Ingram's August 2022

Ameren Corp. With a footprint covering more than half the Show-Me State, Ameren Corp. is the big gest power provider for more than 1.2 million Missourians. Its reach extends well across the Mississippi into Illinois, but Ameren’s electric and gas services are available in 63 of Missou ri’s 114 counties, plus the city of St. Louis. We’re talking about a lot of juice here: Net generating capacity of nearly 10,200 megawatts of electric ity across 7,500 circuit miles of transmission lines. Coal-fired power plants generate the bulk

of that, but Ameren operates the state’s only commercial nuclear-power plant—the Callaway Energy Center southeast of Fulton—and has hydroelectric generation facilities like the Bag nell Dam generating station on the Lake of the Ozarks. The company also distributes more natural gas than any other company in the state. Its holdings include Ameren Transmission Co., which designs and builds regional transmission projects. Overall, 9,000 people are on the com pany’s payroll.

American Century Investments Investors in Kansas City and Missouri may know it as a local brand, but American Century now flexes its brand muscles around the world, with offices in London, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt, in addition to its four U.S. locations. The biggest wealth-management firm in the Kansas City region got to be that way with a clear-cut mission. “Investment management,” it says, “is our sole business focus. No ancil lary businesses compete with our clients or dilute our resources from adding value for our clients.” And that client value just keeps rock et-ing up the tables for investment firm assets

under management: Kansas City-based Amer ican Century has surpassed the $250 billion mark there. It started in Missouri with $100,000 in seed money—a rounding error in the context of today’s AUM. It currently employs 1,400 peo ple across that range of financial capitals, but none have the emotional link to American Cen tury that hometown residents of Kansas City experience. That’s because the brand here is heavily intertwined with the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, established by American Century founder Jim Stowers and his wife, Vir ginia, with $2 billion of their personal wealth.

Anheuser-Busch Companies If you don’t know the Anheuser-Busch brand or that of its family members, Bud weiser, Michelob, Bud Light, and dozens of others, welcome to Earth: you must be vis iting from another planet. Though now part of a global conglomerate AB Inbev, the St. Louis-based company probably won’t give up on its brands until the last grain of bar ley is harvested on this planet, perhaps not even then. Once again, AmeicanCraftBeer. com credits AB InBev with holding four aces in the deck of 10 top-selling brands in Amer

ica, with Budweiser at No. 1 and Michelob right behind. Combined, those two brands alone account for more than $13 billion in sales—twice what other Top 10 competitors are able to claim. Other A-B brands of note are Busch and Natural Light (again, both labels as Top 10 sellers). A source of civic pride in St. Louis since its founding in 1852 and one of the city’s biggest employers, A-B, sold to InBev in 2008, with its brands join ing a much bigger beer-lovers roster of 300 other brands and breweries worldwide.

Bass Pro Shops Eight square feet. That’s howmuch space young Johnny Morris had to work with, setting up a counter to sell bait and fishing gear in his father’s Springfield liquor store in 1972. You want to talk brand-building strength: Fifty years later, it’s America’s biggest name in outdoor sporting gear, with fishing gear, boats, hunting and camping equipment, hiking and archery accessories, clothing, and more. In 2017, Morris extend ed the brand’s reach by doling out $4 billion

to acquire competing Cabela’s. Now, those twin brands have more than 100 retail lo cations and a footprint that extends from coast to coast. Bass Pro has also carved out a brand presence in the conservation niche, leveraging its army of 200 million custom ers and industry partners to support vari ous initiatives to keep the outdoors as close to its natural state as possible, efforts that its conservation partners say will pay off for generations to come.

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