When the Buyer Shows Up, the Best People Start Taking Calls
April 2026 | Foster Conner International
The consolidation wave in electrical infrastructure manufacturing is not slowing down. If anything, it’s picking up speed.
Hubbell acquired DMC Power — a high-voltage connector and substation hardware manufacturer — for $825 million last fall. Littelfuse closed its acquisition of Basler Electric, a manufacturer of protective relays, excitation systems, and custom transformers that has been around since 1942. MacLean Power Systems and Power Grid Components merged to form what Blackstone is positioning as a leading platform across switchgear, instrument transformers, insulators, and pad-mounted distribution products. RESA Power, itself a PE-backed roll-up, just added another transformer services company in Virginia.
This is the market right now. Private equity is deploying capital, strategics are making bolder moves, and the buy-and-build thesis is running hard across engineered components and power infrastructure equipment.
For companies on the outside of these deals, it looks like industry news. For the people inside them, it’s a whole different conversation.
What Actually Happens to Talent After an Acquisition
I’ve worked in this industry for over 20 years. I’ve watched enough acquisitions play out to know what the press release never says.
When a platform acquires a smaller OEM, the first 90 days are usually fine. Leadership is retained, integration is “thoughtful,” and everyone is told their role is secure. Then the synergy conversations start. Then the redundancies get mapped. Then the person who built the transformer applications engineering team from scratch — the one who knows every key account and every quirk of the product line — starts wondering whether the new parent company values what they built, or just what they acquired.
That’s the moment the phone calls start happening. And in this market, those calls get returned fast.
The engineers and operations leaders who carry real institutional knowledge inside these acquired companies — the ones who know the product, the customers, the manufacturing floor, and the people — are exactly the people their new parent company most needs to retain. They’re also exactly the people most likely to be quietly open to a conversation if the acquisition disrupts their sense of trajectory.
Why This Matters for Everyone in the Space
If you’re a candidate inside a recently acquired company, you have more leverage right now than you may realize. Your specific expertise — in dry-type transformer applications, switchgear product management, e-house integration, substation engineering — is not something a new corporate parent can easily replicate. If the culture has shifted, if the strategic direction feels different, or if your upward path has gotten murky, this is a reasonable time to understand what the broader market looks like.
If you’re a client — an OEM or integrator competing against these consolidating platforms — this is a hiring opportunity. Talent is being displaced or unsettled inside these acquired companies, and that includes some very strong people who built meaningful things. The question is whether you’re positioned to find them before someone else does.
And if you’re the acquired company trying to hold your team together: retention conversations that should have happened before the deal closed are now overdue. The people you most need to keep are the ones with the most options.
The Compounding Problem
Here’s what makes this moment unusual. The consolidation is happening at exactly the same time that organic demand for this talent is at a generational high. New manufacturing capacity is coming online — transformer plants, switchgear facilities, e-house integrators all scaling up. Lead times are stretched, backlogs are full, and every company in this space is trying to staff up simultaneously.
So you have displacement pressure from M&A on one side, and hiring pressure from organic growth on the other, competing for the same pool of people who actually know how to do this work. That pool has always been smaller than most people outside the industry expect. Right now it’s genuinely tight.
The companies that will come out ahead are the ones treating talent as a strategic priority — not something to figure out after the business development work is done.
At Foster Conner International, I work exclusively in electrical infrastructure manufacturing — transformer OEMs, switchgear, substations, e-houses, and data center power equipment. I’ve spent 20 years building relationships in this specific niche, which means I know where the talent is, including the talent that’s quietly in motion because their company just went through something.
If you’re navigating a search in this space — or wondering whether the market has something for you — let’s have that conversation.
Nanette Foster President, Foster Conner International www.fosterconner.com
Sources: SEC filings, Blackstone press release, PRNewswire, PwC Industrial M&A Outlook 2026
