Business Description

MSC is a leading North American distributor of a broad range of metalworking and maintenance, repair and operations (“MRO”) products and services. With a history of driving innovation in industrial product distribution for more than 80 years, we help solve our manufacturing customers’ metalworking and MRO challenges. Through our technical metalworking expertise and inventory management and other supply chain solutions, our team of more than 7,000 associates helps to keep our customers’ manufacturing operations up and running and to improve their efficiency, productivity and profitability. We serve a broad range of customers throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom, from individual machine shops to Fortune 1000 manufacturing companies to government agencies such as the United States General Services Administration and the United States Department of Defense. We operate a sophisticated network of five customer fulfillment centers, nine regional inventory centers, 38 warehouses (36 in North America and two in other foreign countries) and five manufacturing locations. Our customer fulfillment centers are located in or near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Atlanta, Georgia; Elkhart, Indiana; Reno, Nevada; and Hanover Park, Illinois. We offer approximately 2.5 million active, saleable stock-keeping units (“SKUs”) through our E-commerce channels, including our website, https://www.mscdirect.com (the “MSC website”); our inventory management solutions; our catalogs; our brochures; and our customer care centers, customer fulfillment centers, regional inventory centers and warehouses. We carry many of the products we sell in our inventory, so that orders for these in-stock products are processed and fulfilled the day the order is received. We offer next-day delivery nationwide in the United States for qualifying orders placed by 8 p.m. Eastern Time. Our customers can choose among many convenient ways to place orders: the MSC website, eProcurement platforms, inventory management solutions (including in-plant and vending solutions), customer care centers and direct communication with our telesales and outside sales associates. Additionally, MSC’s robust sourcing capabilities and vast supplier base allow us to further satisfy our customers’ needs outside of our current product offerings. We believe our value-added solutions approach to driving our customers’ success differentiates MSC from traditional transaction-focused distributors. We are committed to saving our customers money by providing comprehensive support for their metalworking, MRO, Class C Consumables and original equipment manufacturer (“OEM”) product and service needs. Our focus is building strong partnerships with our customers and helping them enhance productivity, profitability and growth through the following strategies: • our experienced team includes inventory management specialists, in-plant and technical support teams, metalworking specialists, abrasives specialists, fluid connector specialists, industrial safety consultants, customer care representatives and experienced sales associates focused on driving our customers’ success by reducing their operational costs; • our robust systems and transactional data enable us to provide insights to our customers to help them take costs out of their supply chains and operations; • our extensive product inventory enables our customers to deal with fewer suppliers, streamlining their purchasing work and reducing their administrative costs; • our timely shipping enables our customers to reduce their inventory investment and carrying costs; • our purchasing process consolidates multiple purchases into a single order, providing a single invoice for multiple purchases over time and offering direct shipments to specific departments and personnel at one or more facilities, which reduces our customers’ administrative costs; • our extensive E-commerce capabilities provide sophisticated search and transaction capabilities, access to real-time inventory, customer-specific pricing, workflow management tools, customized reporting and other features.…