A new look for Gases & Welding Distributor

This issue of Gases & Welding Distributor is different from our past issues, and carries on the changes we have made to make this magazine more valuable to our readers.

We have made Gases & Welding Distributor an integral part of Welding magazine, in part because you have said you want more comprehensive information about the entire welding industry, not just information that is segmented for distributors to increase visibility into the issues and solutions that concern end-users — your customers.

This change goes along with other steps we have taken to improve this magazine.

We changed the editorial focus of the magazine to address more carefully the issues that distributors who serve the gases and welding markets see today and will face in the future.

In doing that, late last year we adopted the tag line: “Running the business better,” and we developed the editorial mission statement that you will find on this page. Combined, that tagline and that mission statement are promises of what we will deliver to you, and they help us to stay focused.

And, we invested in an industry benchmarking survey in 2006 as a first step toward developing practical data that independent distributors can use to compare their operations to other operations, and to plan to improve and to measure how their businesses are performing. The data from that survey is available on the Internet to everyone at www.weldingmag.com/GWD_State_of_the_Industry_ Report.pdf.

Combining Gases & Welding Distributor with Welding magazine, and providing you with more insight into the lives and businesses of your customers, is the next step for us to deliver to you the information you need to run your distribution businesses better.