PPG Industries, Inc.

PPG Industries, Inc. is a global manufacturer and supplier of paints, coatings, and specialty materials, generating $15.9 billion in net sales in fiscal 2025 across operations in more than 50 countries. Originally founded as the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in 1883, PPG has spent the past century-plus pivoting from glass to coatings, building one of the broadest and most geographically distributed portfolios in the industry. It competes everywhere that surfaces need protecting or beautifying: commercial airliners and cargo ships, passenger cars on both the OEM line and in the body shop, beverage cans, bridges, kitchen appliances, and the walls of homes from Mexico City to Helsinki.

This is a story about breadth as both strength and weight. PPG's three segments — Performance Coatings, Industrial Coatings, and Global Architectural Coatings — span aftermarket and OEM, developed and emerging markets, consumer and industrial end uses. That diversification provides stability; no single end market or region can sink the ship. But it also makes the company a leveraged bet on global industrial activity at a moment when tariffs, geopolitical disruption, and uneven regional growth make that a complicated wager. The file turns on whether the businesses PPG has chosen to bet on — aerospace, packaging, Latin American architectural, and automotive refinish recovery — can outgrow the drag from the ones it cannot control, especially European architectural and global industrial production.

PPG is also a capital-allocation story of unusual consistency: 54 consecutive annual dividend increases, 126 years of uninterrupted payments, and $790 million in share repurchases in FY2025 alone. The question for an investor is whether the current valuation — roughly 16 times trailing earnings and 11 times trailing EBITDA — adequately compensates for the cyclical exposure embedded in two-thirds of the portfolio, or whether the restructuring and self-help momentum underway since late 2024 is being underappreciated.