Miscellaneous merchant wholesalers

A scrap yard buys at a price set by global commodity markets and sells into the same, holding inventory through the swing — a leveraged commodity position wearing a waste-management costume. Environmental permitting of the site is the real barrier and the real asset. What this screen adds is the arithmetic of the one North American processor that had to publish it. Radius Recycling — 54 metal recycling facilities across 25 US states, Puerto Rico and Western Canada — earned US$168.8M of net income in fiscal 2022, then lost US$25.8M and US$266.4M in the two years that followed, on revenue that fell only 5%, from US$2,882M to US$2,739M [A]. Revenue barely moved and the result swung by US$435M, because the margin is the gap between two prices the yard does not set, and the metal on the ground is long that spread whether the owner wants to be or not. Toyota Tsusho then took the company private at US$30.00 a share in cash [A] — a strategic buying tonnage for its own supply chain rather than an investor buying earnings, because there were none to buy. A Canadian entrant would be holding the same position with a fraction of that balance sheet and no mill behind it. Volumes are structurally exposed on top of that to whether export markets stay open to mixed material, which no operator controls. What the independents have instead is local feedstock and a permit: 876 of the 1,405 Canadian yards have fewer than ten employees, and they survive on the scrap that physically comes to them.

Boxes, films, towels, cups and copy paper delivered to factories, offices and restaurants from a regional warehouse. It is reachable: a lease, two trucks and a manufacturer willing to sell to you, and 381 of the 918 Canadian establishments have fewer than five people. The group is real money — $14.9B of Canadian operating revenue in 2023 at a 7.5% pre-tax margin, though down 4.1% on the year [A]. The cut is that nothing the distributor sells is its own. Veritiv, the last big listed distributor in this trade, reported $7.15B of net sales and a record 7.2% adjusted EBITDA margin in 2022, and within months accepted a take-private at $170 a share, about $2.6B [A] — roughly five times that record year's adjusted EBITDA, which is the market's own statement of how durable it thinks the spread is. It had already sold its Canadian business in May 2022 [A]. The margin in this trade is a purchasing rebate earned by volume and handed partly back to the customer in contract bids; the entrant buys the same case of towels at a worse price and sells it to a buyer who puts the contract out again next year. The customer's switching cost is one phone call. What builds a position is density — more drops per route in one city — and that is precisely the asset the private-equity roll-ups are paying to assemble, branch by branch. A small distributor in this group is best understood as an acquisition target, not an entry strategy; the honest way in is to buy an existing route book, where the scrap-yard record next door (4181) turns on a site permit rather than a customer list. The distribution software sold to this trade is screened separately.

Seed, feed, crop protection and fertiliser sold to farms from a rural branch. The size-band shape is unlike the rest of wholesale: only 365 of 1,361 establishments have fewer than five staff, and the typical unit is a ten-to-fifty-person branch in Saskatchewan, Alberta or rural Ontario. The group is large and violently cyclical — $35.6B of Canadian operating revenue in 2021, $53.3B in 2022, $46.1B in 2023, at a 5% pre-tax margin with cost of goods at 91% of expenses [A]. The 411 grain-handling record already makes the capital argument, spring credit against an autumn harvest, and it applies here. This record adds who the entrant would be selling against. Nutrien's Retail segment reported $17.6B of sales, $4.6B of gross margin and $1.74B of adjusted EBITDA in 2025; of that gross margin, $1.10B — 24% — came from proprietary products and another $376M from Nutrien Financial [A]. The largest retailer is owned by the manufacturer of the fertiliser it sells, earns a quarter of its margin on house brands an independent cannot stock, and earns more again by lending the farmer the money. The other incumbent type on the Prairies is the co-operative, where the customer owns the competitor and takes the margin back as patronage. An independent sells the same glyphosate and the same urea to a farmer who prices every tonne across three dealers. What is left to it is agronomic service and a relationship, which is a real business for an existing family dealer and no basis for a new one. The distribution software sold to this trade is screened separately.

The most profitable group in this part of wholesale, and the screen should say so first: $21.8B of Canadian operating revenue in 2023 at an 11.2% pre-tax margin, the margin having risen while revenue fell 9.9% [A]. There is a transaction to match. Univar Solutions was taken private at an enterprise value of about $8.1B in 2023 after a year of $11.5B of sales and $1,046M of adjusted EBITDA; its Canadian segment alone did $1,120.5M of sales and $119.7M of adjusted EBITDA [A]. Distributors earn that margin because they do something the producer will not: break bulk, blend, repackage, store and deliver hazardous product in small lots with the paperwork correct. That service is the entry cost. Before the first sale a bulk distributor needs a permitted site with tank storage and containment, a dangerous-goods fleet and trained drivers, environmental liability cover, and a producer's authorisation to carry the line — and the producers appoint few distributors per region on purpose. None of it can be staged: a half-permitted tank farm sells nothing. The incumbent's sites are decades old, often grandfathered into locations that would not be zoned today, and the liability history attached to them is a reason buyers acquire rather than build. This is not a clean kill for the whole group. 565 of the 1,290 establishments have fewer than five people, and those are not tank farms: they are specialty resellers and agents carrying a principal's ingredients in drums and bags to a niche of formulators. A full study would have to test whether a principal-backed specialty line, held under contract, is reachable without the site — and how long the principal lets it stay independent once it works. The distribution software sold to this trade is screened separately.

Eighty-five establishments in the whole country, fifty of them with fewer than five people, dealing in bullion, concentrates and rough stones between mines, mints, refiners and dealers. The counterparties are few and findable, and nothing physical has to be built. The cut is the arithmetic of the one listed wholesaler. Gold.com, whose wholesale platform still trades as A-Mark Precious Metals, reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $25.5B and gross profit of $453M — a 1.78% gross margin, down from 1.92% [A]. To earn that it held $2.36B of inventories at year end, $798M of it restricted under financing arrangements, against $318M of derivative assets carried to hedge the position [A]. A wholesaler in metal is paid a sliver of a very large notional, and the sliver only exists if the metal is on hand when the customer wants it. Every ounce in the vault is financed and hedged, and the spread has to cover both before anyone is paid. The incumbent's edge is its cost of borrowing metal and money, plus standing with the mints — A-Mark has been an authorised purchaser of the US Mint since 1986 [A]. An entrant with ordinary resources can finance a small book, on which 1.78% is a small number, or run unhedged, which is speculation rather than wholesaling. The ore-and-concentrate side is larger still in ticket size and is run by global trading houses against offtake finance; it was not separately examined. The scrap-yard record (4181) describes a leveraged commodity position anchored to a permitted site; here there is no site at all — only the balance sheet.

A log broker stands between whoever holds cutting rights and whoever needs fibre: sorting booms for coastal sawmills, placing pulp logs and chips, assembling export parcels for Asia. Little capital beyond a working line, and knowledge that really is scarce. It is a tiny trade — 82 establishments in Canada, 62 with fewer than ten people, 27 in British Columbia — and the cut is that the pool it trades from has shrunk by nearly a quarter since 2020. British Columbia's own permit report shows the provincial harvest falling from 52.8 million m³ in 2020 to 40.6 million m³ in 2024, a drop of 23% in four years [A]. Export permits held up at 2.89 million m³ in 2024, 7.1% of harvest, with 56% going to China and 79% of the volume from the Coast [A] — which means the visible brokerage business is one region's surplus sold largely into one country's construction cycle, under a permit regime the province can tighten whenever domestic mills are short of logs — and a falling harvest is what makes them short. When harvest falls, integrated companies keep their fibre for their own mills and swap the remainder among themselves; the open-market volume a broker lives on contracts faster than the harvest does. A broker owns no tenure and no mill, so it has no claim on supply when supply is what is scarce. The relationships that make the trade work — with tenure holders, First Nations licensees, tow-boat operators, scalers — are held by people who have been on the water for thirty years, and the incumbents are not selling them. The subsector's scrap-yard record (4181) has a permitted site as its asset; a log broker's only asset is access, in a market holding a quarter less wood than it did five years ago. The distribution software sold to wholesalers is screened separately.

A residual: second-hand goods other than machinery and vehicles (41893), and 'all other' merchant wholesalers (41899) — a list that runs from used clothing graders to whatever did not fit any other wholesale industry. The residual cannot be screened as one market, and its published total shows why: Canadian operating revenue for the group reads $33.6B in 2021, $18.8B in 2022 and $17.3B in 2023 [A], a halving that the source does not explain and that probably says more about what is filed here than about any trade. This record screens the one nameable niche, second-hand goods, and leaves the rest unexamined. The niche is reachable — a warehouse, a baler, a sorting table — and the federal small-business benchmark shows what it pays: 161 businesses with revenue between $30K and $5M, averaging $476K of revenue and $33K of net profit; even the top quartile averages $1.6M of revenue and $67K of profit [A]. That is a wage, not a return. The mechanism is visible in the same table: cost of sales takes 70% of revenue, because the feedstock is bought by the pound from the charities and collectors who control donation streams, and the sorted output is sold by the pound into export markets that set the price. The wholesaler adds sorting labour between two price-takers' prices. The scrap-yard record next door (4181) describes the same squeeze with a permitted site as the asset; here there is not even that. Anything else attractive inside 4189 needs its own record. The distribution software sold to wholesalers is screened separately.