FASTENAL CO (FAST)

Fastenal is a business-to-business distributor of industrial and construction supplies. It began as a partnership in 1967, was incorporated in Minnesota in 1968, and opened its first branch in Winona, Minnesota. It started by supplying threaded fasteners and now sells more than nine major product lines through a global network of locations, using technologies such as vending devices, bin stock devices and e-commerce. It aims to reduce customers' total cost of procurement through proximity, a full product range and supply chain services.

Fastener products include threaded fasteners, bolts, nuts, screws, studs, washers, pins, concrete anchors, metal framing systems, wire rope, strut and rivets. They were 30.5% of 2025 consolidated sales. Non-fastener lines, added aggressively from 1993, were 69.5%. The largest is safety supplies at 22.2%, and the company also sells private-label "Exclusive Brands". Its service models are grouped as Fastenal Managed Inventory (FMI): FASTVend industrial vending (about 124,000 devices in the field, in 21 models), and FASTStock and FASTBin bin-stock programs using scales, infrared sensors, RFID and FASTClick buttons. FMI sales were $3,712.7 million, or 44.7% of sales, in 2025. Digital offerings include eProcurement (including EDI) and eCommerce, FAST360° analytics, mobile apps and FASTCrib cloud-based crib management. The company's Digital Footprint was 61.4% of 2025 sales.

Fastenal serves customers mainly through customer Sites, which are locations at or near customer operations where it keeps inventory tailored to local demand. It prioritizes Sites with monthly sales potential of $50,000 or more. Customers are mostly manufacturing, with the rest non-manufacturing. In 2025 the company reported about 98,361 average active Sites per month and 250,845 unique Sites, and sales were $8,201 million at the Site level, of which manufacturing was $6,203 million and non-manufacturing $1,998 million. At the end of 2025 it had 1,595 branch locations in 25 countries and 24,489 employees.

Operations rest on 15 distribution centers in North America (12 in the U.S., two in Canada, one in Mexico), plus two in Asia and two in Europe, with about 5.3 million square feet of capacity. The Indiana and Kansas centers serve as master hubs, and California and North Carolina as secondary hubs. Twelve North American centers use automated storage and retrieval systems that handle about 96% of picking. Local Inventory Fulfillment Terminals within the centers support dense FMI areas and supported about 11% of FMI sales in 2025. Most suppliers are outside North America. About 90% of product moves on the company's own fleet of roughly 590 Class 6, 7 and 8 trucks, with the rest on third-party shippers, and about 9,200 vehicles deliver from selling locations to customers. The company says its engagement model is difficult for large and small competitors, and web purchasing models, to replicate. Its systems combine in-house, purchased and subscription software, with a local point-of-sale system at each selling location.