Nucor Corp. (NUE)

Nucor makes steel and steel products, and also produces and buys the ferrous and non-ferrous materials that feed its own mills. It is a Delaware corporation incorporated in 1958, with most of its plants and customers in North America, plus international trading and sales companies that buy and sell steel made by Nucor and by others. The company describes itself as North America's largest recycler: scrap steel is the primary raw material, and it recycled approximately 20 million gross tons of scrap in 2025. There are three segments: steel mills, steel products and raw materials. Steel mills is the largest, at 62 percent of sales to external customers in 2025.

Steel mills

Of what the steel mills shipped, 79 percent went to outside customers and the remaining 21 percent to the company's own steel products segment. Fifteen bar mills across the United States make concrete reinforcing bar, hot-rolled bars, rounds, light shapes, structural angles, channels, wire rod and highway products in carbon and alloy steels, four of them concentrating on special bar quality and wire rod; their capacity is estimated at approximately 9,800,000 tons a year. Bar steel goes into agriculture, automotive, construction, energy, infrastructure, machinery, metal buildings, railroads, recreational equipment, shipbuilding and heavy trucks and trailers. Reinforcing and merchant bar are sold in standard sizes and grades, so stock can be held against expected orders, while special bar quality products are hot-rolled to exact specifications for automotive, energy, agricultural, heavy equipment and transport customers.

Steel products

This segment makes products largely for construction. Nucor Rebar Fabrication fabricates, installs and distributes reinforcing bar for infrastructure work such as highways, bridges, reservoirs, utilities and airports and for buildings including factories, warehouses, data centres, hospitals, schools, stadiums, offices and multi-tenant housing, usually sold on a construction contract bid basis and often on an installed basis. It runs nearly 70 fabrication plants across the United States and Canada, each serving a local market, with total annual capacity of approximately 1,700,000 tons. The Nucor Buildings group supplies pre-engineered metal buildings under Nucor Building Systems, American Buildings Company and Kirby Building Systems, in sizes from under 1,000 square feet to more than 1,000,000. The company reports that it is the leading domestic supplier of most of what it makes, naming structural steel, merchant bar, steel joist and deck, pre-engineered metal buildings, steel piling, cold finish bar, steel electrical conduit and insulated metal panels.

Raw materials

This segment produces direct reduced iron and, through The David J. Joseph Company, brokers ferrous and non-ferrous metals, pig iron, hot briquetted iron and direct reduced iron, supplies ferro-alloys and processes ferrous and non-ferrous scrap. DJJ runs six regional scrap recycling companies in the United States whose shredders can process approximately 6,800,000 tons of ferrous scrap a year, and the filing describes it as the leading broker of ferrous scrap in North America and a global trader of scrap, pig iron and other metallics. Its logistics team owns and operates one of the largest independent railcar fleets in the country, used for moving scrap and steel, and also leases and manages railcar fleets. Natural gas production and the industrial gas business, Universal Industrial Gases, also sit here.

Selling, and where the demand comes from

Products from the steel mills and steel products segments are sold mainly through in-house sales forces, with the company's own distribution and trading companies used abroad. Demand follows end markets such as nonresidential construction, durable goods and capital spending, which move with the wider economy; nonresidential construction is the largest end market served. Dedicated teams have been built around large customers and particular end-use sectors. The ELCYON line of heavy gauge steel plate, launched as a brand in January 2023, is aimed at wind energy producers and is to be made at the new plate mill in Brandenburg, Kentucky.

People and safety

The company employs approximately 33,000 people, whom it calls teammates; the vast majority are not represented by unions and are based in the United States. Safety is tracked with a days away, restricted or transferred case rate, calculated per 200,000 hours worked, the equivalent of 100 full-time employees in a year; the 2025 rate was 0.30, a 27 percent improvement on the year before.

From Nucor's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025. The filing