Kumar Thangudu

Powell Industries ($POWL)) makes medium voltage bespoke switchgear and packaged power solutions and is HQ'd in Houston, has ~3k employees, and is ~80 years old. The Predictive Maintenance and Supply Chain Angle - How to view the Remsdaq AcquisitionWhen I was at Georgia Tech about two decades ago, I had a professor who used to step outside military bases and do vibration testing on equipment, and with a 96% confidence interval he could tell you the likelihood of a part having an outage in 1, 3, 5, and 10 years and how much to stock up. Very smart professor — need to go find his info. I mention this because I think Powell's Remsdaq acquisition enables something similar at scale across their entire installed base. Remsdaq essentially creates years of baseline temperature trends, partial discharge data, and vibration signatures that enable predictive maintenance. Examples of what I mean, given to me by some engineers I've met in the industry: • A partial discharge trend from 10 pC to 50 pC over six months means insulation is actively degrading — you have maybe 6–12 months before catastrophic failure (pC = picocoulomb). • A bus bar drifting from 63°C to 78°C with no load change means the bolted joint is loosening and contact resistance is climbing. • A breaker that opened in 48 ms when new but now takes 58 ms is wearing toward the point where it won't clear a fault fast enough. • A vibration spike from 1.8 g to 2.4 g over two months means something mechanical shifted — find it during a planned inspection, not a real emergency. Every one of these data points is a future Powell work order — breaker replacement,  retorque service call, a retrofit upgrade , etc.... — that Powell can see before the customer calls.  The Strategic ValueIf Powell has visibility into the degradation curves across its entire installed base, they can forecast demand for replacement breakers, spare parts, and field service calls with much better accuracy than waiting for reactive orders. That's not just a customer lock-in play — it's a supply chain planning advantage that should make Powell progressively more profitable over time as the monitoring footprint grows. My best guess is that the market is valuing Remsdaq as a small tuck-in acquisition, when the real value is the operational intelligence layer it creates across Powell's entire business. I could be totally wrong — but the logic makes sense to me and I haven't heard a better explanation.