ALEXANDRIA, Va. – NACS announced on Tuesday that it has acquired CSX LLC (CStoreXchange), adding to its industry-leading data portfolio the largest purpose-built, online database of financial and operating data in the industry.
The acquisition allows NACS to expand the level of reporting and analysis it provides on behalf of the $500 billion convenience and petroleum retailing industry and to report upon this information on a more frequent basis.
More than one-fifth of the top 100 convenience store chains in the United States currently use CSX for benchmarking of monthly industry trends. The merged NACS/CSX database represents more than 170 companies and 21,000 stores.
Last year NACS and CSX entered into an agreement to build a multidimensional database that is the ultimate driver of the data provided to NACS for its annual State of the Industry products that have analyzed the United States market since 1971. NACS will announce the convenience and petroleum marketing industry’s most comprehensive 2006 performance numbers tomorrow, which will once again be powered by the CSX database software engine.
“This acquisition will greatly benefit the industry by unifying the two leading sets of industry metrics that can be used to both benchmark operations and report upon industry sales and trends,” said NACS President and CEO Hank Armour. “The CSX data analysis engine makes it much easier to accurately and quickly create reports on almost any cut of the data we’d like to take a look at and turn data into information that can help our members – both retailers and their supplier partners – improve their businesses,” Armour said.
The benchmarking tools that CSX provides are especially critical to the convenience and petroleum retailing industry where both large public companies and progressive privately held firms coexist and thrive.
“The merged database allows for even more synergy between smaller and larger companies in examining same-firm data,” said CSX founding partner David Nelson, who also serves as a professor and chairman of the Department of Economics at Western Washington University and is the founder and president of Finance & Resource Management Consultants Inc. and Petroleum Marketers Study Groups. “The NACS/CSX database protects company identities and participants can customize how they benchmark their operations against national or regional averages generated via the ‘live’ database,” added Nelson.
“NACS members will benefit from greater consistency across specific activity metrics in the data pool, allowing for performance benchmarking across similar store types – whether beer stores, car washes, stores with high diesel volumes and other variations,” said NACS Vice Chairman of Research and Technology Greg Parker, president of The Parker Companies (Savannah, Georgia).
The expanded NACS/CSX database and software also will allow NACS to capture information from wholesalers and distributors to add to the database, and can accommodate international metrics, such as different currencies and metric measurements, and will help NACS facilitate its growing Global State of the Industry efforts.
The four founding partners of CSX – Francis Bologna, Gene Gerke, Dick Meyer and David Nelson – will continue to serve on the CSX board of directors to provide strategic direction and facilitate the coalescence of the NACS and CSX industry benchmarking products. CSX’s current employees also will continue with the company.