TacticScaleWhat Westlake Does & How It Makes Money (WLK)
Updated October 2026 · reflects Westlake's latest reported financials
Houston-based maker of PVC, chemicals, and home building products. Westlake earns money by selling commodity and specialty chemicals and resins to industrial customers, and by selling finished PVC-based building and infrastructure products to contractors, distributors, and municipalities.
How Westlake makes money
Westlake earns money by selling commodity and specialty chemicals and resins to industrial customers, and by selling finished PVC-based building and infrastructure products to contractors, distributors, and municipalities. Its own chemical production supplies the raw PVC that its building products business uses.
What Westlake does
Westlake Corporation, founded in 1986 and based in Houston, Texas, runs two businesses. Its Performance and Essential Materials segment produces ethylene, polyethylene, chlor-alkali, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride monomer, PVC, and epoxy resins. These materials go into packaging, automotive and healthcare products, water treatment, wind turbines, and coatings. The Housing and Infrastructure Products segment makes finished goods, mainly from PVC: residential siding, trim and mouldings, windows, decking, stone veneer, polymer composite and cement roof tiles, pipes and fittings, and PVC compounds. It also sells smaller consumer and commercial lines such as landscape edging and matting. Because the company makes its own PVC, it covers the chain from raw chemicals to building products. Westlake sells in the U.S., Canada, Europe, China, Latin America, and other markets. It changed its name from Westlake Chemical in 2022 and is a subsidiary of TTWF LP.
Products & services
- PVC resin and vinyl chloride monomer
- Ethylene and polyethylene
- Chlor-alkali and chlorinated derivatives
- Epoxy specialty resins
- PVC siding, trim, windows and decking
- PVC pipes and fittings
What is Westlake worth?
On an owner-earnings DCF, Westlake's most-likely value is about $13 versus a recent price near $62 (79% above fair value). But TacticScale only calls a stock undervalued when the price sits below its conservative no-growth floor (~$9) with a margin of safety — so the honest verdict here is “Stretched — richly priced.” Fair value earns its keep only at the extremes, not in the wide middle.
Today's $62 is above even the optimistic Bull case ($16) — the market expects faster, longer growth than modeled here. Expensive unless that extra growth actually shows up.
⚠ High leverage — net debt is 29.7× annual cash flow. Net debt is subtracted from this fair value, but refinancing at higher rates, principal timing, and share dilution aren’t modeled — the equity can be worth far less if cash flow weakens.
Analysis, not advice. Fair value is a margin-of-safety estimate from a deterministic owner-earnings DCF, not a price target or recommendation. See the full breakdown →
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