Profits at the Mackie family’s City Electrical Factors Holdings have been soaring. The group made a £26.4 million profit in 2011-12 compared with just over £4 million the previous year. Sales are running at £587 million.

Thomas Mackie, an ex-GEC employee and former Royal Air Force radio operator, founded City Electrical Factors in 1951 with just one outlet in Coventry.

He began by selling electric cables and light fittings to local contractors. He died in January 2012, aged 89 and the company is now run by his grandson, Thomas, aged 26.

City Electrical Factors employs around 8,000 people worldwide. It has more than 400 UK branches and the same number of overseas outlets including 360 in the United States.

In the 1960s CEF moved into Kenilworth to set up a head office on the site of a former cinema. In the early 1970s, the company began exporting.

From there the empire was cultivated and grown by Thomas Mackie and his son Gerald and family to the size it is today – the UK’s leading electrical wholesale network with nearly twice as many outlets as its nearest competitor.

CEF has divisions in Telford, Redditch, Doncaster and Wrexham and overseas manufacturing facilities in France, Turkey, Tunisia and the USA producing a wide range of in-house electrical products.

The group has more warehousing space than 30 football stadiums and around 5,000 delivery vehicles.

The company is represented in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Holland and Spain.

Between 1993 and 2006 the family had dividends of £177 million.

The Mackie family now lives in Switzerland.