Producer
Franklin Electric
Leading manufacturer of submersible pumping systems for groundwater, fuel, and agricultural irrigation.
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Inputs supplied
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Goods downstream
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Facilities
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Stories
What they make
1 input Franklin Electric supplies
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Goods downstream
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What else they do
Business segments
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Water Pumping Systems (Groundwater + Agricultural)
55%Fueling Systems (Underground Storage Tank Pumps)
30%Energy & Specialty Pumping
15%
Intelligence
What's known
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Did you know2023
Franklin Electric submersible motors pump two completely different fluids in completely separate infrastructure systems: (1) Groundwater — Franklin submersible well pumps draw drinking water from residential private wells (serving ~15 million US homes on private wells), agricultural irrigation wells (feeding center pivot systems from the Ogallala Aquifer), and municipal water supply wells; (2) Gasoline and diesel fuel — Franklin Electric submersible turbine pumps (STP) are installed inside underground storage tanks (USTs) at US gas stations; the pump that pushes fuel from the underground tank to the dispenser when you fill your car is a Franklin Electric STP. The same sealed submersible motor technology that extracts clean groundwater from an aquifer for drinking also extracts petroleum hydrocarbons from a gas station UST for combustion. A disruption at Franklin Electric would simultaneously affect: private residential water supply (groundwater), agricultural irrigation (food production), and retail fuel dispensing (transportation energy). One Indiana motor company is embedded in three separate critical resource delivery systems from the same product platform.
Franklin Electric Co., Inc. ↗Concentration2023
Franklin Electric commands more than 50% of the North American submersible motor market for agricultural and water-supply wells, a near-monopoly position that goes largely unnoticed because the motors are underground.
SC Well Service ↗Origin2023
Franklin Electric was founded in 1944 in Bluffton, Indiana — deliberately named after Benjamin Franklin in homage to the electricity/lightning connection of the company's submersible motor business. The company pioneered the hermetically sealed submersible electric motor: a motor permanently sealed in oil that can be submerged in water without failure, eliminating the need for above-ground pump houses and long drive shafts. Before submersible pumps, extracting groundwater required surface-mounted pump motors connected to well shafts by long rotating steel rods — complicated, noisy, and requiring a structure. Franklin Electric's sealed submersible motor design (developed in the late 1940s) became the industry standard for private water wells. The same 4-inch motor form factor Franklin standardized in the 1950s is still the global standard for residential submersible well pumps. The Bluffton Indiana factory has manufactured submersible motors for 80 years — an Indiana industrial town that happens to be the primary supplier of the water pumping technology used in millions of US private water wells.
Franklin Electric Co., Inc. ↗