Nucor Corporation

Who owns Nucor Corporation?
Nucor is a widely held public company on the NYSE under ticker NUE. Its largest shareholders are index fund managers such as Vanguard and BlackRock; no single owner controls it.

Is Nucor the largest US steelmaker?
Yes. Nucor is the largest steel producer in the United States, having passed US Steel in volume and revenue during the 2010s, and it is also North America's largest recycler.

What does Nucor make?
Sheet, plate, bar, structural, piling, and tubular steel, plus rebar fabrication, joists and deck, fasteners, buildings systems, and raw materials through its scrap and DRI operations.

How does Nucor make steel?
Almost entirely by melting recycled scrap in electric arc furnace mini-mills, supplemented by direct reduced iron from its Louisiana plant, rather than by smelting iron ore in blast furnaces.

How many employees does Nucor have?
Approximately 33,000 teammates as of the end of 2025, across more than 300 North American facilities.

What was Nucor's 2025 revenue?
Net sales of $32.5 billion for fiscal 2025, with net earnings of $1.7 billion attributable to Nucor stockholders.

The corporate entity traces to 1905, when Ransom E. Olds founded the REO Motor Car Company. After REO's collapse, a corporate shell passed through reorganizations and emerged in 1955 as Nuclear Corporation of America, a conglomerate that bought businesses in radiation instrumentation and other speculative fields and nearly went bankrupt.

Salvation came in 1962 when Nuclear Corporation acquired Vulcraft, a profitable South Carolina maker of steel joists. Vulcraft's general manager, F. Kenneth Iverson, became president of the whole company in 1965. Iverson liquidated the conglomerate's money-losing units, bet everything on steel joists, and moved headquarters to Charlotte, North Carolina.

In 1969 the company opened its first steel mill in Darlington, South Carolina, an electric arc furnace mini-mill that melted scrap to feed Vulcraft's joist plants. The integrated producers of the era dismissed mini-mills as scrap dealers incapable of making quality steel. They were wrong. The company renamed itself Nucor Corporation in 1971 and expanded through bar, structural, and fastener markets.

The decisive move came in 1989 at Crawfordsville, Indiana, where Nucor commercially proved thin-slab casting, technology that let mini-mills make flat-rolled sheet, the highest-value steel product and the integrated mills' last protected market. Steel Dynamics and others followed, and mini-mills eventually took the majority of US steel production.

Acquisition and greenfield growth continued: the 2007 Harris Steel purchase made Nucor the largest US rebar fabricator; a 2014 DRI plant in Louisiana gave it captive iron units; and recent projects include new sheet capacity in Kentucky and West Virginia, a plate mill, and electrical steel capability. Nucor overtook US Steel as the largest American producer and has held that position for a decade. Fiscal 2025 net sales reached $32.5 billion.

Nucor recycles roughly 20 million tonnes of scrap annually, making it one of the largest recyclers anywhere. Its EAF process generates approximately one-third the greenhouse gas intensity of average global blast furnace steel, and the company targets further reductions toward 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050.

Product innovations include Econiq steel, offered as net-zero through offsets and renewable procurement, and Elcyon plate for offshore wind. Environmental groups note that the net-zero label relies partly on offsets rather than absolute reductions, and that scale still makes Nucor a significant emitter in absolute terms.

Nucor is a perennial Fortune 500 and Fortune Most Admired company, a Dividend King with more than 50 years of consecutive dividend increases, and a frequent subject of management literature for its decentralized model and incentive pay system, chronicled in the company's own history and the book Plain Talk by Ken Iverson.

Nucor's non-union stance draws criticism from the United Steelworkers, which has tried to organize mills for decades without success; the company argues its profit-sharing pays better than union contracts. It is a leading advocate for Section 232 tariffs, which critics say raise steel prices for manufacturers. Environmental attention focuses on scrap contamination and air permits at some mills, though its record is generally cleaner than integrated peers.