Worthington Enterprises, Inc.
Moat Score — Worthington Enterprises, Inc.
Total Moat Score
12 / 30
| Moat Factor | Score | Analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Intangible Assets Patents, trademarks, brand strength, or regulatory licenses that protect a company's products or services from being freely copied by competitors. | 3 / 5 | Worthington owns or licenses a portfolio of category-leading niche brands — Bernzomatic torches, Balloon Time helium kits, the legacy Amtrol-era Well-X-Trol expansion tank brand, Ragasco composite LPG cylinders, and a licensed Coleman outdoor-living line. The 10-K itself states no single patent, trademark, or trade secret is individually material, so the moat is breadth of brand portfolio and channel relationships rather than any single iconic IP asset, and Consumer Products brands still face national-brand and private-label pressure. |
| Cost Advantage A durable ability to produce goods or services more cheaply than competitors — through scale, unique access to cheap inputs, location, or process — that lets a company undercut rivals or out-earn them at the same price. | 2 / 5 | Seven decades of manufacturing scale, the internal 'Worthington Business System' continuous-improvement program, and a related-party Steel Supply Agreement with spun-off Worthington Steel support efficiency, but core inputs (steel, aluminum, copper, propane) are commodities. Gross margin held nearly flat at 27.4% (FY2026) versus 27.7% (FY2025) despite ~20% sales growth, consistent with cost pass-through discipline rather than a durable structural cost edge over private competitors like McWane's Manchester Tank. |
| Pricing Power The ability to raise prices without losing meaningful business, because the product or service is differentiated, mission-critical, or has few good substitutes. | 2 / 5 | Building Products (62% of FY2026 sales) explicitly competes on price, service, and quality per the 10-K — a commodity-like dynamic with limited pricing power. Consumer brands (Bernzomatic, Balloon Time, licensed Coleman) carry some shelf-space and price-premium advantage over private label, but one retail customer equaled 10% of total consolidated sales and the largest Consumer Products customer equaled ~28% of segment sales, giving major retail accounts real negotiating leverage back onto Worthington. |
| Network Effect The product or service becomes more valuable to every user as more people or organizations use it, making an established leader harder to displace. | 0 / 5 | Worthington sells manufactured physical goods — cylinders, tanks, tools, roofing clips — with no platform, marketplace, or usage-based network dynamic; a new buyer of Bernzomatic or Balloon Time products gains no additional value from other users of the product, so there is no network-effect component to the business. |
| Switching Costs The money, time, or operational disruption a customer would face switching to a competitor, which locks in existing customers and supports renewals. | 2 / 5 | Certain Building Products lines carry moderate switching friction because they are specified into professional practice — Well-X-Trol expansion tanks specified by plumbing/HVAC contractors, and Roof Hugger/LSI clips integrated into standing-seam roofing systems — while JV relationships like WAVE and ClarkDietrich are embedded with contractors over decades. Consumer Products (torches, garden tools, balloon kits), however, are largely shelf-driven retail purchases with low consumer switching costs and direct private-label substitution risk. |
| Efficient Scale A market that can only profitably support a small number of players, so incumbents face limited threat from new entrants even without other defenses. | 3 / 5 | Several of Worthington's niches are structurally limited to a handful of large players: DOT/pressure-vessel-certified cylinder and tank manufacturing requires costly, safety-regulated capacity, and the 10-K describes the WAVE joint venture as the largest of only four major North American ceiling-grid manufacturers, with ClarkDietrich similarly concentrated among a small set of light-gauge steel framing producers — markets likely too narrow to profitably support many additional large-scale entrants. |