Saint-Gobain pushes ahead with US expansion despite slow housing market
French building materials giant wants to more than double North American business through capex and acquisitions
French building materials giant Saint-Gobain will push ahead with a major expansion of its American business despite a US housing slump, transatlantic trade wars and a volatile political climate.
The plasterboard to roofing-shingles maker, which ranks among Europe’s biggest industrial groups, wants to more than double its North American footprint to almost 30 per cent of revenue as it pursues chunkier margins outside its traditional base.
In an interview, chief executive Benoît Bazin said neither political upheaval nor a sluggish US residential construction market had deterred it from this strategy.
“We continue to invest in North America. It’s a growing market for us. It’s good profitability. We continue to gain share,” Bazin told the FT.
“We take a long-term view,” he added. “The game plan is to continue to grow through both capex and acquisitions.”
European industrial groups from CRH to Schneider Electric have been shifting capital towards the US in pursuit of higher margins and market share in an economy that is building out infrastructure from manufacturing plants to data centres. “You need to build everywhere,” said Bazin.
Saint-Gobain, whose overall revenues reached €46.5bn in 2025, has increased its North American revenue share from about 13 per cent of revenue to 22 per cent since it announced a new growth strategy in 2018. Bazin said the company wanted to raise this figure “closer to 30 per cent in the coming years”. It is also expanding aggressively in Asia in a pivot away from its European roots.
The company has pumped $8bn into acquisitions, capital expenditure and research in the US and Canada since 2020 while managing a steady flow of disposals elsewhere. It has snapped up two listed American companies over the period and this month extended the push with deals to buy a North Carolina glass fibre plant and a Vancouver-based concrete chemicals group.
North America now accounts for about a third of profits, roughly on par with Europe, which previously made up as much as 60 per cent of earnings. The US has become its biggest single market, ahead of France.
Saint-Gobain traces its roots back to the 17th century, when it made the mirrors for one of the Palace of Versailles’s most famous galleries.
“We have been in Europe for 360 years in France and 170 years in Germany,” said Bazin. “We have a very strong presence already in Europe, and therefore more opportunities to gain market share in North America, Asia and emerging markets.”
The North American expansion drive comes in spite of a sharp slowdown in the US housing market. Single-family housing starts last month were down by a quarter from their early 2022 level, while existing home sales were more than a third lower than their pandemic-era peak. The 30-year mortgage rate has climbed to 6.58 per cent, up from 2.65 per cent in early 2021.
But Bazin said Saint-Gobain would “continue to invest” despite what he described as a “bit of a dip” in the market. Higher rates, he said, were not “killing” housing demand, but rather “delaying it a bit and changing a bit the scope of what is being built”.
The company said it had been largely unscathed by the upheaval in transatlantic relations as President Donald Trump has ratcheted up tariffs on America’s trading partners, unveiling further new duties this week.
Saint Gobain said it had been insulated by its local production model — one European companies are increasingly favouring. Bazin said the group had “anticipated a bit the de-globalisation of the world of today”.
“We act as a North American organisation with North American leadership and are viewed that way within the area,” said Mark Rayfield, the company’s North America boss. “There’s no ‘Oh your name sounds French, I don’t think I want to buy from you’. None of that.”
Under Bazin, Saint-Gobain has pursued a sustainability push into materials that are less polluting, both in the way they are produced and in the emissions then generated by buildings.
This ethos has not been an impediment in the US where buyers are drawn by the promise of durability, executives at Saint-Gobain said, even though the Trump administration has rolled back some climate policies and been hostile to imposing environmental goals on businesses.
“We leaned into resilience as a positive thing before sustainability was popular and before CO₂ was popular,” said Rayfield. “It is just an apolitical solution: you want a better house that has a higher resale value and is cheaper to operate.”