Who Owns Nucor?

Nucor's corporate ancestry is among the strangest in American industry. It traces to 1905 and Ransom E. Olds' REO Motor Car Company. A corporate remnant of REO eventually became Nuclear Corporation of America in 1955, a holding company that drifted through unsuccessful ventures in radiation instrumentation and other fields and nearly failed.

The turnaround came through a 1962 acquisition of Vulcraft, a maker of steel joists in Florence, South Carolina. Vulcraft's manager, F. Kenneth Iverson, was promoted to run the whole company in 1965, moved headquarters to Charlotte, North Carolina, and steered the business toward steel. In 1969 Nucor built its first mini-mill in Darlington, South Carolina, melting scrap in an electric arc furnace to make bar products cheaply. The company renamed itself Nucor Corporation in 1971.

The mini-mill model rewrote the economics of American steel. Instead of capital-intensive blast furnaces smelting iron ore, Nucor melted recycled scrap, sited small plants near customers and raw material, and paid production workers largely through bonuses tied to output. Through the 1970s and 1980s it expanded up the value chain into structural shapes and then, in 1989 at Crawfordsville, Indiana, became the first company to commercially cast thin-slab steel, cracking the sheet market that integrated producers had defended for decades.

Under Iverson and successors, Nucor kept acquiring and building: plate mills in North Carolina, beam mills, fastener plants, and the 2007 acquisition of Harris Steel that made it a rebar fabrication leader. In 2014 it took majority ownership of a DRI plant in Louisiana to produce its own iron units, hedging scrap prices.

Nucor passed US Steel as America's largest producer by volume and revenue in the 2010s. Recent years brought continued expansion: sheet mills in Kentucky and West Virginia, a plate mill in Kentucky, galvanizing lines, and investments in lower-carbon products including the Econiq and Elcyon lines aimed at automotive and offshore wind customers. Fiscal 2025 delivered $32.5 billion in net sales and $1.7 billion in net earnings.