The next time you find yourself at the site of a half-built home, direct your attention to the joints of its wooden frame. You’ll notice a variety of nondescript steel components tying the planks together and anchoring them to the ground. There’s a better chance than not that those are made by Simpson Manufacturing, a […]
Related post:Wise and the business of cross-border transfers: part 1I concluded part 1 describing how, by looping unit cost advantages back into price, Wise scaled to become a leading player in cross-border payments. From that starting point, it launched several other notable products. The most significant of these is Wise Account, which allows small businesses […]
Every year, consumers the world over move ~£2tn across borders, with roughly 2/3s of that funneled through a labyrinthine network of banks. A typical cross-border bank transaction might look something like this: Amber, a US resident with a checking account at PNC, places an order to send Rupees to her mother’s account at Seylan Bank […]
(taking a break from building products after this. Up next: a 2-parter on Wise)In part 3a, I provided an overview of pre-fabricated trusses, namely the value they offer homebuilders over traditional stick building and what’s involved in the transition from Phase 1 manufacturing (automated saws and lasers) to Phase 2 (robotic systems). You’ll want to […]
Related posts:Building materials: part 1Building materials: part 2a (LPX, JHX)Building materials: part 2b (TREX, AZEK)In Part 1 of this series, I described the steps by which an ocean of building materials are titrated out to end users. Below is a stylized illustration of the value chain from the perspective of BlueLinx, a two-step distributor, who […]
Related posts:Building materials: part 1Building materials: part 2a (LPX, JHX)Next month, I’ll conclude this series with a post (or two) on Builder’s FirstSource and Atlas Engineered Products. I actually meant to publish on those companies today, but a discussion of branded manufacturers felt incomplete without a dissection of Trex.Trex’s origin dates back to 1988, when […]
Related post: Building materials: Part 1In the 1967 film The Graduate, a young Dustin Hoffman is pulled aside by a friend of his parents, who offers the restless protagonist a simple piece of advice: “one word: plastics”. This versatile material had by then seeped into every crevice of American industry and was pitched as a […]
Many of the companies I discuss on this blog are not just good businesses, but obviously good. Visa, Moody’s, Sherwin-Williams, and Heico are wonderful and readers of this blog need not be further convinced of that fact. And notwithstanding regulatory or macro pressures that cast doubt on their prospects at certain points (interchange regulation in […]
