Century Aluminum Company
CENX · Industrials · $4.6B mkt cap · FY2025 filings · · No moat ·
Doesn't clear the bar
The five investor questions
2021–2025 (latest 5 aligned FYs; v3 window cap 5): revenue $2.2B to $2.5B, increasing; diluted EPS -1.85 to 0.42, increasing.
Median gross margin 2.8% over 10y, variable.
Median ROIC -0.9%, above the 12% hurdle in 10% of years.
Net debt/EBITDA 1.7x, no material interest expense disclosed.
Owner earnings changed trend unclear over up to the ten most recent annual observations.
Price vs. value if growth stopped today
A cautious baseline, not a price target: what the shares may support if normalized owner earnings simply hold steady.
- Not reported
- Unavailable — insufficient owner-earnings data
- Unavailable — insufficient growth-model data
- $46.77
- No price data
This zero-growth estimate assumes trailing owner earnings persist — unreliable for declining businesses. The recent FY revenue series does not trigger the three-consecutive-declines flag.
Among the current top-score group, the median current price is 235% above the zero-growth estimate across 49 of the current top 50 companies by Moat Score with both values.
Score records captured Sep 7, 2026.
Exactly which 50 companies?
FTNT, META, MEDP, IBEX, MSFT, GOOG, LULU, ANF, IDXX, TXRH, FHI, QLYS, FFIV, ADBE, LLY, MANH, VEEV, RMD, GRMN, PCTY, EAT, UI, SSD, MNST, DOCS, LRCX, MCO, CPRT, NTAP, NVDA, CORT, SFM, MPTI, ULTA, SN, ROL, CTAS, PAYC, IRMD, INTU, DECK, MORN, JKHY, TPR, LGCY, DAL, GWW, ISRG, MPWR, LOPE
Missing a usable price or zero-growth estimate: ANF.
Model details under moat-index@3.0.0: zero-growth multiple 11.1×, capped-growth comparison at no more than 18×; 9% discount rate; high-end growth 0% (capped at 4%) using min(5y revenue CAGR, 5y diluted-EPS CAGR), clamped to 0%–4%; maintenance capex uses min(capex, D&A); abstain when D&A is unavailable. This is a disclosed model range, not intrinsic value as fact.
18 years of fundamentals
The business, in plain English
Century Aluminum Company booked $2.5B of revenue in FY2025 in the Industrials sector and kept 10.1% of it as gross profit — a thin-margin business by that measure. After every other cost, 1.7% of each revenue dollar reached the bottom line.
Across the filed record, revenue grew from $899M (FY2009) to $2.5B (FY2025) — about 6.7% a year compounded over 16 years.
It earned 13.0% on invested capital in the latest filed year, FY2025. Across the full 17-year measurable filed record, median ROIC was −0.5%. Over the v3 recent window (10 measurable filed years), median ROIC was −0.9%. The Returns on Capital filter above scores it 4/100.
The balance sheet carried $548M of total debt in FY2025 against $41.8M of owner earnings — roughly 13.1 years of owner earnings to retire it all. Balance-Sheet Safety scores it 77/100.
Put together: Balance-Sheet Safety is the strongest of the five filters (77/100) and Pricing Power the weakest (0/100), which is how CENX lands at 32/100 — a None moat.
This breakdown is generated from the filed numbers and sub-scores above — no outside narrative, no estimates. Where a filing doesn’t disclose an input, the sentence that would need it is omitted instead of guessed.
Exact FY and FY-1 financing invested-capital inputs are required.
The explained ROIC gaps have filed inputs but no meaningful positive invested-capital denominator. Other gaps mean the item is not in the filings for that year. The series is never interpolated or estimated. The Table view lists every filed value, including operating and net margins, total debt, and share count.
Visual explainers
The filing-backed explainer service is temporarily unavailable, so no partial or guessed chart is shown.
Moat Score history
Breaks in the line mark methodology or normalizer upgrades — readings across versions aren’t compared, so a level shift there isn’t a change in the business.
Tier changesSame-methodology and same-normalizer crossings of the Wide / Narrow / Shallow bars
- Normalizer upgraded unstamped (version unknown)tomoat-xbrl-normalizer@1.1.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 26, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@2.0.0tomoat-index@3.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 23, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@1.2.0tomoat-index@2.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 20, 2026
Scores are logged append-only and never overwritten — this record cannot be reconstructed retroactively, which is exactly why it’s worth keeping.
Insider activity
Form 4 reports mix P/S market or private transactions with compensation-plan mechanics. Activity casually described as “insider selling” can include compensation mechanics; awards, tax withholding, and option exercises are shown by their exact filed class here, never collapsed into “Bought” or “Sold.”
These are disclosed filing facts and arithmetic aggregates, not a signal or verdict.
This machine-readable surface covers SEC ownership filings from 2003; it does not represent earlier paper-era records.
Records still being gathered — partial as of retrieval Sep 11, 2026.
67 filings were skipped because the SEC primary document returned 404; the omission is disclosed and aggregates are withheld.
Trailing-12-month totals and the 90-day cluster result are withheld because this issuer walk is incomplete.
No reported Form 4 rows were captured for CENX; the incomplete walk cannot establish zero activity, zero counts, or a negative cluster result.
A filing source-event date will appear when a Form 4 row is captured.
Retrieved .
Track record
How Century Aluminum Company’s moat rated in each of the years we can reconstruct from its filings — scored only on what was knowable at the time — and what its price and returns did afterward. The score never saw a price; the two are joined only in hindsight, for education, not as a signal.
How to read this: each dot is what the engine would have scored CENX on that December 31; the line below is its total-return price path (dividends reinvested) in the years since.
Two tracks, one timeline: the score has its own 0–100 scale (top), the price its own 100-based scale (bottom) — never a shared axis. The price path is a total-return (dividends reinvested) index built from the same data the forward returns use; gaps in the score line are years with no reconstructed rating (see the table for why). The Table view carries every value.
What followed, in the years it rated Wide
In the reconstructed history shown, CENX did not rate Wide-moat in any year, so there is no wide-moat track record to report. That absence is itself the honest answer — we don’t manufacture a comparison where the rating never earned one.
Industrials context
#325 of 447 scored Industrials companies, ranked by Moat Score.
Nearest peers by Moat Score
- #323ASLE AerSale Corporation32.5 out of 100, No moatNo moat
- #324TRNR INTERACTIVE STRENGTH INC.32.5 out of 100, No moatNo moat
- #326GWAV GREENWAVE TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS, INC.32.0 out of 100, No moatNo moat
- #327ZEO Zeo Energy Corp.32.0 out of 100, No moatNo moat
Compare CENX with its nearest peers →All Industrials companies on the Index →
Common questions about CENX
- Does Century Aluminum Company have an economic moat?
- Based on its FY2025 SEC filings, the Moat Index scores Century Aluminum Company (CENX) 32.3 out of 100 — below the Shallow-moat bar, so no moat. The five questions behind that score begin at 20% each; if exactly one genuinely lacks data, the other four weights are renormalized and disclosed. revenue and EPS trend 57, pricing power 0, returns on capital 4, balance-sheet safety 77, capital allocation 24.
- How has CENX's Moat Score changed over time?
- The record logs 18 readings since Jul 17, 2026; the latest reads 32.3 out of 100 (no moat). No tier changes on record yet. (Methodology or normalizer upgrades on Jul 20, 2026, Jul 23, 2026, Jul 26, 2026 re-based the score; readings across versions aren't compared.) The history is append-only — readings are only ever added, never rewritten.