RELIANCE INC

Reliance operates a network of companies providing diversified metal solutions and is the largest metals service center company in North America (U.S. and Canada) based on revenues, with 2024 net sales of $13.84 billion.

This is our 85th anniversary as a business since our original organization on February 3, 1939, operating a single metals service center in Los Angeles, California fabricating steel reinforcing bar. In February 2024, we changed our corporate name to Reliance, Inc. from Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co. Our common stock has traded on the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) for 30 years under the symbol “RS” since our September 16, 1994 initial public offering.

We believe we have a unique and sustainable business model predicated on the following key attributes:

As of December 31, 2024, we operated through a network of 320 locations in 41 U.S. states and 10 foreign countries. We distribute a full line of over 100,000 metal products, including alloy, aluminum, brass, copper, carbon steel, stainless steel, titanium and other specialty steel products.

We service more than 125,000 customers in a variety of industries, including consumer products, general manufacturing, non-residential construction (including infrastructure and renewable energy), transportation (rail, truck trailer and shipbuilding), aerospace (commercial, military, defense and space), energy (oil and natural gas), electronics and semiconductor fabrication, industrial machinery and heavy industry (agricultural, construction and mining equipment). We also service the auto industry, primarily through our toll processing operations where we process customer-owned metal for a fee.

We believe that our diversification by product, end market and geography help mitigate volatility in metals pricing and changing end market conditions. We are not dependent on any particular customer or industry because we process and distribute a broad variety of metals. This diversity of product type and material reduces our exposure to fluctuations or other weaknesses in the financial stability of particular customers or industries. We are also less dependent on any particular suppliers as a result of our product diversification. We believe our diversification strategy has contributed to our ability to remain profitable in every year since our initial public offering in 1994, even during recessions and a global pandemic. In 2024, we grew our total and same-store tons sold, outperforming the decline in metals service center industry shipments as reported by the Metals Service Center Institute (“MSCI”). We believe this performance was supported in part by our diversification strategy.

We believe that our focus on small order sizes and customer service, including inventory availability and quick turnaround, earns customer loyalty, and, along with our growth and diversification strategy, has been instrumental in our ability to produce industry-leading operating results. During the past five years, we delivered approximately 40% of our orders within 24 hours and had a high level of customer retention with over 95% of our sales orders received from repeat customers.

We provide a wide variety of processing services to meet our customers’ specifications and deliver products to fabricators, manufacturers and other end users. We believe that few other metals service centers offer the breadth of processing services and metals that we provide. Our primary processing services range from cutting, leveling or sawing to more complex processes such as machining or electropolishing. We typically stock standard size and grade metal products that can be processed into many different sizes to meet the needs of many different customers, and we generally only process specific metals to non-standard sizes pursuant to customer purchase order specifications.

Over the past several years, we have increased the amount of value-added processing services we provide through acquisitions and significant investments in new equipment. We believe expanding our value-added capabilities (including toll processing) and increasing the percentage of our total sales represented by the higher margin orders

generated from those expanded capabilities helps reduce volatility in our profitability during periods of unfavorable metals demand and/or pricing.

According to the MSCI reporting of industry tons sold in the U.S., our 2024 tons sold from our U.S. locations represented approximately 15% of the total tons sold by the U.S. metals service center industry compared to approximately 14% for 2023. We believe our relatively low market share in the highly fragmented metals service center industry leaves significant opportunity for further strategic growth.

We primarily operate in the spot market for both the purchase and sale of our products. We believe we have the ability to quickly adjust our selling prices in response to increases in our raw material costs in order to maintain consistency in our gross profit margin as only a small portion of our business is subject to long-term contractual pricing arrangements.

We strategically source the vast majority of our metal purchases from domestic producers and believe we are one of the largest customers of the North American primary metals producers (“mills”). We believe that our significant scale and long-standing relationships with our mill suppliers enable significant purchasing power and product availability in all market conditions and promote effective management of our inventories.

We promote collaboration across our operations and encourage our businesses to work together to leverage the larger Reliance resources and capabilities to pursue and grow commercial and sales opportunities, better manage inventories, provide career advancement opportunities for our employees, and share best practices.

Our business is relationship-based, and we operate under the following trade names:

We have one operating and reportable segment*—metals service centers*. Further information about our reportable segment, including geographic information, appears inNote 19—“Segment Information” to our consolidated financial statements in Part II, Item 8 “Financial Statements and Supplementary Data.”

Industry Overview

Metals service centers acquire carbon steel, aluminum, stainless and alloy steel and other metal products from mills and then process and distribute these materials to meet customer specifications.

Customers purchase metal products from metals service centers for a variety of reasons, including the ability to obtain value-added metals processing services, readily available inventory, reliable and timely delivery, flexible minimum order size, and quality control. Many customers deal exclusively with service centers because the quantities of metal products that they purchase are smaller than the minimum order sizes specified by mills or because those customers require intermittent deliveries over long or irregular periods. Metals service centers respond to a niche market created because of the focus on as-needed inventory management and materials management outsourcing in the capital goods and related industries. In general, metals service center customers have placed increased emphasis on carrying lower amounts of inventory, especially during declining price environments.

The processing services we provide save our customers time, labor, and expense, reducing their overall manufacturing costs. Specialized metals processing equipment requires high utilization to be cost effective. We believe many manufacturers and their suppliers are not able or willing to invest in the necessary technology, equipment, and warehousing of inventory to perform efficient and effective metal processing at their own operations. Accordingly, we believe industry dynamics have created a niche in the market for metals service centers. We believe that metals service centers purchase, process and deliver metals to end-users in a more efficient and cost-effective manner than the end-user could achieve by dealing directly with the mill.

The measurement of our market share based on the shipment levels of the metals service center industry published by the MSCI, which does not also publish estimated industry revenues, was about 15% in 2024. We believe our relatively low market share, based on the reported shipment levels for the metals service center industry, provides us significant opportunity for growth.

We believe that metals service centers are generally less susceptible to market cycles than metals producers because service centers are generally able to pass on all or a portion of increases in metal costs to their customers. As we have limited long-term contractual business and focus on rapid inventory turnover, we believe that we are generally less vulnerable to changing metals prices than metals producers. However, fluctuations in metals pricing have a significant impact on our revenue and profit.

Operational Strategy

Our primary business strategy is to provide the highest levels of quality and service to our customers in the safest, most efficient operational manner, allowing us to maximize our financial results. The core tenets of our differentiated approach include:

Growth Strategy

Our growth strategy is based on increasing our operating results through organic growth activities and strategic acquisitions that enhance our product, customer and geographic diversification. We believe our focused growth strategy and high level of value-added services we provide our customers makes us less vulnerable to regional or industry-specific economic volatility and somewhat lessens the negative impact of volatility experienced in commodity pricing and market cyclicality, and general economic trends.

We expect to continue growing our business through acquisitions and internal growth initiatives, particularly those that diversify our product mix, customer base and geographic locations and increase our sales of high-margin specialty products and value-added processing services.

Sales and Marketing

Sales personnel are organized by division or subsidiary and are divided into two groups. Outside sales personnel travel throughout a specified geographic territory and maintain relationships with our existing customers and develop new customers. Inside sales personnel remain at the facilities to price and write orders. Outside sales personnel generally receive incentive compensation based on the gross profit from their particular geographic territories. Inside sales personnel generally receive incentive compensation based on the gross profit and/or pretax income of their particular location.

We endeavor to acquire well-run businesses with strong customer relationships and solid reputations within the marketplace. Because of this, we often find value in acquired trade names and generally continue to go to market under the acquired businesses’ names and maintain their customer relationships.

Customers

Although we have many large original equipment manufacturer customers, most of our sales are to small machine shops and fabricators, in small quantities with frequent and often just-in-time deliveries, ensuring as-needed logistics and helping them manage their working capital and credit needs more efficiently. Our metals service centers wrote and delivered over 4.6 million orders during 2024 or an average of 18,370 per day, with an average price of approximately $2,980 per order. Most of our metals service center customers are located within 200 miles of the Reliance location supporting them. The proximity of our service centers to our customers helps reduce total road miles and carbon emissions and promote efficient routing and quick delivery. Our fleet of approximately 1,800 trucks (some of which are leased) delivered the majority of our 2024 sales orders. We believe that our fleet enhances our ability to service many smaller customers and provide quick turnaround deliveries with approximately 40% of our orders delivered within 24 hours. We believe that maintaining our own fleet of trucks and drivers provides a competitive advantage as there has been a shortage of qualified drivers and third-party freight costs have been at elevated levels in recent years. Moreover, our order entry systems and flexible production scheduling enable us to meet customer requirements for short lead times and quick delivery. We believe providing high levels of customer service and maintaining long-term relationships with our customers significantly contributes to our success. In the past five years, over 95% of the sales orders we serviced were from repeat customers, which we believe demonstrates the high level of customer satisfaction and loyalty our businesses earn. Our provision of reliable, prompt and efficient services and quality products at reasonable prices are important factors in maintaining and expanding these relationships.

We have built and opened international locations to service specific industries, typically making limited investments to support existing key U.S. customers that also operate in those international markets. Accordingly, our exposure to risks associated with such investments is minimal. Sales from our foreign operations were approximately seven percent of our net sales for the year ended December 31, 2024, or $901.1 million. However, sales to international customers (based on the shipping destination) were approximately nine percent of our consolidated 2024 net sales, or $1.25 billion, with approximately 25%, or $312.8 million of such international sales, to Canadian customers.

Customer demand changes from time to time based on, among other things, general economic conditions and industry capacity. Many of the industries in which our customers operate are cyclical in nature. Because we sell to a wide variety of customers in a wide variety of industries, we believe that we are able to somewhat mitigate earnings volatility. In addition, many of our customers are small job shops and fabricators who also have a diverse customer base and the versatility to service different end markets when an existing market slows.

Due to our focus on small orders, decentralized operating structure and the diversity of the markets we serve, customer concentrations are not significant. Our largest customer represented 0.7% of our net sales in 2024. In 2024, we generated sales greater than $30 million from only 22 customers.

Suppliers

We strategically purchase most of our inventory from the major domestic mills. Our U.S. operations do, however, also purchase minimal amounts of certain products from foreign mills. We have multiple suppliers for all of our products.

Because of our total volume of purchases and our long-term relationships, we believe that we are generally able to purchase inventory at the most competitive prices offered by our suppliers. We believe that our relationships provide us with an advantage in sourcing product in accelerated timeframes when needed and also allow us to more efficiently manage our inventory. We believe both our size and our long-term relationships with our suppliers continue to be important because mill consolidation has reduced the number of suppliers.

Seasonality

Some of our customers are in seasonal businesses, especially customers in the construction industry and related businesses. Our overall operations have not shown any material seasonal trends because of our geographic, product and customer diversity. Typically, revenues in the months of July, November and December have been lower than in other

months because of a reduced number of working days for shipments of our products, resulting from holidays observed by the Company as well as vacation and extended holiday closures at some of our customers. The number of shipping days in each quarter also has an impact on our quarterly sales and profitability. Results of any one or more quarters are therefore not necessarily indicative of annual results.

Competition

The metals service center industry is highly fragmented and competitive within localized areas or regions. Many of our competitors operate single, stand-alone service centers. According to IBISWorld Inc.’s October 2024 report, there were approximately 10,700 metal wholesaling locations operated by approximately 8,400 companies in the U.S. in 2024. According to the MSCI reporting of U.S. metals service center industry shipments, our 2024 tons sold from our U.S. locations represented approximately 15% of the industry total, an increase of nearly 100 basis points from 2023. The significant number of metals service centers that exist in this fragmented market creates opportunities for us to expand through acquisitions.

We have numerous competitors in each of our product lines and geographic locations, and competition is most frequently local or regional. Our domestic service center competitors are generally smaller than we are, but we also face strong competition from national, regional and local independent metals distributors and the mills themselves, some of which have greater resources than we do.

We compete with other companies on price, service, quality, processing capability and availability of products and services. We maintain relationships with our major suppliers at the executive and local levels. We believe that this division of responsibility has increased our ability to obtain competitive prices for metals by leveraging our total size and to provide more responsive service to our customers by allowing our local management teams to make purchasing decisions. In addition, we believe that the size of our inventory, the diversity of metals products we have available, and the wide variety of processing services we provide distinguish us from our competition. We believe our competitors are generally unable to offer the same high-quality products and services we provide using state-of-the-art equipment and advanced technology as they do not have the financial ability or risk tolerance to grow their businesses at the same rate as Reliance. We believe our industry-leading financial results in recent years are attributable to our strong financial condition, the high quality of products and services we are able to offer as a result of our significant investments in the facilities and equipment of our existing and acquired businesses, as well as our continued focus on small order sizes with quick turnaround.

Human Capital

As of December 31, 2024, we employed approximately 15,900 persons worldwide, of which approximately 14,200 were employed in the U.S. Our total workforce of approximately 16,200 persons as of December 31, 2024 includes approximately 300 contract and temporary workers. Our management strategy is to align our workforce levels with the pace of business and management believes it has sufficient human capital to operate our business successfully.

As of December 31, 2024, approximately 12% of our employees were represented by unions under collective bargaining agreements. Approximately four percent of our employees are covered by 21 different collective bargaining agreements that expire in 2025 unless renewed. We have entered into collective bargaining agreements with 40 union locals at 48 of our locations. These collective bargaining agreements have not had a material impact on our revenues or profitability. From time to time, our collective bargaining agreements expire and come up for renegotiation.

We seek to create an environment that values the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees, their families and the communities in which we operate and live. We strive to equip our employees with the knowledge, skills and resources to maintain or improve their personal health, develop professionally and operate safely within our businesses. A highlight of our commitment to our employees is the inclusion of “Relational” as one of our five core values that represent key areas of focus for our company. For more information on Reliance’s core values, seehttps://reliance.com/our-culture.

Among the critical elements included in the Relational category are the following:

The health and safety of our employees, customers, suppliers and communities is our most important core value. Our safety programs are designed around recognized standards with appropriate variations addressing the multiple jurisdictions and regulations, specific hazards and unique working environments of our operations. Our SMART Safety program focuses on embedding our culture of safety across all of our operations. We strive to have zero fatalities and no life-threatening or life-altering injuries and illnesses from working at our facilities.

Our executive team supports a safety management system that includes policies, standard practices and goals at our facilities, including:

We utilize a mixture of indicators to assess the health and safety performance of our domestic operations. Lagging indicators include the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (“OSHA”) Total Recordable Incident Rate (“TRIR”) and average Department of Transportation Recordable Accident Rate per million miles (“DOT Rate”).

Our focus on safety is evident in our 2024 TRIR, which is lower than the MSCI average of 3.5 as reported in their most recent survey conducted in 2020. A lower TRIR means that fewer people are injured on the job, and fewer lives are negatively impacted. We have not identified a universally accepted and annually updated benchmarking standard for DOT Rate.

The health, wellness and wellbeing of our employees is critical to our success. We are committed to providing our employees with resources to help them achieve their personal health, wellness, and wellbeing goals. As part of our comprehensive benefits offering, we provide employees and their covered spouses/domestic partners with a robust employee assistance program, individualized assessments, access to lab or on-site health screenings and personalized wellness coaching.

To help attract and retain the best employees, we strive to offer competitive compensation and best-in-class benefits. In addition to base salaries, our compensation programs can include annual bonuses, stock-based compensation awards, a 401(k) plan with employee matching opportunities, healthcare insurance and welfare benefits, and health savings and flexible spending accounts. We believe that we provide industry-leading healthcare benefits to our employees and funded approximately 85% of the costs associated with our domestic employees’ health insurance coverage in 2024.

We believe employees should have an opportunity for ongoing development through challenging daily contributions and structured development programs. We maintain an evolving leaders program focused on the continued training of selected employees, encouraging development in several areas of our business, leadership and communication, along with opportunities for enterprise-wide collaboration to drive an approach to innovative problem solving and solutions. Our success is dependent on the knowledge, skills and abilities of our current and future leaders and we continue to invest in talent management initiatives to pursue the significant long-term potential for our continued success.

We believe that superior Company performance requires contributions from a workforce that includes a variety of employee experiences, backgrounds, and characteristics. We are committed to providing fair and unbiased opportunities and hiring, developing and supporting a diverse and inclusive workplace. Our Company values are demonstrated by our Code of Conduct, which prohibits employment discrimination or harassment based on race, color, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions), national origin, religion, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Our Code of Conduct is available athttps://investor.reliance.com.

Quality Control

Procuring high-quality metal from suppliers on a consistent basis is critical to our business. We maintain strict quality control measures to assure that the quality of purchased raw materials will enable us to meet our customers’ specifications and to reduce the costs of production interruptions. In certain instances, including at a customer’s request, we perform physical and chemical analyses on selected raw materials, typically through a third-party testing lab, to verify that mechanical and dimensional properties, cleanliness and surface characteristics meet our requirements and our customers’ specifications. We also conduct certain analyses of surface characteristics on selected processed metal before delivery to the customer. We believe that maintaining high standards for accepting metals ultimately results in reduced return rates from our customers.

We maintain various quality certifications throughout our operations. Approximately 55% of our operating locations have earned International Organization for Standardization (ISO 9001:2015) certifications. Many of our locations maintain additional certifications specific to the industries they serve, such as aerospace, auto, nuclear, and others, including certain international certifications.

Government Regulation

Beyond our compliance requirements with environmental regulations, compliance with government regulations has not had and, based on laws and regulations currently in effect, is not expected to have a material effect on the Company’s capital expenditures, earnings or competitive position.

Our operations are also subject to laws and regulations relating to workplace safety and worker health, principally OSHA and related regulations, which, among other requirements, establish noise, dust and safety standards. We maintain comprehensive health and safety policies and train employees to follow established safety practices.

We are subject to the conflict mineral provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. We are required to undertake due diligence, disclose and report whether the products we sell originate from the Democratic Republic of Congo and adjoining countries. We verify with our suppliers the origins of all metals used in our products.

Our domestic locations sell to international customers and we operate metals service centers in 10 foreign countries, which subjects us to various countries’ trade regulations concerning the import and export of materials and finished products. Our operations are subject to the laws and regulations of the jurisdictions in which we conduct our business that seek to prevent corruption and bribery in the marketplace, including the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (the “FCPA”) and the United Kingdom’s Bribery Act 2010. We have developed and implemented company-wide export and anti-corruption policies designed to provide our employees clear statements of our compliance requirements and ensure compliance with applicable export and anti-corruption regulations. For information about risks related to government regulation, please see the risk factors set forth under the captionItem 1A. “Risk Factors” including the Risk Factors captioned*“We are subject to**various environmental, employee safety and health, and customs and export laws and regulations, which could subject us to significant liabilities and compliance expenditures;”and “We operate internationally and are subject to changes in tax rates, exchange rate fluctuations, exchange controls, political risks and other risks relating to international operations.”*

Environmental

We are not a metals producer or mill – we operate metals service centers that process and distribute metal products. We believe that circularity and low emissions are key attributes of our business model.

The overwhelming majority of our operations involve the processing and distribution of inherently sustainable aluminum and steel products that we believe (i) are some of the most commonly-recycled materials on the planet—more than plastic, paper, and glass combined each year and (ii) can be 100% recycled without loss of quality. We reintroduced approximately 226,000 tons of recycled scrap material into the manufacturing life cycle in 2024. As a distributor and “first-stage” processor of metal products, our operations, by their nature, have a limited environmental impact as we do not emit significant amounts of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.

We continue to evaluate and implement energy conservation and other initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of our business. However, enactment of more stringent environmental regulations could have an adverse impact on our financial results. In addition, the manufacture and production of the materials we source from mills can be a carbon-intensive activity, and adoption of more stringent carbon regulations or policies may increase the prices of these materials.

As a processor and distributor of metals, and not a producer, we acknowledge and embrace our role in protecting the environment and continue to assess our impacts. Our strong desire is to identify and prioritize areas of improvement. In order to align our environmental initiatives with our broader strategy, we completed a materiality assessment to determine the environmental matters that are most critical to our business and our stakeholders. As a result of the materiality assessment, we determined that the most material environmental issues to our business are: (i) emissions from company-owned trucks that deliver our products; and (ii) our overall energy usage (e.g. fuel and electricity). We expect to update this materiality assessment on a periodic basis to ensure it reflects changes in our business and the external environment.

In addition, prolonged disruption in the supply and/or distribution of metals due to weather, climate change or, natural disasters connected to climate change could increase costs, limit the availability of materials critical to our operations and have a significant impact on operating results.

Available Information

We file annual, quarterly and current reports, proxy statements and other documents with the SEC under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”). The SEC maintains a website that contains reports, proxy statements and other information regarding issuers, including our Company, that file reports electronically with the SEC. The public can obtain any reports that we file with the SEC athttps://sec.gov.

Our Investor Relations website is located athttps://investor.reliance.com. Our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and any amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act are made available, free of charge, through our website as soon as reasonably practical after we electronically file or furnish the reports to the SEC. Information about Reliance’s ESG-related programs and initiatives is available under the “ESG” section of the Company’s website. Additional corporate governance information,

including our restated certificate of incorporation, amended and restated bylaws, principles of corporate governance, Board committee charters, code of conduct and anti-bribery and anti-corruption policy, is available underCorporate Governance in the “Investors” section of the Company’s website. We encourage investors to visit our website.

Website addresses referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are not intended to function as hyperlinks, and the information contained in our website and in the SEC’s website is not intended to be a part of this filing.