Gypsum Product Manufacturing (U.S.) — NAICS 32742

An investor's primer at the NAICS-industry level. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 32742 is the five-digit "industry" that covers U.S. factories turning gypsum rock into finished building products — above all the drywall panels that line the walls and ceilings of nearly every American building.

This is a single-child pass-through level. NAICS 32742 contains exactly one national industry beneath it — 327420, Gypsum Product Manufacturing — and the two are, for investment purposes, the same thing. This page gives the level's own federal statistics and the top-line takeaways, then points you to the 327420 primer for the full treatment (cost stack, company-by-company universe, demand math, regulation, and outlook).

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1. Overview

Gypsum is a soft mineral (calcium sulfate). Heat it, grind it, mix it with water, and sandwich the paste between two sheets of paper, and you get wallboard — the "drywall," "gypsum board," "plasterboard," or "Sheetrock" that forms the interior surfaces of roughly 90%+ of U.S. homes and most commercial buildings [1][2]. This industry is the factory step: it buys gypsum (mined, or recovered from coal-power plants), heats and forms it into panels, plaster, and joint compounds, and ships them to builders and dealers.

For an investor the appeal is a near-universal, low-tech, hard-to-substitute product with durable demand; the catch is cyclicality, because volumes rise and fall with housing starts, remodeling, and commercial construction. It is a regional commodity manufacturing business — profit turns on regional supply balance, price discipline, and input costs (gypsum, paper, energy), not on brand. Note one correction the child primer now supplies: capacity utilization matters less to unit cost than the usual fixed-cost story implies, and more to realized price. See the 327420 primer for how those levers work in detail.

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2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

NAICS 32742 has a single child national industry:

Because there is just one child, the five-digit industry (32742) and the six-digit national industry (327420) describe an identical set of factories. The Census Bureau reports concentration and firm counts at the six-digit level and the totals roll straight up unchanged. Nothing is added or removed at this level, so this page does not repeat the child's full analysis — the 327420 primer is the authoritative page for scope, in/out boundaries, and company detail.

Scope in one line. In scope: making gypsum products — wallboard/panels, gypsum plasters and plasterboard, gypsum block, joint compound, architectural and ornamental plasterwork, and gypsum-based tile and ceiling products. Out of scope (and where those activities sit): mining gypsum rock (NAICS 212390, Other Nonmetallic Mineral Mining and Quarrying), and installing drywall on site (NAICS 238310, Drywall and Insulation Contractors). Adjacent mineral-products industries — cement (327310), lime (327410), ready-mix concrete (327320) — sit elsewhere in 3273/3274. The federal manufacturing statistics here capture the plants, not the mines or the installers [3].

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3. Size of this level

Federal statistics for NAICS 32742 (identical to 327420, its one child):

This is a small-headcount, high-output industry: roughly 11,500 workers across ~172 plants produce about $9 billion of product — the signature of automated, capital-heavy manufacturing. Read the establishment count carefully: the Census figure spans every gypsum-product establishment (plaster, joint compound, ceiling products, and support locations), while the wallboard business proper is far tighter — Eagle Materials counts six U.S. manufacturers operating 59 wallboard plants and 69 production lines [7].

Physical scale (the units the industry actually trades in). Dollars understate how easy this industry is to measure in tons and square feet. U.S. gypsum consumption ran about 44 million tons in 2025, against roughly 20 million tons of crude gypsum mined domestically (worth ~$260 million), down from 22 million tons in 2024 [6][1]. Wallboard sales were approximately 25–26 billion square feet in 2025 — the sources disagree, with the Gypsum Association at 25.4 BSF and the USGS at 26 BSF, depending on coverage and timing conventions — down from ~28 BSF in 2024, against panel-making capacity of roughly 33–34 BSF per year [1][6][7]. That puts utilization near three-quarters: comfortable, but with visible slack. The full USGS mining- and consumption-side detail is in 327420.

Undercount / coverage note. Coverage here is good, not thin. This is a concentrated industry of a handful of large, mostly corporate producers, so federal business statistics capture it well — unlike fields dominated by tiny sole proprietors or nonemployers. The one figure to read with care is dollar market size: private research firms quote a larger "U.S. gypsum board market" (commonly $12–16 billion) because they bundle in distribution margins, related products, and sometimes installation, which sit outside 32742 [2][8]. Treat the ~$9 billion federal factory-gate figure as ground truth for the manufacturing industry itself [4].

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4. Investable universe — where value concentrates

Because 32742 is one industry, its value concentrates exactly where the child primer describes: in a short list of large producers, most of them private or foreign-owned. Public exposure is genuinely scarce.

• United States Gypsum (USG / "Sheetrock") — the U.S. market leader; private, owned by Germany's Knauf since 2019 [10].
• National Gypsum ("Gold Bond") and Georgia-Pacific Gypsum (Koch Industries) — major, multi-plant, private.
• CertainTeed Gypsum — owned by Saint-Gobain (Euronext Paris: SGO; U.S. OTC: CODYY), a diversified global materials group in which drywall is a small slice [11].
• American Gypsum — a segment of Eagle Materials (NYSE: EXP), the only U.S.-listed name with material, direct wallboard economics. It sold about 2.76 billion square feet of wallboard in fiscal 2026 [9], but its wallboard/recycled-paperboard "Light Materials" arm is under half of Eagle's ~$2.3 billion of revenue — the rest is cement and aggregates [7].
• PABCO Gypsum — private, regional (Western U.S.).

The key fact for allocators: there is no pure-play U.S. drywall stock. The full ticker-by-ticker map, scale figures, and ownership history are in the 327420 primer.

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5. How the money works

Wallboard economics are the economics of a regional commodity with a freight moat: a panel is heavy and cheap per square foot, so shipping it far destroys the margin — delivery is overwhelmingly by truck, with under 5% of Eagle's volume moving by rail [9]. Plants therefore serve a radius of a few hundred miles, and each region is supplied by only a few producers, which supports pricing power when demand is firm. Revenue is volume (square feet) × price (per thousand square feet, MSF), and the returns can be unusually fat for a building material: Eagle's wallboard segment earned $286.8 million of operating profit on $764.5 million of revenue in fiscal 2026 — roughly a 38% segment operating margin, down from 41% the prior year as volumes and prices softened, on an average net price of $226.08/MSF plus $51.00/MSF of freight [9].

The cost stack is gypsum feedstock, paper facing (about one-third of wallboard production cost), energy (natural gas ran roughly 8–10% of Eagle's production cost, since calcining is gas-intensive), and freight both ways [7][9]. One correction the revised child forces on the standard narrative: Eagle discloses that fixed costs are less than 20% of overall wallboard cost [12], so utilization swings move unit cost less than a "high fixed cost" framing suggests. Volume still matters — but mainly because slack capacity erodes regional pricing discipline, not because idle plants blow out unit costs. The child primer works the full example, the feedstock discussion, and the shift from coal-derived "synthetic" gypsum toward mined natural rock.

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6. Demand drivers

Demand tracks construction and renovation across three end-markets that don't peak together: new residential construction (the swing factor, geared to housing starts and mortgage rates), repair and remodel (the ballast, tied to the large installed base of homes), and nonresidential/commercial (offices, schools, hospitals, warehouses, data centers). Housing-linked demand dominates: Eagle estimates that residential construction plus repair and remodeling accounted for more than 80% of calendar-2025 U.S. wallboard sales [9], leaving under a fifth for nonresidential. Total demand is therefore steadier than housing starts alone, but still cyclical — wallboard sales slipped from ~28 BSF in 2024 to ~25–26 BSF in 2025 [1][6], and the near-term cycle remains soft, with U.S. housing starts in May 2026 running at a 1.177 million seasonally adjusted annual rate, 8.7% below May 2025 [13]. Full breakdown in 327420.

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7. Regulation

The regulatory picture is the child's: building and fire codes shape demand toward higher-spec, higher-margin panels (fire-rated "Type X," sound, mold/moisture resistance); environmental permitting covers calcining-kiln and dryer air emissions, plus mine reclamation, process-water, and remediation obligations; and antitrust scrutiny follows from the industry's concentration — In re: Domestic Drywall Antitrust Litigation (MDL 2437, E.D. Pa.) swept in USG, National Gypsum, CertainTeed, Eagle/American Gypsum, PABCO and others over alleged 2011–12 price-fixing, with USG settling for roughly $48 million across purchaser classes without admitting liability [14]. One nuance the child clarifies: EPA's Coal Combustion Residuals rules govern the power-plant gypsum stream, but EPA excludes encapsulated beneficial reuse such as wallboard from federal CCR disposal regulation — the supply risk runs through utility compliance costs and plant closures rather than through a direct rule on the panel makers [15]. Trade actions on imported gypsum rock and an emerging embodied-carbon standard round out the list. Details and citations in 327420.

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8. Consolidation

One of the more concentrated manufacturing industries the Census tracks — and the concentration statistics are this level's own:

• Top 4 firms = 84.1% of revenue; top 8 = 96.1%; top 20 = 98.8%; top 50 = 99.8% [4].
• Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) = 1,934.6 [4] — a single measure of market concentration (higher means more concentrated); this sits just under the 2,500 line the U.S. antitrust agencies treat as "highly concentrated," i.e., firmly in moderately-to-highly concentrated territory.

Even those numbers understate the picture, because the freight moat makes competition local: within a given region the effective choice is often two or three producers, not the national half-dozen. Two landmark deals drove the consolidation: Knauf's ~$7 billion acquisition of USG (2019) [10] and Saint-Gobain/CertainTeed's ~$1.4 billion acquisition of Continental Building Products (2020) [11]. The result is a mature oligopoly of large, deep-pocketed, mostly private owners competing on cost position — reserves, energy, freight, plant network, product mix — rather than price wars. See 327420.

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9. Risks

The risk set is the child's, now with figures attached:

• Housing cyclicality and mortgage-rate sensitivity — the biggest swing factor, as the 2024–25 volume decline showed [1][6].
• Shrinking synthetic-gypsum supply — flue-gas gypsum from coal plants was about 34% of U.S. supply in 2024 and is falling as plants retire [6]. Retirements slowed recently (2.6 gigawatts in 2025) [16], but the direction of travel forces a shift to mined and imported rock.
• Import dependence — net import reliance was ~15% of consumption in 2025, with crude-gypsum imports concentrated in Spain (~38%), Mexico (~30%), and Canada (~28%) over 2021–24 [6].
• Natural-gas price volatility in the energy-intensive calcining step [7][9].
• Overcapacity risk — with utilization near three-quarters, a demand shock pressures price rather than unit cost [1][6].
• Antitrust and litigation exposure given high concentration [14].
• Customer concentration and a consolidating channel — a risk the previous version of this page missed. Three customers were roughly 64% of Eagle's fiscal-2026 wallboard segment sales [9], and distribution has since consolidated into the big-box retailers: Home Depot's SRS acquired GMS [17], and Lowe's completed its $8.8 billion purchase of Foundation Building Materials in October 2025 [18].

The 327420 primer quantifies each.

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10. How to invest & outlook

Because 32742 equals 327420, the investment routes are identical. Public-market exposure is limited to Eagle Materials (NYSE: EXP) — the closest thing to a listed wallboard name, though majority cement/aggregates — and Saint-Gobain (Euronext Paris: SGO; U.S. OTC: CODYY), a diversified group that owns CertainTeed. There is no pure-play U.S. drywall stock. Most of the industry sits in private hands, reached through building-products private equity or the gypsum-mining/aggregates layer (feedstock-side). The distribution channel is no longer the clean back-door it was: with GMS inside Home Depot/SRS and Foundation Building Materials inside Lowe's, drywall distribution is now a small piece of two large retailers rather than a set of standalone listed proxies [17][18].

The forward judgment is an industry small in headcount, large in output, highly concentrated, and mostly private or foreign-owned — still earning strong margins (~38% at Eagle's wallboard segment, down from 41%) behind a freight moat, with fortunes riding on the U.S. housing and construction cycle and a structural raw-material transition (away from coal-derived gypsum) as the defining medium-term cost story. The question to watch is whether the consolidated field holds price through the current soft patch or lets utilization slack turn into competition. For the full analysis, cost math, and company detail, see the NAICS 327420 primer [19].

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Sources

1. U.S. Geological Survey. Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025: Gypsum, 2025. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-gypsum.pdf
2. Grand View Research. U.S. Gypsum Board Market Size & Outlook, 2030, 2024. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-gypsum-board-market-report
3. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 327420 (establishments, employment, payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
4. U.S. Census Bureau. 2022 Economic Census — Concentration Ratios & Selected Statistics, NAICS 327420 (receipts, firms, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
5. U.S. Small Business Administration. Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 327420 = 1,500 employees), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
6. U.S. Geological Survey. Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Gypsum, 2026. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-gypsum.pdf
7. Eagle Materials Inc. Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Results (Light Materials/Gypsum Wallboard segment), 2025. https://ir.eaglematerials.com/news-releases/news-release-details/eagle-materials-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025
8. Emergen Research. US Drywall & Gypsum Board Market Size, Growth Outlook 2034, 2024. https://www.emergenresearch.com/industry-report/us-drywall-gypsum-board-market
9. Eagle Materials Inc. Form 10-K, Fiscal Year 2026, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/918646/000119312526230979/exp-20260331.htm
10. USG Corporation / Knauf. Knauf Completes Acquisition of USG Corporation, 2019. https://www.usg.com/content/dam/USG_Marketing_Communications/united_states/product_promotional_materials/finished_assets/news/19-04-24-knauf-completes-aquisistion-of-usg.pdf
11. Saint-Gobain / CertainTeed. Saint-Gobain Completes Acquisition of Continental Building Products (~$1.4B), 2020. https://www.saint-gobain-northamerica.com/company/newsroom/news-releases/saint-gobain-moves-forward-acquisition-continental-building-products
12. Eagle Materials Inc. Form 10-Q, September 2025 (fixed-cost structure disclosure), 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/918646/000119312525258663/exp-20250930.htm
13. U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Construction, May 2026. https://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/current/
14. Top Class Actions. Drywall Price-Fixing Class Action Settlement (In re: Domestic Drywall Antitrust Litigation, MDL 2437), 2016. https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/drywall-price-fixing-class-action-settlement/
15. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Coal Combustion Residuals Reuse, accessed 2026. https://www.epa.gov/coal-combustion-residuals/coal-combustion-residuals-reuse
16. U.S. Energy Information Administration. 2025 Coal-Capacity Retirements, 2025. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67427
17. The Home Depot. Home Depot and Its Subsidiary SRS Distribution Complete Acquisition of GMS, 2025. https://corporate.homedepot.com/news/company/home-depot-and-its-subsidiary-srs-distribution-complete-acquisition-gms
18. Lowe's Companies Inc. Lowe's Completes Acquisition of Foundation Building Materials (SEC Form 8-K), October 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/60667/000006066725000199/exhibit991-10092025.htm
19. NAICS 327420 primer (Histometrics) — full leaf-level treatment of Gypsum Product Manufacturing (companies, cost stack, USGS mining/consumption data, regulation, and detailed sources).