2024: #4 Fastest Growing Private Company: NewPower Worldwide

Three-Year Average Annual Growth: 92%
Founded: 2014
Rank on Private 100: 3 
Headquarters: 107 Northeastern Blvd., Nashua
CEO: Carleton Dufoe
Total Number of Employees: 152
Product/Service: Distributor of electronic components and finished goods

For the second year in a row, NewPower Worldwide has made the list of NH’s five fastest-growing companies on the list of NH’s top 100 Private Companies, and CEO Carleton Dufoe credits a hard-working team and strategic business decisions for the company’s success.

“To keep it simple, we’ve got the best talent and the best people,” he says of NewPower, a Nashua-based global distributor of electronics components and finished goods with gross sales that reach into the billions.

A familiarity with Asian markets has also helped. Dufoe and his family lived in Singapore for six years while he was working for a competitor and “I forged tremendous relationships and got to understand the business,” he says. He founded NewPower in 2014 soon after returning to NH.

Another contributor to growth is the company’s proprietary software, called Empower, which “unites all of our departments and people around the world,” Dufoe says, allowing rapid response to customer inquiries.

Foresightedness and diversification help see the company through economic ups and downs, like the slowdown in the semiconductor business over the last year and a half. Offering excess inventory mitigation services, as well as new acquisitions, offset such vagaries. “We’ve stayed very diversified intentionally so that we can weather storms when things are bad in one market segment or another,” Dufoe says.

The company has a customer list of more than 6,000, about 700 of which are core customers, and Dufoe expects to end the year with sales over the $2 billion mark again.

Challenges remain, chief among them being geopolitical issues and uncertainty over China, as Taiwan Semiconductors makes many of the wafers used in chips for integrated circuits. NewPower ships out of Hong Kong, an administrative region of China, but has also opened a large hub in Singapore to give it options.

Rising health care costs are another concern, as the company continues to pay 100% of employee health insurance premiums.

Though the company has received several acquisition offers, Dufoe says he has no interest in selling, or in leaving NH. “As we continue to grow and prosper, that money is going back into the community,” he adds.