customers need partners that can reliably manage execution and reduce their risk. That's what plays directly to WESCO's strengths. WESCO is uniquely positioned through our scale, our technical expertise, our global footprint, and our breadth of product services and solutions to deliver the end-to-end value proposition that our customers need. We've been serving data center customers for four decades. Our roots in this market go back to the 1980s. That's when our business was primarily focused on connectivity and datacom infrastructure that supported enterprise, co-location, and multi-tenant environments. As the market evolved, so did WESCO. We expanded our capabilities, broadened our customer base, and have significantly deepened our participation in the data center life cycle. We began serving hyperscale customers a decade ago. Through organic investments and strategic acquisitions, we've continued to expand our data center capabilities and offerings.
Today, what started as a white space connectivity business has evolved into a comprehensive Power to Compute platform. WESCO now participates across power infrastructure, the gray space, and the white space, and that gives us a significantly broader opportunity to create value for customers and capture growth across the entire data center life cycle. Our One WESCO strategy is not a new concept for our company. Our first proof point came following the acquisition of Anixter, when we brought together two leading businesses, and at that point, back in early 2020, established a sales synergy target of $170 million. Through disciplined execution and a relentless focus on cross-selling, we ultimately delivered more than $2.3 billion of cumulative sales synergies, far exceeding our original target by more than 13x .
We're applying that same cross-selling playbook to data centers today, bringing together CSS, EES, and UBS capabilities to expand our addressable market and create even more value for our customers. We are executing well and have positive momentum as our data center sales have grown over 300% since early 2024. Sales are approximately $6 billion on a trailing 12-month basis and represent over 20% of our total company sales, up from less than 10% just a few years ago. That growth reflects both the strength of the market and, more importantly, our ability to continue gaining share with the world's largest customers. Even more importantly than that, data centers are EBITDA margin accretive to WESCO, and that demonstrates the value of our differentiated business model and solutions-oriented approach.
The success of our cross-selling efforts following the Anixter acquisition six years ago really laid the foundation for what has become our One WESCO strategy today. What began as an opportunity to introduce customers to a broader set of products and solutions has now evolved into a comprehensive integrated value proposition. Today, customers are looking for more than individual products or bundled services. They need a partner that can help solve their increasingly complex challenges, manage larger projects, and support them across all phases of the life cycle. Our strategy is straightforward: bring all of WESCO to each and every customer. And again, our opportunity extends across the entire life cycle, from the grid to the building, to the rack and the equipment, and to data center operational support.
One of the strengths of our data center business is the breadth of our customers we serve and our ability to tailor our approach to their specific requirements. Approximately 85% of our sales are with hyperscaler, MTDC, multi-tenant data centers, and co-location customers. For hyperscalers, their requirements are increasingly global. Customers are looking for a partner that can support large, complex deployments around the world. Our unmatched global footprint is increasingly important as these customers scale. MTDC and co-location customers require a more customized approach, including strong relationships with the developers and other participants involved in bringing their new capacity online. We are also seeing the development of emerging AI-focused infrastructure providers, which represent about 10% of our current data center sales mix. These operators are building high-density compute capacity, and they require a flexible, scalable approach for their complex deployments.
Our experience across the entire data center ecosystem positions us well as these customers grow. Finally, approximately 5% of our data center sales are with enterprise customers. This is where we have had the deepest roots going back four decades. This market, again, includes a very broad range of customers that we have deep relationships with over the last four decades. The key takeaway is that data centers are not a one-size-fits-all market. Customer requirements and go-to-market strategies vary, but WESCO has the capabilities and the experience to serve the full spectrum of our customers' needs. Now let's shift to WESCO's addressable data center market. The underlying AI-driven data center market continues to be driven by secular growth trends. WESCO's current serviceable market of over $100 billion is expanding as we execute our One WESCO cross-selling strategy.
Our expanding addressable market reflects a shift from supplier direct to distribution as our customers look for a one-stop shop for their global data center builds and deployments. Now, I would like to make a comment on the current market conditions regarding data centers. I know we are all aware of the increased noise in the markets over the last two-plus weeks. That does not change our view one iota regarding the enduring secular growth trends and our mid-to-high single-digit sales growth expectation for WESCO in 2027, mentioned in our earnings call two weeks ago. Now let's shift our view to WESCO overall. We are uniquely positioned at the intersection of multiple powerful secular growth trends that extend well beyond data centers. First, AI automation and converging technologies are accelerating investments in digital infrastructure and intelligent systems.
Second, at the same time, rising power demand, electrification, and grid modernization are creating substantial opportunities across our utility and power infrastructure businesses. Third, reshoring, onshoring, and supply chain resiliency initiatives continue to support investment across industrial and manufacturing markets. The strength of WESCO's diversified portfolio positions us to capture the benefits from these enduring long-term secular trends at the same time, which supports sustainable growth and continued market outperformance over the long term. In summary, why is WESCO winning and why are we taking share in data centers? The answer is very clear. We have a differentiated Power to Compute solution where UBS powers the site, EES builds the gray space, and CSS connects and protects the white space. As a global one-stop shop for our customers, we have substantial runway for continued profitable growth for our data center business.
Next, our business leaders are going to deep dive into how WESCO participates across the data center life cycle and how those capabilities come together through our One WESCO initiatives. Dirk Naylor first will start out in the white space and show how CSS helps customers accelerate time to compute. Danny Castillo will take us into the gray space, where EES helps customers manage increasingly complex electrical infrastructure with greater project certainty. Jim Cameron will take us upstream to power infrastructure, where UBS helps customers accelerate time to power. With that, I'll hand it over to Dirk. Dirk, take it away.
Thank you, John, and good morning to everybody. It's quite a pleasure to be able to spend some time with all of you and talk about CSS, or Communications & Security Solutions business, and as John just pointed out, how we accelerate the time to compute with all of our data center customers in the white space. I'll spend a little bit of time today talking about our capabilities and what it is that we can do to help in that effort to go ahead and shrink the amount of time needed. I'll also spend some time talking about the end-to-end service offerings that we continue to build out in our business today. We are also seeing an importance in our global footprint continue to accelerate, so I'll spend some time on that as well, based on all the deployments that are taking place around the world.
I also want to highlight our acquisition strategy and what that's done to be able to go ahead and broaden out our relevance in our footprint and our capabilities to be able to help our clients in the white space. I'll also conclude by sharing what John just talked about with a case study that shows how our three business units are making an impact with some of the largest data center construction projects around the world. So that'll be an overview for us all over. Before I do that, though, just a couple of comments on me. I've been with the organization for 21 years, and I've been around our strategies as it relates to the data center for most of those years. Certainly, we have seen projects and the scale of these projects magnified significantly, and that, again, is globally we've seen that.
The other thing that we've seen, which I just said, is the amount of activity around the world is unprecedented right now. Anywhere we travel, we're supporting a lot of these large builds, which is something that is highly unique for us. And just the speed in which people want to be able to build and execute is something that's unprecedented as well. Before we dive deep into the data center, though, I just want to spend a few minutes on CSS overall. And you can see we've achieved $10.5 billion in the trailing 12 months, and over roughly 50% of our business today is indeed in the data center.
The other 50%-ish is equally as exciting for us right now based on trends that we're seeing in our market and a lot of the exciting portfolio items that we're bringing, which is in our enterprise network infrastructure business as well as the security business. Across the organization, we specialize in a lot of different customer segments, certainly technology, but finance, telecommunication, transportation, education, government, healthcare, and retail. All these verticals create diversity for us in our efforts to sell. What we provide is truly connectivity, power, security, safety, energy management, and wireless offerings that allows us to have quite a diverse background of solutions to be able to take into all those different categories that we sell into.
In that data center space, John just highlighted the four areas that we sell into, and what I'd highlight inside of those is the hyperscale aspect of our business is incredibly global. We have dedicated people around the world that are very coordinated in an effort to sell and take care of our clients in the white space in all of those areas. In the multi-tenant data center arena, we've participated in this segment of our business for over 15 years and know that side of the business exceptionally well, and the demands and what they're doing around the world is changing rapidly also. John brought up the emerging AI organizations that are building as well. We have dedicated individuals that focus on that around the world, and we're seeing trends for that to build out more global as well. So exciting on that front.
We're very bullish on the enterprise. John mentioned our deep roots in that side of our business. That is the future in our mind with needs that we can provide to help those organizations around what they're trying to build out, whether it's a cloud environment or in an AI environment, and we have distinct opportunities to be able to help our clients in that space. You can also see that we'll continue to grow, and we continue to have demands around the world. Our business roughly is about a third now outside of the U.S., and we have a lot of demands that are really driving this growth by a lot of the clients that I've already mentioned, and certainly, with a lot of the data center builds as well. So, how do we help reduce the time to compute.
Really, that's what we're focused on, and that's where we spend most of our efforts, is trying to figure out with the solutions we bring, which, as I've mentioned, network infrastructure and racks, enclosures, and connectivity are aspects that we can be able to help our clients out in a variety of different ways to be able to bring those to compute faster. We also offer security and power and thermal technology that enables us to be able to allow that organization to be secure in their efforts to make sure that the environment is proprietary for folks that come on site and work in those environments as well. The technology infrastructure is an area that we help on. What we do for our clients really breaks down into a couple of key areas. We help them design the solutions that we provide.
Most of our clients today are looking for a consistent approach to help them around the world with all the solutions that they need to implement into the data center. Along with that, we have the abilities to go ahead from a logistics perspective and offer them the abilities to move these goods in very challenging places around the world on a consistent basis. That helps with speed and being able to get their compute up even faster. And one of the largest trends that we're seeing now by all of our customers is to be able to build off-site and do so as much as possible in the white space and transport those finished products to the facility or in the data hall and get that built out.
You'll hear me show you a few of these areas in the future slides that will tell you some of the build-out we're doing. So, at the end of the day, these areas are what we focus on in an effort to go ahead and increase the speed to compute as we move forward. Now, transitioning. If we were to look at our efforts in these areas, and flip to the next slide, please. If you would look in those areas and look at the value proposition that we bring from a CSS perspective, it really starts by power being needed at the facility, that data center site that's being built. You'll hear from Jim shortly that talks about the capabilities that are brought that way.
As John also mentioned, the next stage in that process is to go ahead and bring the gray space environment up and operational, and you'll hear from Danny talk about that. What we offer then in that white space is a broad portfolio of products, as I've mentioned, along with services. So, our objective in the overall build cycle is to go completely from end- to- end and offer a full suite of offerings across all of WESCO, and post-build, have the ability to offer on-site services in a manner that allows us to stay engaged with that client. So, a complete end-to-end build offering. So, we don't look at it purely as a CSS value proposition. We look at it as a WESCO value proposition in terms of what we're doing on that front.
Scaling to the next area of where we can help our clients out, I have mentioned already a few times the global capabilities that we bring. We have never seen demands globally like we have today. In CSS, right now, we will finish somewhere between 37%-39% of our business in the global theaters. Some of our largest hyperscale customers, less than 50% of what we are servicing is in the U.S. So, this is truly a global business, and we help our customers around the world to be able to do this. So, the demands continue to be that way, and obviously, there is consistencies in how we can go ahead and help them in a repeatable manner to be able to go out and support them in all the areas around the world. We are obviously seeing strong growth in Southeast Asia.
We are seeing strong growth right now in parts of Latin America, namely in Northeast Brazil, we're seeing a lot of build-outs take place. Certainly, in the EMEA region, there is some activity in the Middle East, but also in the Nordic region, we are seeing a lot of build. I highlight these as areas where we have the capabilities to go ahead and help our customers with all the work they are doing, but equally with the local people that we have to help engage with the ecosystems that allow these projects to take place in far places of the world. So, exciting times with our global reach, and then again, leveraging the local presence for us to be able to go on that front. If I were to migrate now into some of the offerings we have, at our core, we are indeed a distributor.
What we have done over the last six- seven years is begun to add incremental offerings in the services arena, and you can see many of those listed on the slide. Our objective is to be more than just that distributor in terms of the products that we can help identify and specify in for our clients. We have a large group of engineers that help us in abilities to go ahead and design and engineer solutions in for these clients, and we have the capabilities to actually do some fit-outs in the facilities in a variety of different technologies. You'll hear more about our cooling offerings and what we are doing on that front based on the demands that are taking place. We're involved in asset management.
One of the biggest obstacles we hear from the data centers is their abilities to keep track of their assets once they have been deployed. I mentioned before our abilities to go ahead and do the facilities maintenance or site operations, as it is known. So, exciting times for us, including a lot of rack delivery build-outs that we can do for our clients as well. So, transitioning then, if I would look at what has truly enabled us to be able to offer more in the way of these services. John Engel mentioned the acquisition merger of WESCO and Anixter. That was the foundational element that has created these three BUs that allows us to have a complete end-to-end offering for our data center clients. In 2022, we realized we wanted to keep that trend going and offering more in the way of the services, and we acquired Rahi.
Rahi really enabled us to have more in the way of white space integration, which included rack and roll capabilities, and really the deployment of different IT infrastructures to be able to help. They too had some site operations, and they also had a nice global footprint that really augmented ours as well. That was a catalyst for us to be able to get deeper into our clients. in 2024, we followed that up with two additional acquisitions, Ascent, which really had two primarily business lines, one of which was engineering, and that was really in the way of designing and engineering solutions, both in the gray and white space, and also facilities maintenance that they were able to offer. This broadened out again our relevance into the data center customers we work with.
We also acquired entroCIM, which was a platform software organization that enabled us to aggregate all the different software outputs in our customers in the data center and aggregate those for them to be able to generate work and process information to make them more efficient in running the facilities. Our latest acquisition was Newark. This is particularly exciting because it gives us a stronger foothold in Southeast Asia, and it also allows us now to be further involved in mechanical and cooling solutions.
Our focus is to offer more of an end-to-end cooling offering, from cooling towers on the outside of the data center all the way into the data center and bring that down into the white space, enabling us to cool AI chips and also offer rear door heat exchanger technology that allows us to cool the internal aspects of the enclosures that are used as well. This is not only a technology play for us, but equally is important to bolster our position in Southeast Asia, where we feel there will be a lot of builds in the future. You can see the acquisition targets, and our focus still is to look at additional areas where we can do more in this space as well.
So, as I transition and look at the other area that I wanted to highlight, there are certainly consistent constraints that we are seeing in the data center area. Certainly power, and John mentioned this, and you'll hear from Jim with some solutions that we are bringing on in a moment. We are certainly seeing one of the big areas as well is people and skilled trades that are able to do work, and additionally, supply chain. Those three are the main areas that we are hearing consistent concerns with our customers and their abilities to go ahead and deliver on-time builds. What we have built out in our first center down in Irving, Texas, just outside of Dallas, is a unique environment that allow us to support our clients and do builds offsite first to get into the white space.
Well, we're actually going to be able to provide L10, L11, and L12 rack integration with cooling technology and enough power to be able to allow us to burn in the chips and the information that needs to be loaded onto those and ultimately delivered onsite to our clients by us. We have four other locations scheduled to open over the next year and a half, and you're seeing a photo of exactly what we have in the facility down in Irving. Super exciting in our abilities to go ahead and add more in this area in the white space. Again, that Power to Compute that we talked about, the more we can do offsite. So exciting times for us in this front as well. So, moving on, if we were to take a look at an area where all three business units are combined.
We had a large engagement down in the south in the U.S., and the client was struggling with all three areas that we provide. They were struggling originally on how they can bring this over a gigawatt data center up and operational, and they had some constraints around power. UBS engaged, got dedicated facilities, got material that can help and support the needs within that facility to come up and operational. With all the relationships that the UBS team has with the vendor community, was able to secure product and start the process of that facility coming online from a power perspective. You then look at how EES was engaged in supplying a whole host of material, including medium voltage cable, putting a consortium of contractors together to help facilitate the build in a timely manner and do so in the project down in Texas.
Very well done that way. CSS's involvement. We were involved early in leveraging the design and helping to secure the allocation of certain products for this build-out, and were able to prime the supply chain in an effort to make sure that that was done expediently, and they had the capabilities of putting this together. This really showcases one example of many that we have today of how our end-to-end offering from a WESCO perspective really has merit and relevance to the builds that are taking place. And in particular, the sheer size of these builds really require an organization of scale and scope and physical size in terms of warehousing. In this case, in this example, we actually stood up a dedicated facility just for this build, and it was used across all three business units.
That really is the power of us coming together as an organization and supporting the marketplace with our capabilities to do just that. If I were to look at closing with a couple of comments here and think about the CSS business overall, we feel we are the global leader in our space. There's no question that we have the capabilities to help our organizations, our customers around the world, our locations, 50 countries that we're in, operating in more countries than that, really lend itself for our capabilities to help build out these large-scale data centers. This Power to Compute and our abilities to go ahead and do more that way with the offerings that we bring and how we help them be faster in their deployment schedules is something we spend a considerable amount of time with our customers on today.
The last that I would say is our expanding value across the life cycle is an aspect of the business that we continue to grow in and raise our relevance in. We are involved then much earlier and engaged in the process throughout the entire life cycle. So, we' re excited about our future in CSS. We think the market continues to be incredibly buoyant for us. With that, I'll turn the call over to Danny, and he will spend some time on the EES business.
Dirk, and good morning to everyone. The EES business at WESCO builds the electrical backbone that supports the computing environment. I will begin with an overview of the business and then show how our technical expertise, supplier partnerships, scale, and services help customers turn complex requirements into executable solutions. For WESCO, the gray space represents a significant growth opportunity and expands our participation in one of the most critical portions of the data center build. Before we jump into EES and in data centers, let me provide you with some context on the business. EES is nearly a $10 billion business with operations in more than 50 countries and is the leading electrical distributor in North America. We serve construction, industrial, and OEM customers with electrical, MRO, safety, and automation solutions.
Data centers represent approximately 10% of our sales, giving us a meaningful platform for continued growth. We continue to diversify the total company data center sales mix with nearly 30% of data center sales in the third quarter attributed to the gray space versus a historical average of around 20%. Electrification, digitization, and reshoring support our growth, and data centers bring those themes together. Customers are adding capacity, increasing power density, and working across more complex supply chains. They need more than product availability. They need technical expertise, strong supplier alignment, and the ability to execute consistently across locations. That combination of scale, scope, and domain expertise positions EES to support the critical infrastructure behind the technologies of tomorrow. Let us go deeper into the gray space.
The gray space is the facility's engine and electrical backbone of a data center, connecting incoming site power to the systems that support the computing environment. A data center requires continuous, reliable power. The infrastructure must also maintain energy and operational efficiency and support safety under increasingly demanding loads. That requires an end-to-end power infrastructure system extending through wire and cable, conduit systems, power distribution, backup power, mechanical and cooling infrastructure, and the services required to coordinate them. As rack density and power demand increase, these systems become more interconnected. EES helps customers manage that complexity across electrical distribution, backup power, mechanical infrastructure, and cooling. The gray space represents a significant growth opportunity and an expansion of our participation in the data center. We believe that opportunity will continue to grow as power requirements and infrastructure complexity increase.
Our value proposition to the data center is that EES brings together products and services, an expansive supplier portfolio, and technical expertise to simplify complexity and turn customer requirements into executable solutions. This is also where One WESCO creates additional value. Data center projects require coordination across multiple stakeholders, technologies, and phases of deployment. EES helps bridge those requirements, connecting technical specifications, product selection, and project execution into a coordinated solution. As Dirk mentioned, each WESCO business has a distinct role. Coordinated around the customer, together we can support a broader portion of the project and help reduce complexity and deliver project certainty across the full life cycle of the data center. Our value proposition is supported by five complementary strengths and how these capabilities come together. Our technical expertise gets us involved early. Our supplier partnerships gives us breadth, choice, and access.
And our planning, services, and execution capabilities help turn complex requirements into operating infrastructure. And our global capabilities allow us to bring that model to customers across markets and locations. For customers, that means less complexity and greater certainty. For WESCO, it means deeper customer relationships, greater participation across the project life cycle, and an opportunity to grow with our customers as they scale. And this combination is difficult to replicate. Technical expertise is one of the clearest ways we simplify complexity for customers. A customer may begin with a difficult project, application, or performance requirement. Our WESCO technical specialists help evaluate the need, support specification and submittals, identify qualified substitutions, and account for lead time considerations. The result is an executable solution aligned with the project requirements. Across EES, CSS, and UBS, WESCO has a network of more than 300 technical expert service engineers. That distinction matters.
EES team brings deep gray space and electrical application expertise, while the broader One WESCO network extends support across the complete data center environment. This technical engagement helps us participate earlier, improve the quality of solution, and reduce the risk of problems surfacing later in the project. Our supplier partnerships are a significant source of value for our customers. Long-standing relationships with the best-in-class suppliers gives us access to a broad range of products, solutions, and technical capabilities, but the value goes well beyond breadth. Those partnerships allow us to work across our supplier network to identify the right solution, navigate availability and lead time constraints, support qualified alternatives, and bring greater consistency and value to the customer across multi-site programs. Combined with WESCO's scale and technical expertise, we can help customers reduce supply chain complexity and execute with greater certainty, and that creates a powerful ecosystem.
Suppliers gain access to demand and scale through WESCO, while customers benefit from greater choice, flexibility, and a more coordinated and proven path to execution. Products are essential, but our value extends well beyond the product itself. Our services help customers address complexity across the full life cycle, from planning and deployment through the ongoing operation of the facility. We help customers improve how materials and solutions are planned, prepared, deployed, and replenished. That can reduce work in the field, improve productivity, strengthen availability, and provide greater certainty as requirements change over time. For EES, that extends our relationship beyond the initial build. We can continue supporting customers as their facilities operate, expand, and evolve, creating a longer-term partnership rather than a single point-in-time project. Let's go into an example of how we move from a project to a long-term relationship.
This customer was rapidly scaling production to support AI data center cooling demand. The initial needs were to solve a wire and cable design issue, which were also compounded by product availability and supplier capacity constraints across manufacturing locations. What began as a product need quickly became a much broader opportunity. By combining technical expertise, supplier partnerships, and our supply capabilities, we expanded the solution across controls, busbars, cable assemblies, and panel builds, supported by managed inventory, engineering, and logistics services. As the customer scaled, our supplier relationships helped us expand capacity and respond to evolving requirements, positioning WESCO as an increasingly strategic partner in the customer's growth. We moved from a product supplier to embedded solution partner. Revenue increased from approximately $15 million to a run rate of more than $100 million. This model is repeatable.
Technical expertise earns the opportunity, supplier partnerships, supply chain services, and execution scale the relationship, and consistent performance expands WESCO's strategic relevance. So, let me close with a few takeaways. By participating in the electrical infrastructure that sits between site power and compute, we have increased our addressable market and established a stronger position within one of the fastest-growing portions of the data center ecosystem. EES is a leader in the data center gray space. The electrical backbone is a core WESCO strategy supported by longstanding capabilities that can reduce complexity and drive better customer outcomes. Technical expertise and supplier partnerships help us engage early, develop the right solution, and improve availability through broad supplier access and global capabilities. Project execution, coupled with our services and solution, deliver savings, reduce construction timelines, and project certainty. EES helps customers translate increasingly complex power requirements into executable gray space infrastructure.
The next step is establishing the power foundation for the site. With that, I'll turn it over to Jim Cameron to explain how UBS helps customers accelerate time to power.
All right. Well, thank you, Danny, and good morning, everyone. For every data center, compute starts with power. UBS brings the utility market expertise, supplier relationships, and grid services capabilities needed to support site power readiness. Today, I'll explain how we're helping customers address increasingly complex data center power requirements and how grid services connects those needs to the broader capabilities of One WESCO. First, a quick overview of UBS. UBS is a $5.7 billion business and the number one utility and broadband distributor in North America. While our core utility and communications customers are primarily located in North America, we support them through extensive global sourcing, supply chain management capabilities, and deep expertise in managing critical infrastructure supply chains.
We also expect grid services to become an increasingly global business as hyperscale customers deploy capacity around the world and look for partners that can help accelerate time to power across multiple regions. We serve investor-owned utilities, public power companies and municipalities, broadband and wireless customers, along with the contractors that support their infrastructure. These relationships give us experience with the equipment and supply chains that support essential infrastructure. Long-term secular trends in grid modernization, re-industrialization, and 24/7 connectivity underpin the business, while large-scale data center projects are creating additional demand. Our established utility foundation matters. We bring it to customers facing increasingly complex power requirements, extending capabilities we developed over time into the data center market. The central issue for a data center is time to power. A data center's construction schedule depends on the power and electrical infrastructure that will ultimately serve it.
Our role starts with helping customers coordinate the equipment and supply chain requirements of that program. The project owner has a required operating date. The utility has its system requirements. The equipment manufacturers have production schedules, and the engineering and construction team need materials available in the right sequence. Bringing those requirements together takes specialized knowledge and sustained coordination. Our experience spans transmission and substation equipment, distribution products, and medium and high voltage applications. That helps us understand how individual purchasing decisions fit into the broader project. We support supplier qualification and product selection, then coordinate sourcing, staging, and delivery around customer schedule requirements. Those activities help customers manage the risks associated with long lead times and complex supply chains. We work alongside the customer's engineering and construction partners. Our focus is the equipment, technical product support, and supply chain coordination within our scope.
That's the context for accelerating time to power, supporting site power readiness by addressing equipment, material, and coordination challenges that stand in the way of project completion. Our value proposition combines deep knowledge of high voltage equipment and supply chain with a collection of services that extend well beyond product fulfillment. We bring customers, suppliers, and large-scale equipment together into a single power program, supporting the customer from planning through energization. For the customer, that means a partner who understands high voltage requirements and can connect specifications and sourcing decisions with the scheduling and project logistics while effectively managing the material requirements. From a WESCO perspective, it also gives us a natural point of collaboration with the other WESCO businesses. Our power solution is highly complementary to EES and CSS, and extends One WESCO from site power readiness through electrical infrastructure and ultimately into the white space.
Our opportunity is to apply our high voltage expertise early in the project cycle and then connect our combined EES, CSS, and UBS teams as customer requirements develop. Grid service is developed from an established utility foundation into a global platform for complex high voltage power programs across all market verticals. We started with longstanding customer relationships and product expertise, then expanded the supply chain and project support around them. Today, grid services represents approximately $400 million of trailing 12-month revenue, giving us a meaningful platform from which to continue scaling. As data center power requirements grew, we applied those capabilities to a broader set of customers and projects. The underlying needs are familiar: qualified equipment, dependable material supply, and coordination across a demanding construction schedule.
Executing these larger programs requires very strong coordination between sales, engineering, operations, and project management, as well as the development of a broader international supply base. That operating discipline becomes even more important as programs grow in scale and span multiple geographies. Within UBS, the significance is that our utility and high voltage foundation gives us a relevant platform and knowledge base for participating in this demand. Our focus is to support multi-year customer programs while continuing to strengthen the capabilities required to execute them. This slide explains how we organize work around customer requirements. Demand is increasing, equipment lead times remain a challenge, and customers must coordinate multiple suppliers across complex construction schedules. We begin with supplier selection and qualification. The objective is to identify qualified suppliers and align their capabilities with the project's technical and commercial requirements.
That work becomes especially important when customers need alternatives across equipment categories or regions. Product standardization is another part of the solution. We help align specifications across projects and reduce unnecessary variation while respecting the technical requirements of each site. Project logistics connects the procurement plan to delivery. Our supply chain teams can support staging and materials management so the customer can plan equipment availability against the construction sequence. International supply chain management extends that coordination across regions and a global supplier base. The value comes from managing these activities together. Customers gain one global partner coordinating multiple manufacturers, equipment categories, and project stakeholders within a single managed program. That gives us a clear operating focus, understand the customer requirements, clarify responsibilities with the other project participants, and manage the material program against those requirements. The multi-year award on the next slide shows why that approach matters.
This $1+ billion multi-year award demonstrates both the scale of the opportunity and the strength of our grid services capabilities. The customer needed support coordinating high voltage power equipment requirements across a major data center program with multiple sites. Our scope includes transformers, breakers, and other apparatus used in the substation environment. The agreement covers a specific set of projects across North America, with the potential for broader geographic participations. The reasons we won are very important. We brought global supplier relationships and qualification capabilities, supported by high voltage technical and market expertise, and the program management and logistics needed to execute a complex program. For a customer managing multiple location builds, those capabilities help connect equipment sourcing with the requirements of a larger project portfolio. That's the practical application of the coordinated model I just described, and our solutions are both scalable and geographically agnostic.
The strategic importance is consistent with this slide, extending our data center participation beyond white and gray space into the power infrastructure supporting the site. Let me close with what this means for WESCO and our customers. First, UBS extends One WESCO to the earliest stage of the data center life cycle, when customers are addressing the power infrastructure required for their projects. That gives us earlier visibility into their future requirements. Second, grid services helps customer manage project risks by coordinating equipment suppliers and supply chains with the execution plan. And third, that early engagement creates an opportunity to bring more of WESCO to the relationship as needs develop across the site, including the capabilities of EES and CSS. Each business brings its own expertise, but One WESCO brings it together across the data center life cycle.
That's the power of One WESCO, bringing our capabilities together and showing up for our customers as one partner. That's the role UBS plays, helping customers establish the power foundation on which everything else depends. Thank you all for your time, and I believe we're now going to open things up for your questions.
We will now begin the question- and- answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Please limit your questions to one question and one follow-up. Please note, you may also ask an anonymous question through the chat feature in the webcast. Our first question today comes from Christopher Glynn with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks. Good morning, everyone. Really great to hear everyone's pitch and get the deeper look under the covers. I was wondering, just given the rapid growth across this, and you highlight throughout the presentation the complexity of products, even to the point of allocations. I'm wondering, what's the extent across your supply base of kind of watch list for potential bottlenecks?
Why don't I have the three— hey, morning, Chris. Thanks for that question. Thanks for joining today. Why don't we have the three SBU leaders just touch on that a bit, and how we're helping, not only where the bottlenecks may surface, but how we're helping address those.
Chris, I'll take it from a white space perspective. This is Dirk. We have seen this for quite some time. This is not new, where we'll have bottlenecks that are coming up. And what we're seeing right now from many of the builders or hyperscalers or customers that need to buy this material is they're frankly looking for us to support them with alternative options to be able to buy some solutions. At some point, you can't continually do it without being able to find incremental vendors in this space. So, we're working with some organizations to do just that, and we're finding that many of the vendors are bringing up capacity to be able to do more work, and frankly, around the world to be able to do more work.
So, we're really locking in with a lot of our vendors in an effort to make sure we can secure the necessary capacity on behalf of the customers that are doing the build-out. So, that's certainly something that we're seeing for sure.
On the UBS—
Dirk, do you make Yeah.
Go ahead. I was just going to add to that.
I was just going to say, Dirk, do you make or break some suppliers' fortunes? Do you actually create winners?
No, we're not necessarily creating winners and losers on that front. What we're trying to do is work with our clients and make sure we can engineer the best offering for them, and we want to make sure we're doing so with the ones that offer the best capabilities, technology, footprint, able to deliver, so on that way. We don't necessarily make or break them, but we work aggressively to present alternatives to the actual data center organizations that are trying to lock up supply right now, for sure.
The same applies to EES, Chris. The example Jim gave on grid services, I will expand a bit and say that Jim's team, having the strong and broad capabilities and a leadership position in all things utility across North America, has for many years been looking at a global supply base and global sourcing to support certain critical sets of equipment for what started in U.S. and Canada applications. That's Jim's recent examples that he just highlighted in that example, where we have $1+ billion in backlog as a result of expanding for that one customer, was because we worked in a global supply base and were able to bring additional suppliers online, support them in terms of them getting, quote unquote, "certified" and being available to support builds, as Jim mentioned, in the U.S.
So, I think the global supply chain capabilities are critical here, coupled with a shift for certain categories from direct exclusively previously to distribution. Think of that as an incredible one-two punch. It is highly net accretive to WESCO.
Yeah, John, thanks. If I could get one more in, building on that last point. Should we assume you are a core channel for any and all of the large major liquid cooling technology leaders?
We have relationships with them today. And again, that solution will vary. Some goes direct, some goes through distribution. But the short answer is yes. And we have engineering teams that are working with our end customers to spec those solutions, as Dirk talked about. And the recent acquisition of Newark in Southeast Asia, it does exactly that. It's a broad array of liquid cooling solutions for the Southeast Asian market, for data centers. And so again, we've been using our M&A and balance sheet to expand our portfolio, and we have relationships with all the existing suppliers, Chris.
Thanks again.
The next question is from Chris Dankert with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Hey, morning, guys. Thanks for taking the question, and thanks for the color here. I guess my question is more for Dirk here, thinking about the life cycle services side of the business. Maybe can you give us a little more color? What does the margin look like on that business? Is the selling cycle similar to kind of the standard three- to five-year hardware refresh cycle? Just any additional detail would be great.
Yeah, kind of a combination of all that. Do we see it being accretive? Absolutely. That's one of the main drivers for us to be able to expand out and do more in that area. And the main reason, and John hit on a little bit, if you go back three to four years, we were starting to get disintermediated in certain environments, and we view this as a catalyst for us to maintain the relevance that we have with the client. So, we do see it as accretive, for sure, and there's a whole host of offerings that we can bring to bear that way. More color would be, I highlighted a few in terms of the rack and roll capabilities that we're bringing. Really, that's in the last four years that we've brought that on.
The site operations is something that's very unique, where post-build, we can have our own people that are on site and doing the facility's maintenance. That obviously keeps us attached to that customer as they need refreshes that come along. So, this elongates our relationship with the customer and then keeps us involved, as I mentioned, when the refresh comes along as well. So, there's a whole host of different items that we're being asked to do from a services standpoint. Most of those, though, in many cases, can wrap around the actual products that we're trying to sell, which in a sense makes the product mix even more accretive in that we're bringing the service and wrapping that around the products that we're selling as well. So, yes to your question about that being accretive for us.
Dirk, if I can. Hey, Chris, if I can just add to that and make a broader point on margin expansion. If you look at CSS margins year over year, that expanded 160 basis points. At the company level, we expanded overall EBITDA margins 100 basis points. The key point there is, like you heard all of the business leaders talk about, us providing a lot more solutions for our customers in terms of specific to the data center space, Power to Compute, time to power, and we're doing it broadly across all of our end markets as we face up to different verticals, right? And we are pricing, increasingly pricing for that value proposition, and you're seeing that show up in our margins. Another point to note is you've seen operating margin leverage.
If you think about some of Dirk's comments in terms of the data center example, of the customer example, we stood up a new facility. So, we're adding cost in terms of investments to scale the business, both in terms of distribution footprint, but also product capabilities, technical resources. So, we're getting the margin expansion despite those investments. So, just wanted to underline that point.
No, that's really helpful, color. Thank you both for the detail there. I guess just as a follow-up, is there any way to think about what the kind of sales opportunity is on the refresh? If you're installing X dollars of product in the initial build-out, how much of that actually does kind of come back up during the refresh cycle? Any way to kind of think about that as a rule of thumb?
Yeah, I would say this, Chris, is that the largest area is certainly the compute, and some of that we don't participate in. So, if it's a refresh, what you normally see take place is new power needs to be able to potentially, in an AI environment where it wasn't an AI environment in the past, they need to bring up more power, so there's opportunities in that space. Certainly what Jim articulated, we can do some more there. There's some cooling opportunities that could come in on the refresh. But if you think about this AI life cycle, it's relatively new in the last five to, count it, five-ish years or so. So, we haven't really seen the refresh in earnest yet. There's still a lot of new builds in that space.
What you do see happening is the conversion of traditional data centers into more of an AI opportunity or a data center. In that environment, we do have opportunities, as I mentioned, in cooling and additional power. Obviously, they have to refresh the racks and the enclosures and the different products that go into that white space. But that's typically where we see it, is the opportunity in that refresh for some incremental sales for that portion of the business.
Yeah, and it would apply across all three SBUs, to Dirk's point. Depending on what the current state is of the data center being upgraded or retrofitted or renovated, and what it is going, it is the from to. To the extent it demands more power and there is not that available on site or the equipment cannot handle what is required on site, that impacts both UBS and EES, so there are upgrade opportunities there. Then when you move into the white space, to your point, there are significant upgrade opportunities on rack connectivity, all of that, which is where your deep roots are.
Really helpful. Thanks so much, guys.
The next question is from Ken Newman with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks guys. Morning.
Morning.
Wanted to ask a question. Morning. I just wanted to kind of dig into UBS a little bit. You highlighted some opportunities on getting earlier into the opportunities for wins across the other two segments that you operate in. I'm just curious, are you seeing any indications where you're securing a UBS win today, and is that translating to an EES win on the gray space or CSS win on the white space later for the same project as of yet? Or is that still an opportunity that we haven't seen translate quite yet?
We are coordinating all the time between Dirk and Danny and I, and the UBS participation in the power solution is very interesting, because when you look at the portfolio of projects that customers are managing, the transformer oftentimes is the longest single lead time item for the data center. It can take five years or more to get a power transformer for a data center. In certain situations, what we'll see is data center companies need to go out and secure transformer capacity for what they're planning to build, which then gives us a feel for how much they're going to build, which then allows us to share thoughts around where do we think these builds are going to come up. It helps Dirk having conversations with his team around where are these sites going to be.
It helps us with planning from a supplier standpoint and a capability standpoint. So, we can find out about a project through any one of the individual SBUs. The key is that we bring it all back together, figure out where we are in the cycle, and then figure out how we all can participate in it.
Yeah, Ken, I'd—
And maybe just to add on that's really important. One thing we wanted to get across in this deep dive today, which was focused on data centers, is that when we put Anixter and WESCO together back in 2020, the start of the pandemic, we did focus as a top strategic priority developing a cross-selling set of processes, mechanizing that across the enterprise, supporting with the proper compensation structure. Because we believe the combinatorial effects of these two leading companies coming together was massive and was very additive, and we demonstrated outstanding success in cross-selling, three, four, five years post-Anixter WESCO coming together. It's that same foundation. We've built on that further, Ken, continued to refine those processes, and we're applying it across all aspects of WESCO, most notably here with data centers.
So, we literally have an integrated team and set of processes that is one integrated pipeline of opportunities for all data centers across the phases of the data center. So, it starts with years ahead of time and driving the front-end lead require, kind of front-end requirements for these long lead items on UBS, but it includes all through the phases of build and includes those data centers where we have operational support now as a result of the acquisitions that we've done, starting with Rahi that Dirk mentioned and others since then. So, one integrated pipeline, one team, one integrated process. And again, we believe that our portfolio, which is extensive, and our unmatched global footprint with this One WESCO strategy and cross-selling process that is now mature, represents a real secret sauce for our ability to maximize sales and margin.
Very helpful. I appreciate that. Maybe for my follow-on here, just on the expanded addressable market, I think you're kind of calling out $100 billion plus. I'm curious just how much do you think of that as attributable to the cross-sell and organic initiatives they have going on versus maybe a need for incremental M&A to expand what's already in the portfolio today?
This is Dirk here. I think it's a combination of both. I think there's also this trend that John highlighted with the market changing. If you go back six, seven years, you had a couple of big clusters in terms of mega data centers that were being built. They could be managed by manufacturers selling direct. Now what you have is many, many, many facilities around the world that are being built. The manufacturers really aren't global. They might have international dots on a map, but they can't facilitate what's needed in all those facilities around the world. So, I would highlight that change being more of a channel-friendly environment. So, we think there's portions of that as well that helps.
Certainly, we've done these acquisitions, and we have more room to grow within that by taking the existing acquisitions we've made and taking those horizontal and bringing some of the offers in. John just brought up Newark a few minutes ago. I highlighted it. We just did that one a few months ago, so the whole cooling opportunity. So, it's a combination of both of the, in your question, the things you were asking that way. And we feel very bullish about being able to pick up more opportunities in the marketplace overall.
If I can add to that, I think another point to underline on the global side is we're a very asset-light business. So, we can mobilize very quickly. So, I think you'll see Dirk and team, Danny and Jim, I think they can follow a customer quickly into a new market. So, as you think about our addressable market, it really is the global market. And there are several other vectors that we are seeing that is beneficial to the overall addressable market. One obviously is the dynamic of more going through channel, like Dirk mentioned. Another one for UBS specifically for our power solutions is increased behind-the-meter solutions. So Jim, if you want to touch on that for a second, I think that'd be helpful for the audience.
Oh, absolutely. The behind-the-meter solution is something that's been talked about for a while, and we're seeing more and more interest in that given the timeframe that it takes to get utility interconnections done, to get permitting done, to get generation built. So the acceleration of behind-the-meter power within the space actually creates additional opportunities for us because it brings more into our scope. It takes it out of the traditional utility environment. And when you look at this, one of the key things that Dirk talked about is the portfolio component of this.
When companies are trying to manage large-scale portfolios and you have multiple products and development simultaneously, the ability to coordinate that all together, especially in a behind-the-meter environment, ensuring that product is available when it is supposed to be, creating standardization so that we can have plug and play with different product designs, can move from one site to another to support the schedule and support being able to adjust schedules based on construction schedules. All of that is incredibly important. And we are very, very focused on making sure that we have the value proposition around the entire power solution, not just the transformers, but in other capabilities and other product lines as well.
Very helpful. Thanks, guys.
The next question is from Tommy Moll with Stephens. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions.
Morning, Tommy.
Morning, Tommy.
John, early on you mentioned there's been a transition from supplier direct purchasing to more purchasing through distribution. Does that comment apply to products categories specifically, where, say, a couple years ago, the same products category would have gone direct, but now it's coming through you? Could you just outline for us some examples and what drove that evolution, if there has been one?
So, I'll frame it, then I'm going to ask each SBU, and let's hear from all three of them, because they all have examples. Okay? There are some categories that had a combination of it, either it was served direct and also through distribution, but it depended based on the project, the complexity, the requirements, et cetera. And in a number of those cases, we're seeing where it was both served via direct or distribution, depending on that particular customer and the way they were managing that project. We've seen a shift to more distribution. Call that one category. Second category is there's some notable categories of products that were exclusively 100% direct that now are shifting into distribution. Maybe we'll start there with Jim, and he can give you a couple classes of that.
It's what he talked about relative to grid services, where there's categories of equipment that for decades was exclusively direct and is now selectively being shifted to distribution, but selectively being shifted to distribution with us, through us, because of our unique capabilities. We'll start with Jim. Maybe Danny could touch on an example for EES, and then Dirk can close out with CSS. Fiber would be in that first category that I mentioned, that I know Danny and Dirk will touch on. Go ahead, Jim.
Thanks, John. So, when you look at our business, historically, utilities have been the primary purchasers of high-voltage transformers, circuit breakers, other substation apparatus. What we've seen over the past five years is that renewable developers, EPCs, data center companies, are all now heavily involved in purchasing high-voltage apparatus. Because they're trying to manage many project schedules simultaneously, they needed a lot of help coordinating this and pulling it together. That's where we created our value proposition, is through this whole engagement, understanding what the challenges are, developing solutions around standardization, portfolio management, material logistics, staging and storing, and creating the most flexibility from an equipment standpoint so that construction schedules can be managed almost as delays come or as you want to pull one project in, push another out. We have the equipment available to support projects independent of the design because we've helped the standardization process.
On the EES side, I would say what we're seeing is going back to our legacy Anixter relationships. We're seeing a lot of the medium-voltage wire and cable come more through WESCO as we leverage our market position and also solve the supply chain challenges that we previously spoke about. We're seeing that drive a lot of our market outgrowth, and we think that's going to position us to even provide a broader One WESCO approach as we get into the early phases of projects with our technical services too.
Tommy, on a CSS standpoint, two very quick examples. We've seen the build approaches from account to account change from project to project. What I mean by that is, historically, they might have bought and procured a particular way, and they'll literally change what's going on because of the constraints in the supply chain and the timing of all the materials showing up to the job. They feel it's better to be able to leverage a channel to aggregate all that material and have it come together at one point. The other example I would give you is a large project we did in Southeast Asia that we did over the last quarter that historically would have gone direct, but the manufacturer didn't have the capability to be able to move the goods into the theater and be able to get it there in a timely fashion.
So, just a couple of small examples, but we're seeing a lot of this, as I mentioned before, because the sheer amount of build sites that exist don't lend themselves to the manufacturer shipping direct. They need to be able to—
Again, I think a driver here is, this isn't just a series of episodic events in our view. It's because of the size and complexity of these data center builds. As one dimension, one driver, much more complex projects. The requirements go up non-linearly. The second major driver is where we have these end user hyperscalers and global MTDC customers. They want a partner who can help, a one-stop shop. I'll use the term one throat to choke, a supplier to provide global execution, global project management, global deployment, and support their global startups. That's where we have unmatched capability. It's really important to think about this in the context of those dynamics. So, we don't see it as a series of episodic events.
We see this as a fundamental trend, and that's what's speaking to if you were to look at kind of the nature of the opportunities in our opportunity pipeline, increasingly global, increasingly items that may have been direct before to distribution. These are clear trends we're seeing.
Thank you all for the insight. As a follow-up, I want to ask about the run rate for data center sales. We have yet to hit a ceiling here, John. At some point, we will, and so I'm just curious, where are you closest to that now? Is it demand? Is it availability of product? Is it people at WESCO? What's the most likely gating factor whenever we hit that ceiling?
We've shown the ability. It's a great question. We've shown the ability to scale up quickly. Resources, i.e., WESCO resources, and facilities has not been a constraint. Look at the growth rates we're experiencing and have been experiencing thus far. So, I don't see that being an issue, quite frankly, at all. We're showing great operating leverage, and Neel addressed this. We've added several large facilities, brand new facilities, and we don't talk about that a lot, but that's embedded in our operating expenses now. We're getting the operating leverage. I don't see that as being a fundamental constraint.
The supply chain and various lead times are a constraint, but because we have a global supply base and a global supply chain management capability, we're managing those factors and incorporating those into the intelligence we give to our customers and how we can build the best project build and deployment schedules. But that's clearly a constraint. The other constraint, which I think the industry has to deal with, is skilled trades.
And as well as just power, period. I still see power as being the ultimate driver, and that's what, you know, getting power on site. A utility may provide it, or it may be behind-the-meter, where the end user is looking to procure their independent power solution. In both cases, the project's more complex. We're positioned to serve both. I think we've had a little bit of Q&A on behind-the-meter power. That's even more complex when you look at all the stakeholders and constituencies, and we're especially well-positioned for that. Grid services plays into that directly. That's just kind of giving you some of the dynamics. Maybe a comment I'll make that wasn't asked yet, but I feel I have the need to address it. I addressed it in my opening comments.
Clearly, you know, look at what's happened in the AI-driven data centers and the market reactions over the last few weeks. This is massive growth we're experiencing, and I expect it will still be massive growth. In the U.S., you know, is there some moderation coming in some states episodically? There could be. We've not seen anything yet. I will say this, remember, we have a global customer base and a global set of capabilities. So, I'm highly confident because we're already supporting them globally, our hyperscaler and MTDC customers. If they see any additional challenges in the U.S., they'll continue in this AI race to leverage global investments. That will, you know, as they increase any international investments even faster or further outside the U.S., we're exceptionally well-positioned. We would see that as a net positive for WESCO due to our unmatched global footprint.
Thanks, John and team. I'll turn it back.
At this time, I'll turn the conference back over to Scott Gaffner for questions that came through the webcast.
Thanks, everyone. We've got a number of questions here through the webcast. The first one is really a follow-up, John, on what you were just discussing about the current landscape, where companies are building new capacity, et cetera. The question was really around, this is for Dirk and Danny, around the rest of the world business for WESCO and data centers. Can you talk about the complexion of that, Europe, Asia? Danny, I know, I mean, Dirk, you mentioned some of Asia in your opening remarks, but can you just talk about the trends that you're seeing around the rest of the world from your customers?
Sure.
Yeah, I'll take that.
So—
Go ahead, Danny.
Go ahead, Dirk.
Go for it.
Go ahead.
Our data center sales increased more than 100% in the third quarter, obviously off a smaller base, and that is driven by strong activity across two of our key channels on the construction side and the OEM side. We feel the gray space opportunity is larger than the white space opportunity, which positions EES to benefit as these power densities rise and customers invest more heavily in electrical infrastructure, power distribution, cooling, and related systems. We see those opportunities strong in the U.S. and strong overseas too, and that momentum continues to build.
I'll just add, we feel very bullish about a lot of areas. Certainly, I'll just double-click on the U.S. I think enough been said about that. But if you look at Canada, it's been very small so far, but we see a lot of investments coming in Calgary area and throughout all of Canada. If you go down in Latin America, I've already brought up Brazil, I believe. There's a lot of builds going on in Brazil and Colombia. Chile is another area. Parts of Mexico we're very bullish on as well. I brought up comments about Europe. Still a lot of activity in the Middle East in spite of all the conflicts that are taking place there. Particular areas are, I'd say, a little paused, but most of the rest of those areas still have a lot of work that's going on.
Up in the Nordic region, we're seeing a lot of work in the EMEA market. As you get into Asia, very bullish about that portion of the business. Certainly in Johor and Malaysia, it's been well-chronicled the amount of work that's going on there. Some of the parks that are being constructed are very, very large in that area. Also Indonesia, there's a lot of work. Vietnam, there's a lot of work. Japan still has a lot of work. A lot of activity in that theater, and I haven't even mentioned yet India. And one of the main drivers for a lot of this growth also is data sovereignty, which hasn't been brought up yet, but you've got a lot of government regulations about data being maintained in a particular country, which is going to fuel even more growth with all the work that's being done.
A lot of activity around the world, and we're really bullish on, and John mentioned, our capabilities to take care of those clients with the unmatched global footprint that we have as well.
Thanks to both of you. I think a little bit of a follow-up on that, Dirk. You talk about unmatched capabilities. There's a question here on the competitive landscape. How does WESCO stack up versus, I would say, other distributors, other supply chain solution providers, suppliers, et cetera? Can the whole team talk about how WESCO stacks up versus the competition?
Danny, Jim, you guys want to go first?
Well, when you talk about the global reach, I'll give you an example. We had an OEM customer ask WESCO to invest in Southeast Asia for their local demands and requirements. We were, like John said, we invested in that facility. It's up and running, and we're gaining share out there while they continue to expand their base in the U.S. So, when you talk about scale and reach, I would say we quickly were able to meet that international demand and also replicate the product services that we can leverage back to growing in the U.S. too.
Yeah. From a UBS standpoint, I think our key differentiators are our engineering resources, our project management capabilities, our international supply chain expertise, and our ability to provide technical support, technical assistance, material staging, storage services. We've assembled a portfolio of services based on how the market has evolved that we think is unique in the marketplace.
I would just add that from a CSS perspective, we have talked about changing landscape, going more channel, but there's still a lot of direct business that exists out in the marketplace. And you could say that that mixed model creates competition from the very vendors we represent as well. That mixed model then presents a big upside, and we're looking at it that way, as more opportunities for us to be able to take more of that stuff through the channel. But certainly around the world, from a consistent perspective, you would say that a lot of these manufacturers act as a competitor to us as well.
Great. The next one is on the M&A pipeline. I know, Dirk, you talked a lot about the acquisitions that we've done over the last couple of years. Neel, Dirk, Danny, Jim, can you talk about the overall M&A pipeline? We'll maybe start with Neel from a high-level perspective outside of data centers, and then we can move on from there.
Sure. Like we've said before, we're always very, very active, but also very, very disciplined. I would say we have a robust pipeline across all three BUs, and we have a very robust process internally where we really think about our solutions roadmap, our services roadmap in terms of filling in the blanks, if you will, in our value proposition, both here in the U.S. and internationally. You've seen that through some of the acquisitions that we've done. I think we're going to continue with that very disciplined approach.
Scott, not much more to add there from a CSS perspective. Neel did a nice job kind of laying it out, but obviously we're going to maintain our focus to be able to add more in our portfolio, and certainly are eager to do so with that end-to-end service offering that I spent time talking about.
Perfect. I know we still have a fair number of questions out there in the queue. We can definitely circle back to everyone that didn't get their question answered. I do have your names and information, so we'll reach out to you directly. Before that, before we end the call, I did want to turn it back to John for a few closing remarks.
Thank you. Look, thank you all for joining us today. Hopefully this was a helpful discussion. As Scott mentioned, we have some other excellent questions in the queue. We will definitely get back to each and every one of you. I will now wrap, and I am wrapping with an overall investor message regarding WESCO. Think of this as our why invest in WESCO thesis. First, we are the market leader, and we are driving durable above-market growth. We' ve got that momentum vector. It is positive. It is accelerating. We're leaning into that. We're investing in that. We expect that to continue. Number two, we' ve got a differentiated global platform with expanding value for our customers. Hopefully that has made clear to you today. We've been investing in the portfolio, both organically and through acquisitions.
We have an unmatched global footprint, and that matches up exceptionally well with data center customers, our global data center customers, and where the market growth is and going, as well as our other customers. Number three, we' ve got multiple levers to expand margins and to further compound our earnings growth. Again, good momentum, good trajectory there, and we're exercising all those levers. We expect that to continue. Then finally, we offer a very compelling long-term value creation opportunity. We've experienced exceptional value creation already, but we think there is a lot more to come, and we obviously think WESCO is an exceptional buy at these levels. So, with that, I will bring the call to a close. Next, Neel and Scott are off to the Baird Global Industrial Conference. I know we'll see some of you there. Thanks again for joining us. Have a great day.
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.