How often is it that a company”™s first action on moving into a new office involves activating a device it helped pioneer?
When someone first flipped the light switch at Hubbell Inc.”™s new Shelton headquarters, just such a Thomas Edison moment is exactly what occurred.
Beginning this quarter, Hubbell Inc. now recognizes Shelton as its new corporate headquarters, occupying a new office building at 40 Waterview Drive constructed by R.D. Scinto Inc.
The electrical systems maker is taking 100 employees across the county border from Orange in New Haven County, and is consolidating another 200 employees in Shelton from locations in Bridgeport, Milford and Stonington.
“(We) combined our executive offices, engineering and sales and marketing, which had previously been in three locations,” said Tim Powers, CEO of Hubbell, in a conference call with investment analysts. “The new setup saves money, (and) enhances communication and teamwork.”
It was one of the larger relocations into Fairfield County in the past few years ”“ and one of the few to feature a company moving westward from another part of Connecticut, rather than eastward from New York as the case with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and the digital film producer Blue Sky Studios.
Hubbell specializes in assemblies of electrical wiring and components, helping to energize everything from hotel lobby lights to computer workstations. The company”™s board of directors includes Anthony Guzzi, president of Emcor Group Inc., a Norwalk-based company that manages building electrical and mechanical systems on an outsourced basis.
Hubbell competitors include Cooper Industries Inc., Graybar Electric Co., and Rexel Inc.
Harvey Hubbell II founded the company in Bridgeport in 1888. As the story goes, Hubbell”™s breakthrough came after stumbling upon a penny arcade in New York City, where he heard a janitor complain about having to detach the electrical wiring for the games while cleaning each night, a laborious process that also invited short circuits. The idea for an electric plug occurred to Hubbell; the standard two- and three-pronged plugs common today are direct descendents of the figurative light bulb that clicked on in his head that day.
Hubbell saw the light in a literal sense as well ”“ he gets credit for the pull cords used to turn lights on and off. His influence was pervasive enough to lead a Forbes journalist to declare in 1977 that “unless you are reading this on safari, there is probably a Harvey Hubbell invention within six feet of you right now.”
Hubbell died in 1927 and the company passed to his son Harvey Hubbell III; in 1936 the company went public in the throes of the Great Depression, and at times Hubbell paid employees in shares of stock in lieu of a paycheck.
As Connecticut and the nation emerge from the Great Recession, Hubbell is among the companies seeing light at the end of the tunnel. In the second quarter, Hubbell earned $58 million on sales of $646 million, up 11 percent from the second quarter of 2009 thanks in part to its acquisition last fall of Burndy Americas Inc. Powers said Hubbell is starting to see evidence of federal stimulus spending in the purchase orders coming in, which bodes well for future results as the economy continues a recovery.
“Our performance is very good because we prepared for a market that”™s worse than (what) we”™re seeing,” Powers said. “We have reduced our cost substantially, and now I think you’re seeing some of the incremental profit start to flow as volumes are just a little bit better than we anticipated. So, I think we”™re performing very well and I would expect that to continue.
“I’m very comfortable where we are in a very low market,” he added. “I think we”™re quite happy.”
