Earlier this month, QXO President and CEO Brad Jacobs released his investor Q&A on its website. The document provided a wide-ranging set of topics, including future merger and acquisition strategies, QXO’s value creation plan, its operational blueprint, and technology needs for the future.
QXO has made a splash in building products distribution over the past several years by acquiring Beacon Roofing for $11 billion in 2025, Kodiak Building Partners, which supplies lumber and trusses, for $2.25 billion in April of 2026, and TopBuild Corp, an insulation distributors, for $17 billion, on July 1. QXO offered $9.4 billion to acquire Rexel in September of 2024. Rexel rejected the offer and no other negotiations occurred.
Jacobs explained his interest in building products distribution because, “it fits our playbook perfectly and offers the right combination of size, growth, and acquisition opportunity. It’s a very large market, and we believe long-term demand is supported by repair and remodel activity, the structural housing deficit, population growth, aging housing stock, and data center construction. It’s cyclical, but we’re buying and building in an industry where demand should be meaningfully higher over time.
“We also like the structure of the industry,” Jacob added. “There are attractive assets to buy, and the acquisition landscape is less crowded than it is in many other industries we’ve operated in. Most importantly, this is a sector where better execution matters. As we improve pricing, procurement, availability, service, technology, and inventory management at scale, we can unlock considerable value independent of market growth.”
Jacobs explained at length his focus on customer experience, and the need to meet needs as quickly as possible. “In our view, the customer experience in this industry comes down to a few practical things. Do we have the product when the customer needs it? Can we quote quickly? Do we deliver on time and in full? Do we have the installation teams available when the job is ready? Do we help customers get jobs finished on time? Is the invoice accurate? Are our people competent, responsive, and easy to work with? If we consistently do those things better, we should earn more share of wallet and better economics over time. That’s why we’re spending so much time on product availability, pricing tools, transportation, labor planning, installer scheduling, invoice accuracy, training, and the operating cadence around the customer. We’re trying to move the experience from fragmented and unreliable to professional and dependable. We’re not trying to win with a race to the bottom on price. We’re trying to earn the right to price appropriately by being easier to do business with and more valuable to the customer.”
That’s a big reason why QXO has invested so heavily in its tech stack, something Jacobs admits others can replicate. But Jacobs says he has, “a highly experienced management team with specific expertise: cleaning the data, standardizing processes, training thousands of people, changing daily branch behavior, aligning incentives, and making the tools part of the operating cadence rather than a parallel system. Technology only creates value if it changes outcomes — better pricing, higher availability, improved service, faster quoting, more accurate invoicing, better inventory placement, and clearer data visibility. Our competitive advantage will come from speed of deployment, quality of adoption, and the depth with which technology is embedded into the business.”
Jacobs added he’s acquired a well-rounded group of companies in Beacon, Kodiak, and TopBuild, and future expansion may move a little slower.
“Beacon gave us scale in roofing and waterproofing. Kodiak expanded our reach into lumber, general contractor channels, doors and windows, gypsum, and value-added components. TopBuild added a leading insulation platform and expanded job-site access through installation. We now have a much broader presence across the building envelope in North America:
- #1 in insulation
- #2 in roofing
- #1 in waterproofing
- #1 or #2 in the lumber and building materials sector in the key geographies we serve
The strategy is to go narrow and deep, not broad and shallow. We expect to expand thoughtfully into a few more categories over time, not dozens. We want to build density, customer relevance, and operating excellence in product areas where scale, service, and cross-sell can create a material advantage. Our near-term emphasis is on integration, optimization, and deleveraging. Our organizational focus is on pricing, procurement, technology, customer experience, and operating improvement. That does not mean we’ve stepped away from M&A permanently. It means the bar for new capital deployment is appropriately high. In any case, we still expect tuck-ins to remain an important and highly accretive part of the model, particularly where they add density or expand our presence in core building-envelope categories.”