
Fastenal Company

FAST (Fastenal Company) trades at 5.6x EV/Revenue — reasonably priced for a industrials company with solid margins (45%) and moderate growth (+10% YoY). The business is profitable at 20% EBIT margins. Forward PE of 36x.
If you invested $1,000 in Amazon at IPO in 1997, it would be worth over $2.1M today. But you would have endured a 95% drawdown in 2001.
Fastenal (FAST) is a B2B industrial supply company that sells fasteners, tools, and maintenance supplies to manufacturers, contractors, and other businesses. They operate through a network of over 3,000 branches and vending machines placed directly at customer sites, making it easy for businesses to access the nuts, bolts, safety equipment, and industrial supplies they need to keep operations running.
Fastenal typically grows revenue in the mid-to-high single digits annually, driven by new customer acquisition and expanding wallet share through their Onsite program (vending machines at customer locations). The company has been investing heavily in digital capabilities and automation to capture share in the massive, still-fragmented industrial supply market where local relationships and logistics matter.
The company maintains healthy gross margins around 45-50% and operating margins in the low-to-mid 20% range, reflecting their scale advantages and efficient distribution model. Fastenal consistently generates strong free cash flow conversion, typically returning significant cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases as a mature, cash-generative business.
Fastenal competes with W.W. Grainger, MSC Industrial, and increasingly Amazon Business, but differentiates through its extensive local branch network and innovative Onsite vending solutions. Their logistics capabilities and deep customer relationships in manufacturing create switching costs, though the market remains highly fragmented with thousands of smaller regional players.
Without recent financial data available, the company's latest performance metrics and quarterly trends cannot be assessed. Historically, Fastenal's stock performance has closely tracked industrial production and manufacturing sentiment, with the market rewarding consistent execution and penalizing any signs of market share loss.
Analyst sentiment typically focuses on Fastenal's ability to gain market share through technology investments and the health of their end markets. The stock is generally viewed as a high-quality industrial name, though debates often center on valuation relative to growth prospects and cyclical positioning.
Fastenal is a cash-generating industrial distribution leader with sticky customer relationships, but success depends on executing digital transformation while navigating industrial economic cycles.
Gold Eagle provides data and AI-generated analysis for informational purposes only. Not investment advice. All data from public sources.








| '25E | '26E | '27E | '28E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $8.2B | $9.0B | $9.8B | $10.4B |
| Growth | — | +10% | +8% | +6% |
| EBITDA | — | $2.0B | $2.2B | $2.3B |
| Growth | — | +8% | +6% | |
| FCF | $1.1B | — | — | — |
| Margin | 13% | — |
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| — |
| — |
| EPS (PF) | $1.10 | $1.23 | $1.35 | $1.42 |
| Growth | — | +12% | +10% | +5% |