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Mohawk Industries makes and sells flooring for homes and businesses, including carpet, tile, wood, and vinyl.
Mohawk Industries is the biggest flooring company in the world. It makes the stuff under your feet — carpet, ceramic tile, wood planks, vinyl, and stone floors — and sells it to people building or fixing up homes, to stores that resell it, and to businesses putting floors in offices, hotels, and shops. You probably walk on its work without knowing it.
The company runs three main parts, spread across different regions. Its North American flooring business sells carpet and vinyl through retailers and builders, and it owns well-known brands like Mohawk and Karastan. A second part makes ceramic and stone tile, mostly in Mexico, Brazil, and Europe, sold under names like Dal-Tile and Marazzi. A third part covers the rest of the world, selling flooring in Europe, Russia, and Australia. Wall-to-wall carpet, its original product, is now slow-growing in the US; the growth has shifted toward hard surfaces like tile and vinyl, which buyers increasingly prefer. Flooring is a tough, unglamorous business. Customers are price-sensitive, and the industry swung hard during the housing crash of 2008, when new home construction collapsed and Mohawk's sales fell with it. The company also faces a squeeze today: slow housing markets, cautious consumers, and cheap imported flooring from Asia have pressured prices. To defend itself, Mohawk has spent heavily buying rivals like the Italian tile maker Marazzi and the Belgian flooring company Unilin, which also gave it valuable patents on click-together flooring. Scale helps — being the biggest means it can spread factory and shipping costs across more product than smaller rivals can.
Mohawk is a cash machine when housing is healthy. It uses that cash to pay a dividend and buy back its own shares, and it has spent billions over the years acquiring companies rather than just building new factories. That strategy made it a global giant, but it also loaded the company with debt and left it exposed to whatever region is struggling at any given moment. The simple bet behind the stock: people will always need floors, and the biggest, lowest-cost maker usually wins. The risk: when housing stalls, even the biggest floor maker feels it.
Saved answer · last researched 22 Oct 2026