Daikin North America LLC, a Houston-based subsidiary of Japan-based Daikin Industries Ltd., has purchased Stevens Equipment Supply LLC, according to a Nov. 2 press release.
Under Daikin's ownership, Stevens will operate as a wholly owned business unit of the Japanese heating and cooling giant. The acquisition will also allow the distributor to keep its current name and allow its management team to continue to operate from Stevens' headquarters in Eagan, Minnesota. Currently, Stevens has 18 branch locations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah and Nevada.
Financial terms of the deal and number of employees at Stevens were not disclosed in the press release. The Houston Business Journal has reached out to Daikin for more information.
"The Stevens management team has built a high-quality sales team that understands Daikin's sales hospitality approach," said Doug Widenmann, senior vice president of North America Daikin Business Unit sales and distribution at Daikin. "Stevens possesses exemplary business practices that promote high-efficiency system sales that aligns with Daikin's market-transformation philosophy. It has state-of-the-art training facilities to educate and foster superior contractors that align with our shared vision."
In the press release, the company also said the acquisition of Stevens will provide more opportunities for growth and expansion for its contractor customer base, new employees, business technology, product lines and more.
Additionally, Stevens will continue to promote the full line of Daikin's HVAC products throughout its distribution footprint as well as the distributor's own commercial foodservice equipment and other Daikin brands, including Amana, Quietflex and Goodman.
"Our vision for Daikin is to become North America's No. 1 indoor comfort solutions provider," said Takayuki Inoue, executive vice president and president of Daikin Business Unit. "We believe the purchase of Stevens is a significant milestone for Daikin in our continued effort to achieve our North American vision."
Daikin Industries Ltd. has had a major presence in Houston since 2012, when it purchased Houston-based Goodman Global Group Inc., a heating, ventilation and air conditioning manufacturer. That $3.7 billion acquisition, which closed in November 2012, allowed Daikin to enter American homes and offer a wide selection of residential HVAC products, making it a North American HVAC player.
“Daikin’s goal is to be the No. 1 HVAC brand in the word, and this (Goodman acquisition) financially puts them there from a volume standpoint,” Mike Donovan, principal and co-owner of Houston-based HTS Texas, told the Houston Business Journal in 2012.
Then in 2015, Daikin made plans to build a new $417 million campus in the Waller area northwest of Houston to expand its Goodman operations in the U.S., the largest single investment in Goodman's four-decade history.
The campus opened in 2017. It was expected at the time that almost any Daikin or Goodman HVAC product, mostly air-conditioning or heating units, shipped in the U.S. would pass through the new facility.
As of January 2018, the company had about 4,900 employees at the Daikin Texas Technology Park and planned to grow that figure to about 7,000 employees. At the time, the company expected to more than double its assembly lines, units produced daily and sheet metal presses by 2020. As of January 2018, the company had invested more than $500 million into its roughly 4.1 million-square-foot campus.
Also in 2018, Daikin's Goodman Manufacturing subsidiary leased 411,442 square feet, the entirety of Northwest Logistics Center, for its distribution and logistics operations department. Employment numbers for that location weren't disclosed.
In August 2019, Takeshi Ebisu, formerly president and CEO of Daikin’s Goodman Global Group at the time, stepped down and was replaced by Satoru Akama. Akama came to Daikin in 1986 and joined Goodman in April 2017, serving as the executive vice president and president of the Goodman Business Unit.
As of March 2019, Osaka, Japan-based Daikin had 292 headquarters and consolidated subsidiaries worldwide and more than 76,000 global employees, according to the company's 95th anniversary website.