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Otis makes, installs, and services elevators and escalators, and earns most of its money keeping those machines running.
Otis is the world's biggest elevator and escalator company. If you have ever ridden in a lift in an office tower, a hospital, or an airport, there is a decent chance Otis built it or maintains it. The company sells the machines themselves, installs them in new buildings, and then — this is the important part — services them for years afterward. It also modernizes old elevators, swapping out aging parts so a decades-old building can keep moving people safely.
The business has two big halves. The new equipment side makes and installs elevators and escalators, which is a competitive, somewhat cyclical business tied to construction activity. The service side maintains roughly two million units worldwide, and it is the crown jewel: customers pay recurring fees, often on multi-year contracts, and the work is steady regardless of whether new buildings are going up. That service backlog is enormous and gives Otis a reliable stream of revenue that the equipment business alone could never provide. Why do customers stick around? Safety and regulation. Elevators are inspected, licensed, and tightly regulated, and building owners do not want to gamble on cut-rate maintenance. Otis has a huge installed base, trained technicians, and a reputation built over more than a century — the company traces back to Elisha Otis, who in 1852 invented the safety brake that made passenger elevators trustworthy in the first place. Scale matters too: with millions of machines in the field, Otis can spread its technicians and parts network efficiently in a way smaller rivals cannot.
Otis was spun off from United Technologies and began trading as its own public company in 2020. It generates healthy free cash flow, which it uses to pay dividends and buy back shares — it has repurchased a meaningful chunk of its stock since the spinoff. The risks are real, though: new equipment orders depend on construction markets, especially in China, where a weak property sector has pressured demand. And the service business, while sticky, faces competition from independent providers and from the building owners themselves. Still, the core story is simple: the world keeps building upward, and someone has to keep all those elevators running.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026