Who Owns Commercial Metals?

The company began in Dallas in 1915 as American Iron and Metal, a scrap yard founded by Moses Feldman. For its first four decades it was a regional recycling business. The decisive move came in 1963 with the acquisition of Structural Metals, a small rebar mill in Fort Worth, which turned the scrap collector into a steelmaker and gave the business its current name, Commercial Metals Company.

The mini mill model defined the company's growth. Instead of blast furnaces and iron ore, mini mills melt scrap in electric arc furnaces, a cheaper and more flexible way to make steel. CMC expanded mills and fabrication shops across the Southeast and Midwest through the 1980s and 1990s, went international with Polish mill acquisitions in 2003 and 2012, and added a network of recycling yards that feed its furnaces.

The 2018 acquisition of Gerdau's US rebar assets was transformative, adding dozens of fabrication locations and making CMC one of the two largest rebar producers in the country. More recently, the company built its Arizona 2 micro mill to serve the western US market and began assembling specialty businesses, including Tensar geogrids, inside an Emerging Businesses Group.

Fiscal 2025, ended August 31, 2025, produced net sales of $7.8 billion and net earnings of $84.7 million, with margins recovering into the fourth quarter. After year-end the company announced pending acquisitions of Foley Products and Concrete Pipe and Precast, extending into precast concrete.

The company's operating identity has always been practical: buy scrap cheap, melt it efficiently, and sell finished steel into local construction markets where freight costs protect regional pricing. Rebar, the ribbed steel bar that reinforces concrete, became its core product because every building, bridge, and highway project consumes it in volume.

International expansion began with the 2003 purchase of a majority stake in a Polish mini mill, followed by a second Polish acquisition in 2012. The European business gave CMC a second geographic platform, though it has remained smaller and more cyclical than the US operations.

Inside the US, growth came from both mills and downstream fabrication. Fabrication shops convert commodity rebar into cut, bent, and labeled assemblies matched to engineering drawings, a service business that builds switching costs into customer relationships. The 2018 Gerdau deal more than doubled that fabrication footprint in a single transaction.