On the desk today · Pool Corporation
The pool costs $50,000. The chlorine costs forever.
| NASDAQ · POOL |
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The Chlorine
Never Stops
There are roughly 5.5 million in-ground swimming pools in the United States. Every single one needs chemicals every week. Not sometimes. Not seasonally. Every week — chlorine, stabilizer, pH balance, algaecide. Skip a week and the water turns green. Skip two and you have a swamp. Nobody builds a $50,000 pool and lets it become a swamp. So the chemicals get bought. The pump filters get replaced. The heater breaks and a new one goes in. The pool is the razor. Everything that keeps it running is the blade. And one company in Covington, Louisiana, distributes more of those blades than anyone else on Earth.
I was at a neighbor's house last summer. His pool had just been resurfaced — new tile, new plaster, a salt chlorine generator. He told me the remodel cost $35,000. I asked him what he spent on chemicals last year. He shrugged. "Maybe six or seven hundred? I don't really think about it." That's the business. The big expense gets your attention. The small one runs on autopilot — forever.
Pool Corporation is not a pool builder. It doesn't install anything. It doesn't own a single swimming pool. It is the middleman — the largest wholesale distributor of pool supplies, equipment, and chemicals in the world. It ships chlorine, pumps, filters, heaters, tile, and plumbing to roughly 125,000 contractors, retailers, and service companies who do the actual work. If you've ever had a pool cleaned, resurfaced, or repaired, the parts almost certainly passed through a Pool Corp warehouse.
Frank St. Romain founded the company in 1980 as South Central Pool Supply, a one-location wholesale house in Metairie, Louisiana. For a dozen years, he opened one new location every year or two. In 1993, a private equity firm bought the business and started scaling it. The company went public in 1995 under the ticker POOL. Manuel Perez de la Mesa took over as CEO in 2001 and ran it for nearly 20 years. Under his leadership, one location became 450.
In 2025, Pool Corp reported $5.3 billion in revenue. That number was flat — new pool construction fell to about 58,000 units, down 40% from the pandemic peak. But the maintenance business held firm. And that's the point. Roughly 64% of all pool product sales came from maintenance items — chemicals, replacement parts, repair equipment. Non-discretionary. You don't choose whether to treat the water. You treat it or the pool dies.
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That 5.5 million number is the installed base — and the installed base is the moat. Every pool that has ever been dug in America still needs chemicals today. It needed them yesterday. It will need them tomorrow. The pool doesn't care about interest rates or tariffs or consumer confidence. Green water is green water. And the contractor who treats it orders from Pool Corp because Pool Corp has 450 locations, 200,000 products, and next-day delivery. Nobody else comes close.
The pricing power runs through the supply chain. Pool Corp carries products from hundreds of manufacturers. When a chemical company raises prices 3% — and they do, every year — Pool Corp passes the increase through to its customers. The contractor, in turn, passes it to the homeowner. A pool owner doesn't cancel the service over a $20 increase on a $700 annual bill. The price goes up. Everyone pays. Nobody switches.
I keep thinking about what Manny Perez de la Mesa said when he described the early years. "Virtually all the earnings and whatever could be borrowed was used to fund the growth." That was the 1980s and '90s. One location became ten. Ten became fifty. Fifty became 450. Perez de la Mesa ran the company for nearly two decades. During that time, Pool Corp's stock became one of the best-performing names on the NASDAQ — quietly, without fanfare, in a business most investors considered boring. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway noticed. Berkshire built an 8.3% stake worth roughly $650 million. Then, in the first quarter of 2026, Berkshire sold it all. The pools didn't notice. The chlorine still shipped.
The flywheel runs in two directions. First, every new pool built adds a permanent customer to the maintenance stream. That's 58,000 new pools a year — even in a weak market. Second, every existing pool ages. Older pools need more repairs, more equipment upgrades, more resurfacing. The installed base doesn't just generate recurring revenue — it generates increasing revenue as the pool gets older. You never stop spending. You just spend more.
WHY THIS WORKS
Maintenance is non-discretionary. You treat the water or you lose the pool. Sixty-four percent of revenue comes from products the homeowner has no choice about — chemicals, filters, repair parts.
The installed base only grows. Pools don't get unbuilt. Every pool dug since 1950 still needs chemicals right now. New construction adds 58,000 permanent customers a year — even in a down cycle.
Distribution scale is the moat. Four hundred fifty locations. Two hundred thousand products. Next-day delivery to 125,000 contractors. No competitor has that network. Switching costs are logistical, not contractual.
Aging pools spend more. An older pool needs resurfacing, equipment replacement, and technology upgrades. The revenue per pool increases as the installed base ages — a second growth engine inside the first.
What most people miss: Pool Corp doesn't build pools or clean them. It ships the chlorine, the filters, and the pumps to the people who do. There are 5.5 million in-ground pools in America. Every one of them needs chemicals right now. It's a $5.3 billion business built on the fact that green water is not optional — and no one delivers the fix faster than the company in Covington, Louisiana.
