Copart, Inc.

Copart, Inc. is an American online vehicle auction company that provides salvage and used-vehicle remarketing services to insurance carriers, rental car companies, financial institutions, and dealers worldwide, generating $4.65 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Founded in 1982 and operating the first online-only salvage auction platform since 2003, Copart today runs auctions across more than 160 countries with over 300,000 registered members, handling roughly 3 million vehicles annually through a network of more than 200 facilities.

This is a story about a marketplace that has spent four decades building a moat the insurance industry cannot easily bypass. Copart's competitive advantage rests on a simple flywheel: deeper auction liquidity drives higher selling prices for its insurance consignors, which in turn attracts more volume, which draws more international buyers, which pushes prices higher still. The question the file turns on is whether the near-term headwinds that have compressed unit volumes—an insurance consumer retrenchment cycle, shifts in carrier market share, and a temporary lull in total loss frequency growth—represent a pause in a durable compounder or a signal that the flywheel is losing momentum.

The market currently values Copart at roughly $31 billion, or approximately 20 times trailing earnings and 14 times trailing EBITDA. Those multiples have compressed from pandemic-era highs above 35 times earnings, reflecting both the earnings growth the company has delivered and genuine debate about the trajectory of its addressable market. The analysis that follows does not resolve that debate; it maps the terrain so a colleague can make their own call.