Genuine Parts Company - Overview

Overview

Founded in 1928, the company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and employs 31,700 people. It specializes in replacement parts for cars and other industrial machines and is the parent company of National Automotive Parts Association (NAPA). The Automotive Parts Group, the largest division of GPC, distributes over 380,000 products through its 58 NAPA distribution centers located across the United States. J. Hicks Lanier is a director.

It also consists of NAPA Canada/UAP Inc., Canada's leading automotive parts distributor, as well as Auto Todo, one of Mexico's largest automotive aftermarket organizations. Additionally, they operate their heavy vehicle parts distribution business under the name TW Distribution and Traction, and their import parts distribution operations under the name Altrom. Approximately 5,800 NAPA Auto Part stores, around 1,000 of which are company owned, are serviced by the auto parts segment of the company, which accounted for 51% of their profits in 2005.

GPC also consists of the Industrial Parts Group, based in Birmingham, Alabama, which operates under the name Motion Industries and distributes over three million items from 500 operations located throughout the United States and Canada. Another GPC company is the Office Products group distributes over 50,000 business products from 45 distribution centers across the U.S. and Canada under the name S.P.Richards Company to thousands of office product resellers, including independent dealers, large contract stationers, national office supply superstores, mail order distributors, internet resellers and college bookstores. Another GPC company is the Electrical/Electronic Materials Group - which operates under the name EIS, Inc., one of North America's leading distributors of process materials, production supplies, industrial MRO and value added fabricated parts.