NMSDC Salutes Corporate-Minority Business Partnerships At Annual Dinner Dance

NEW YORK, May 14, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The National Minority Supplier Development Council, Inc. ® (NMSDC®), the leading organization for advancing business opportunities between Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American-owned companies and major corporations, will hold its annual Minority Business Leadership Awards Dinner Dance on Wednesday, May 22 at the Hilton New York and Towers. The black-tie event will celebrate the successful partnership of large corporations and their minority-owned suppliers. Eighteen of those success stories will be honored during the evening. Nearly 1,200 guests are expected to be in attendance, including national CEOs, corporate executives and minority business owners.

For more than 40 years, NMSDC has carried out its mission of profit through partnership, cultivating successful business relations for thousands of minority-owned businesses. For this year's event, NMSDC corporate members selected NMSDC-certified minority suppliers with whom they've shared continuous contracts for at least 10 years and also share a current contract valued at $5 million or more. The corporate members then submitted a success story about the supplier, chronicling the history of the partnership, the growth of the relationship and how the supplier adds value to the corporation's supply chain.

NMSDC will honor each corporate-minority business success story pair in attendance and share their stories and photos. This year's success stories are comprised of the following companies:

AT&T Inc. and Telamon Corporation
Alcatel-Lucent and SHI International Corporation
The Allstate Corporation and Sayers40, Inc.
Chrysler Group, LLC and Ryan Industries, Inc.
Cisco Systems, Inc. and D.W. Morgan Company, Inc.
The Coca-Cola Company and Harris & Ford, LLC
Communications Test Design, Inc. and Summit Container Corporation
Ford Motor Company and Choctaw-Kaul Distribution Company
General Motors Company, LLC and ChemicoMays, Inc. 
The Kroger Company and TWT Distributing, Inc.
Marriott International, Inc. and Tronex International, Inc.
Merck & Co., Inc. and ASH Ingredients, Inc.
Northrop Grumman Corporation and APR Consulting, Inc.
Raytheon Company and Banneker Industries, Inc.
Shell Oil Company and Chickasaw Distributors, Inc.
Southern California Gas Company and Uchida Pipe & Industrial Products
Sprint Nextel Corporation and Perfect Output of Kansas City, LLC
United Technologies Corporation and Arnold-Hanafin Corporation

Keith E. Wandell, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Harley-Davidson, Inc., will serve as honorary chairman for the evening's celebration. Nearly 100 chairmen of America's top corporations, including Aetna, Cardinal Health, Darden Restaurants, Delphi Automotive, DuPont, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Home Depot, Kellogg, Kroger, Macy's, Merck, MillerCoors, Northrop Grumman, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, United Parcel Service, and United Technologies, serve on the honorary committee.

Eleven-time Grammy Award winner Paquito D'Rivera and the George Gee Orchestra featuring John Dokes will provide musical entertainment for the evening, while the Arturo O'Farrill Quartet and the Asian-American Jazz Connection will perform at the chairman's reception. 

About NMSDC
The National Minority Supplier Development Council advances business opportunities for certified Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American business enterprises and connects them to corporate members.  One of the country's leading corporate membership organizations, NMSDC was chartered in 1972 to provide increased procurement and business opportunities for minority businesses of all sizes.

The NMSDC Network includes a National Office in New York and 36 Regional Councils across the country. There are 3,500 corporate members throughout the network, including most of America's largest publicly-owned, privately-owned and foreign-owned NMSDC companies, as well as universities, hospitals and other buying institutions. The Regional Councils certify and match more than 16,000 minority-owned businesses with member corporations that want to purchase their products and services.

For more information about NMSDC, call (212) 944-2430 or go to www.nmsdc.org.

SOURCE National Minority Supplier Development Council