Wall Street didn’t exactly throw a parade when Holcim’s North American business stepped out on its own this summer. On June 23, Amrize—an all-American blend of quarries, kilns and commercial roofs—began trading in New York and Zurich after a one-for-one dividend spin to Holcim shareholders. The company arrives with real scale: about $11.7 billion of 2024 sales and formal targets to grow revenue 5%–8% and adjusted operating profit 8%–11% through 2028. It’s a meaty industrial story in an era obsessed with software. And it’s still flying under most U.S. investors’ radar.

A moat built from quarries, kilns—and roofers

Amrize’s defensibility starts with old-fashioned physics. Cement and aggregates don’t travel well; hauling rock is expensive, permitting new quarries is harder than ever, and building a modern cement plant is a decade-long capital slog. The result in most local markets is a durable oligopoly where scale begets margin and cash. Amrize’s footprint is hard to replicate: 18 cement plants across North America, 462 aggregate sites and 269 ready-mix plants, positions that collectively make it the No. 1 cement player and a No. 1 or No. 2 supplier in the aggregates markets it serves. That base feeds a nationwide ready-mix network, tightening the loop between pit, plant and project.

What makes Amrize unusual among heavy-materials peers is its second pillar: a building-envelope business with well-known brands such as Elevate (the former Firestone), Duro-Last and Gaco. Roofing may sound prosaic, but in commercial construction it’s rich with service, specification and warranty economics. Duro-Last, for instance, is known for “no-dollar-limit” warranties up to 30 years, backed by hands-and-knees inspections before coverage is issued; Elevate’s Red Shield program offers up to 20- and 30-year terms depending on system and spec. Warranties, installer training and large distribution footprints create sticky, recurring relationships with owners and contractors—an intangible moat that’s very tangible in a downturn.

Scale and integration let Amrize move both ways on price. In cement and aggregates, short supply lines and limited incremental capacity keep pricing rational. On the roof, premium systems and full-envelope solutions support value-based pricing, especially in re-roofing, where owners trade off leak risk against lifetime cost. That diversity across “foundation to rooftop” makes earnings less hostage to any one cycle.

A long runway: infrastructure, re-roofing and the housing gap

Tailwinds are real and multi-year. Federal spending from the bipartisan infrastructure law is pushing money into roads, bridges and ports—cement- and aggregate-hungry work. Add the CHIPS Act-driven factory boom and energy projects from the IRA, and you have a construction mix skewed toward heavy materials. Those programs are in motion and under-allocated relative to total authorizations, suggesting a multi-year spend-out rather than a one-off sugar high.

Then there’s housing. The U.S. remains short several million homes; estimates cluster in the 3.7–5 million range depending on methodology. Even if mortgage rates stay bumpy, the structural need for new units—and the remodeling that accompanies population growth—supports a steady demand floor for cement, aggregates and roofing. Commercial re-roofing, meanwhile, is inherently recurring: membranes age, warranties expire and owners upgrade for energy codes, all of which feeds Amrize’s higher-margin building-envelope arm. Industry forecasts call for the North American roofing market to grow mid-single digits this decade.

Sustainability is becoming a bid-winning feature, not just a compliance line item. The company is pushing lower-carbon cement and concrete platforms (ECOPlanet and ECOPact) and showcasing projects that cut embodied carbon without blowing up budgets—of interest to tech and industrial customers racing to decarbonize new facilities. There’s work to do and critics to satisfy, but the direction of travel lines up with where procurement—and regulation—are going.

The playbook—and the player running it

If the strategy sounds familiar, it should. Chairman and CEO Jan Jenisch has a habit of taking industrial franchises and making them harder to catch. Before Holcim, he spent more than two decades at Sika and ran it as CEO from 2012 to 2017, a stretch in which Sika hit record sales and profits, opened new plants, drove a “Strategy 2018” expansion into higher-margin mortar and adhesives, and won admission to Switzerland’s blue-chip SMI index. By the time he left for Holcim, Sika’s market capitalization had more than tripled—an outperformance notched while he steered the company through a four-year, high-profile takeover siege by Saint-Gobain without losing operational momentum. That mix of disciplined bolt-ons, greenfield capacity, and relentless execution is the same playbook he applied at Holcim—buying Firestone Building Products and Duro-Last to build a premium roofing platform—and is now bringing to Amrize.

Jenisch has also put personal capital behind the story. Form 4 filings show he bought substantial stock in early August at roughly $46–$48 a share, with additional purchases disclosed days later—altogether tens of millions of dollars in open-market buys. It’s not dispositive, but it’s a rare, high-signal vote of confidence from a sitting industrial CEO.

Valuation: priced like a newcomer, not a franchise (yet)

On the numbers, Amrize still trades at a conspicuous discount to the North American aggregates aristocracy. Management’s investor-day deck pegs the stock around ~12× enterprise value to adjusted EBITDA on a standalone basis—well below where mature peers have tended to change hands. By contrast, Vulcan Materials and Martin Marietta sit near 21× and 19× EV/EBITDA on current, trailing figures, respectively. Even allowing for methodology noise (Amrize cites adjusted EBITDA and the business has only just migrated from IFRS to U.S. GAAP), the gap is hard to miss.

Some of that spread reflects “show-me” risk around a fresh spin, index inclusion that hasn’t fully washed through, and the mix effect of combining a pure heavy-materials engine with a premium roofing franchise that investors don’t yet quite know how to value. But the ingredients for a re-rate are lined up: clean stand-alone quarters, steady mid-single-digit top-line growth with high-single- to low-double-digit EBITDA growth, and the company’s own math calling for more than $8 billion of cumulative free cash flow through 2028—fuel for buybacks, bolt-ons, or both. If Amrize merely narrows half the valuation gap with Vulcan and Martin Marietta as the story seasons, the equity case looks markedly better without heroic macro

The bottom line

Amrize is not a story stock; it’s a cash-machine-in-waiting built on assets that are hard to copy and brands that keep customers coming back when the weather—and the business cycle—turns. A dominant, geographically entrenched cement-and-aggregates network underwrites the economics; a premium roofing and building-envelope arm adds growth, margin and resilience. The growth backdrop—infrastructure, re-roofing and a multiyear housing deficit—looks sturdier than the average cycle. And it’s run by an operator with a clear playbook who just bought a lot of his own shares.

For investors who can handle some cyclicality, that stacks up to an excellent long-term buy. The kicker: because Amrize is new to U.S. screens and only just beginning its life as a stand-alone, it isn’t yet as well known—or as well owned—as it probably will be once index inclusion and a few clean quarters roll by. Sometimes the best industrials aren’t the loudest; they’re the ones pouring the concrete under everyone else’s bull market.