Latest acquisition by Brad Jacobs’ QXO building products rollup is largest so far

Publicly-traded TopBuild being acquired for about $17 billion

QXO is making its third acquisition, and it's the biggest one yet. (Photo: Jim Allen\FreightWaves)

About 13 months after Brad Jacobs-founded QXO announced its first acquisition as part of his quest to roll up a fragmented building products industry, the company has made a third purchase, its biggest one yet.

QXO (NYSE: QXO) announced Sunday that it was acquiring TopBuild Corp. (NYSE: BLD) for approximately $17 billion. 

QXO’s earlier acquisitions were Beacon Roofing Supply in March 2025 for about $11 billion, and Kodiak, a $2.25 billion deal that closed April 1. 

In a prepared statement, QXO said the TopBuild deal, when completed, would make it the second-largest publicly traded building products company. The largest publicly-traded building products company is Ferguson Enterprises (NYSE: FERG).

Ferguson has a market capitalization of $50.6 billion, per Barchart. That same information service at the close of business Friday reported QXO’s market capitalization at $17.7 billion, roughly the same amount of money it spent to acquire TopBuild.

Since QXO CEO Jacobs first announced his new venture following the restructuring of XPO (NYSE: XPO), which included the spinoff of 3PL RXO (NYSE: RXO) and contract logistics provider GXO (NYSE: GXO), the plan behind QXO had logistics as a key strategy. Jacobs said repeatedly that the fragmentation of the building products industry made it a candidate for a rollup, but with the success of it depending to a large degree on using more efficient logistics across a wider base of operations as a driver of profitability.

Tops in several building products fields

QXO said after the deal is complete, it will be the number one supplier in North America of insulation, waterproofing, number two in roofing, and number one or two in the lumber and building material sector, depending on geography. 

TopBuild’s stock has been on a strong run in the past year, rising about 43.8% during the last 52 weeks. The prospect of Jacobs’ hunting for acquisition targets in the building products space is believed to have given a lift to companies in that sector.

TopBuild’s stock closed Friday at $410.31. Under the QXO deal, each share of TopBuild will be valued at $505, a 23.1% premium to the closing price. 

Shareholders of TopBuild have two options to get paid. They can receive the $505 in cash, or 20.2 shares of QXO stock. Friday’s QXO closing price of $25 translates to $505 per share for a shareholder exchanging TopBuild shares for those of QXO. 

Soaring stock price

But that latter choice also offers the upside of QXO stock, which has risen more than 90% in the last year. That is not surprising given that a year ago QXO was nothing more than the Beacon deal having been announced, Jacobs’ track record and a pile of cash and other assets, since QXO had not gotten started as a true operating company in the building products field. (The Beacon acquisition closed in late April 2025).

When the TopBuild acquisition is complete, QXO said the combined company will have $18 billion in revenue and more than $2 billion in adjusted EBITDA. It expects to report its first quarter earnings May 7, but only the Beacon acquisition was operating within QXO in the first quarter.

QXO did say the TopBuild acquisition is expected to be immediately accretive.

It also said that the purchase price is about 14.9X EBITDA for the company pre-synergies, which it estimated at about $300 million. Post-synergies, the purchase price is about 11.8X EBITDA, QXO said.

Synergies ahead

Those synergies were implicit in other statements QXO made about the rationale behind the acquisition.  

“Customers will benefit from QXO’s ability to cross-sell legacy Beacon and Kodiak products with TopBuild’s services and products,” the company said. “Crucially, it expands QXO’s exposure to large, complex projects where scale makes a difference, including data centers.”

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.