Electricals
2017: No.16 - £440m
2016: No.14 - £440m

Revenues have gone past the £500 million mark at Thomas Mackie and family's City Electrical Factors Holdings Ltd electrical products wholesaler.

Established in 1951 with one outlet, CEF Holdings now has customers around the world.

The company’s attention to customer service has kept the Kenilworth company consistently profitable.

Pre-tax profits in 2015 reached almost £30 million from £21.4 million the previous year.

Turnover was £504 million compared to 2014's £478 million.

Thomas Mackie, an ex-GEC employee and former Royal Air Force radio operator, founded City Electrical Factors 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 28.

City Electrical Factors employs around 8000 people worldwide - almost 3,000 in the UK.

It has nearly 400 UK branches and the same number of overseas outlets including 360 in the United States and outlets in Spain and Australia.

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 5000 delivery vehicles.

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

The Mackie family now lives in Switzerland.