For two years the materials cost story has been tariffs. Amrize just told the market it’s fuel.
North America’s largest cement producer reported second-quarter results on August 6 with revenue up 8.6% year over year, organic growth of 6.7%, net income up 14.4% to $476 million, and adjusted EBITDA up 5.8% to $986 million. Then it raised full-year revenue guidance to $12.5 billion to $12.7 billion and cut adjusted EBITDA guidance to $3.1 billion to $3.2 billion.
Revenue up, margin down
That split is the signal. Amrize can sell more, and it is telling shareholders it cannot fully protect the margin on what it sells, because oil-price-driven inflation is pushing up freight, diesel and raw material costs faster than pricing is recovering them.
“We delivered strong revenue growth of 8.6% in the second quarter driven by increased mega-project demand from data centers and energy to advanced manufacturing plants and infrastructure modernization,” said chairman and CEO Jan Jenisch. “Oil price driven cost inflation drove higher freight, diesel and raw materials costs, which we are proactively managing with pricing, fuel surcharges and ASPIRE.” ASPIRE is the company’s internal cost program, targeting $80 million of savings this year.
The pricing call is the tell
Amrize now expects cement pricing flat to up low single digits for the full year, with aggregates pricing up mid single digits on a freight-adjusted basis. That’s a downgrade on cement, and it’s more interesting than the EBITDA number.
Cement pricing power softening while data center and power megaprojects are booming means the demand strength is narrow. It fits the pattern showing up everywhere else in the data: one vertical carrying the aggregate, and ordinary commercial and institutional work underneath it going sideways.
What buyers should expect in the second half
Fuel surcharges and mid-year price letters are the mechanism by which this reaches a GC. If your ready-mix and aggregate supply agreements were priced on spring 2026 assumptions, the surcharge language in them is about to matter.
The exposure is worst on long-haul aggregate and on jobs with large single-pour volumes where a delivery-radius premium compounds. Heavy civil work sitting on a river or in a canyon, from the $1.15 billion Brandon Road Interbasin Project on the Illinois Waterway to mountain-corridor highway work, is the profile where freight is a material share of delivered cost rather than a rounding error.
Amrize also put $241 million into capex in the quarter against roughly $900 million guided for the year, and returned $502 million to shareholders, including $197 million of buybacks under a new $1 billion program. Acquisitions contributed too: PB Materials in West Texas aggregates and July’s purchase of Rapid Redi-Mix in Dallas-Fort Worth. The company runs about 19,000 employees across North America.
Contractors bidding second-half work on spring material assumptions should reprice. Suppliers just told them the assumptions changed.