Steel Dynamics (STLD) FY2025 results: revenue $18.2 billion, up 3.6% on the year

Steel Dynamics makes steel from recycled scrap, recycles the scrap itself, fabricates steel joists and decking, and now rolls aluminium. Its plants are in the United States and Mexico. The company describes itself as one of the largest domestic steel producers and metals recyclers in North America, on steelmaking and steel coating capacity of approximately 16 million tons at the end of 2025. It earns its money from making and selling steel, from processing and selling recycled ferrous and nonferrous metals, and from fabricating and selling steel joist and deck products. The aluminium business supplies flat rolled products with higher recycled content to the beverage can industry and to automotive and industrial customers.

Steel operations

Electric arc furnace mills, 72 percent of consolidated net sales in 2025 against 69 percent in 2024: Butler Flat Roll, Columbus Flat Roll, Southwest-Sinton Flat Roll, Structural and Rail, Engineered Bar Products, Roanoke Bar and Steel of West Virginia. Coating and processing sits alongside them at The Techs, Heartland Flat Roll, United Steel Supply, New Process Steel, acquired on 1 December 2025, and Vulcan Threaded Products, plus warehouses in Mexico and a 75 percent controlling interest in SDI Biocarbon Solutions. Shipments reached a record 13.7 million tons in 2025, 12.3 million excluding movements inside the segment, 9 percent higher than 2024, mostly from Sinton and Heartland as four new value-added lines ran for a full year; mill utilisation rose to 86 percent from 81 percent. Average selling prices fell 1 percent, or $14 a ton.

Metals recycling

Ferrous and nonferrous scrap processing, transport, marketing, brokerage and scrap management, sited close to the company's own mills and aluminium plants and to other scrap consumers across North America, including the Omni operations in the United States and central and northern Mexico. This was 11 percent of consolidated net sales in 2025, and exports were 14 percent of the segment's net sales, down from 17 percent in 2024. In 2025, 65 percent of the segment's ferrous scrap went to the company's own mills, against 62 percent a year earlier, with the rest sold to other steelmakers and foundries.

Steel fabrication and aluminium

Fabrication is the New Millennium Building Systems joist and deck plants across the United States and in northern Mexico, making steel joists, joist girders and deck systems for non-residential construction; it was 8 percent of consolidated net sales in 2025 against 10 percent in 2024. The aluminium segment qualified industrial, beverage can and automotive quality flat rolled products during 2025 and began shipping in the later part of the second half.

The circular model

The metals recycling platform collects and processes scrap, which is sold on to end users including the company's own electric arc furnace mills and aluminium plants; the steel and aluminium then goes to customers who process it further or build finished products, some of it to the company's own fabrication businesses, and the scrap from that manufacturing and from products reaching the end of their lives comes back again. The recycling platform is the largest supplier of recycled ferrous scrap to the steel operations and of recycled aluminium scrap to the aluminium operations. The company states that this lowers working capital, because less scrap inventory has to be held at the mills, and gives it better access to higher-quality scrap. Its own steel-consuming businesses bought 1.8 million tons of steel from its mills in 2025, 13 percent of total steel shipments, and in weaker steel demand it can source their needs internally, buying outside when demand picks up.

How people are paid

Compensation is heavily performance-based. More than 60 percent of a production team member's total potential pay is at risk and tied to quality production and cost-effectiveness measures, and more than 85 percent of senior leadership's total potential pay is at risk and linked to company-wide financial measures including return on equity, growth, cash generation and return on invested capital. Profit sharing for eligible employees is 8 percent of consolidated pre-tax income excluding noncontrolling interests and other items, and the expense was $123.0 million in 2025 against $164.9 million in 2024. Operational decision making is deliberately decentralised.

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

Written from the 10-K filed 27 February 2026: read the full 10-K.