Belden is the multibillion dollar St. Louis company you’ve likely never heard of

St. Louis has many major companies that proudly tout their connection to the Gateway City, but plenty more fly under-the-radar, despite consistently posting billions of dollars in revenue and hundreds of millions in net profit each year.

Belden Inc. is one of the latter organizations, having cleared nearly $2.5 billion in revenue last year and brought in just over $280 million after subtracting expenses.

“Even though our corporate headquarters is in St. Louis, it would be easy to miss us,” says Doug Brenneke, Belden’s vice president of operations in the Americas. “Just the number of people that we have in the St. Louis area is not huge.”

Brenneke describes the company’s St. Louis presence as a “spartan office,” housing its tax, treasury, legal risk and compliance departments, a result of the company establishing its corporate headquarters in St. Louis in the early 2000s. The rest of the company’s roughly 7,500 employees are spread across the globe, according to its SEC filings. 

Since its founding in 1902, Belden has mostly supplied network products, such as cables and wires. The company says it was the first to market Ethernet and fiber optic cables for industrial use in the 1980s and that some of its wire was used aboard the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. 

“Historically, they’ve been at least thought of as a cables and components, like a physical kind of cable and connector kind of company,” says David Williams, an equity research analyst with the Benchmark Company. “If you drive around your city, there’s little boxes on the side of the road for AT&T or [others]. They sell and distribute those types of products.”

Belden’s products are mostly used in the “industrial and ruggedized commercial space—on the factory floor or places where the environment is very much not your typical office,” Brenneke says. These are places where concerns over temperature, dust, and moisture matter deeply, with machinery that needs “to be very reliable in a very tough environment,” he explains. 

In the past few years Belden has been orchestrating a transformation, from a company that sells products to one that offers solutions for companies using their products or those of other companies on their factory floors. Brenneke acknowledges that “solutions can mean a lot of things to a lot of people,” but he describes Belden’s emerging focus as helping companies boost efficiency by gathering and analyzing the data generated from specific sensors or equipment.

“The value that we sell is increased uptime or a quicker understanding and analysis of downtime so that you actually go do something about it at the end of the day,” he says. “The sensors that are gathering temperature, vibration, you name it, we can extract that data, understand what [it] means, and come up with a predictive maintenance type of approach so that you don’t have a catastrophic failure that’s occurring on a key asset in your system overall.”

Brenneke explains Belden can work with existing sensors and equipment where “the data is there and not being utilized at all” or in developing entirely new systems too.

It’s a concept that may sound simple but is quite complicated in practice because data generated from different sensors and machinery isn’t generally in the same format, says Williams. Belden can “translate all of these different languages into a single language,” Williams says, which enables use of artificial intelligence, machine vision, and other predictive modeling to drive better equipment use.

“Predictive maintenance is one of the largest opportunities, because a simple vibration, certain harmonics will signal that your motor is going out,” he says. “If you can predict better, you can see that before it creates the real damage. Then it’s a 10-minute fix, as opposed to having a machine down for an entire day.”

It’s something that is broadly applicable to many sectors, spanning the processes that produce furniture or metal ingots to very complex technological manufacturing, Williams says. 

One of Brenneke’s examples is a leading U.S.-based food and retail grocery chain , which has its own internal manufacturing too. 

“They literally had millions of dollars of waste of butter fat making ice cream per year,” he says. “We introduced basically a data collection network and system for them that [put them] in a position to reduce that by 20 to 25 percent, year over year.”

Other applications of this expanding expertise include the transportation and logistics industry, data centers, and the energy grid, Brenneke adds. 

“The U.S. grid is aging and vulnerable in a lot of different areas, and we see a lot of investment into upgrading the grid to become, number one, more efficient, smarter, more intelligence built into the network,” he says. “Just a lot of different factors in terms of risk for the U.S.”

Belden’s prioritization of solutions for different companies has earned it awards, as well as a high-growth business segment with larger profit margins. Brenneke says the majority of the company’s revenue still comes from supplying its legacy products, but the “solutions space” has grown to represent 20 percent of Belden’s revenue.

“That cohesive story has only come together in the last few years,” Brenneke says. “We’re trying to take a very complex situation, make it easier for our customers, and make them more profitable when it’s all said and done. Whereas, if we’re just comparing Product A to Product B, that is a world that gets very commoditized very quickly.”

To Williams, the equity analyst, this shift makes Belden “stickier” with its customers, because it’s now providing a valuable service rather than just a commodity. And the company’s current position gives him confidence its value will rise, he says.

“Belden is a small player in a very large market, and most of their competitors in a lot of these markets are significantly larger,” he says. “That means there’s a lot of market share potential for them to gain.”