Blackstone Just Paid 18x EBITDA for Part of This Company. The Rest Trades at Nearly Nothing
TriMas sold its aerospace arm to a Blackstone-backed buyer at a premium valuation and the leftover business is priced like an afterthought. It shouldn't be.
0. THE STORY
TriMas makes the pump on your lotion bottle. Not the lotion, the pump. Through brands like Rieke and Taplast, they supply dispensing components to consumer goods giants, and through Norris Cylinder they make high-pressure steel tanks for industrial gas. It’s unglamorous, it’s slow-growing, and nobody at a dinner party has ever asked about it. That’s kind of the point.
In March 2026, the company completed the sale of its aerospace division for $1.45 billion in cash, netting $1.2 billion after taxes. Against a total market cap of roughly $1.4 billion today, that one transaction was almost the size of the entire company. The result is a balance sheet that looks almost comically strong: $1.31 billion in cash, $397 million in debt, and a net cash position of $913 million sitting there doing nothing while management figures out what to do next.
The reason to look at this right now isn’t a growth story. There isn’t one. Revenue from the remaining businesses is growing at 3–6%, in line with inflation, essentially. The reason to look at it is that the stock appears to be priced as if the cash barely exists, the businesses are valued near zero, and you’re getting paid to wait. That’s a value play, not a compounder thesis.
1. THE MACHINE
The Simple Explanation
Think of TriMas as a toll road with a giant pile of coins sitting next to the booth. The toll road, the packaging and cylinders business, isn’t spectacular. Traffic grows slowly, pricing is moderate, and nobody’s building a better pump for Unilever anytime soon, but nobody’s disrupting it either. The giant pile of coins is the $913 million in net cash. The value play here is simple: you’re buying the toll road for next to nothing because the market keeps squinting at the coin pile and worrying about what management does with it, instead of just pricing the assets rationally.
The Moat
It exists, but let’s be honest about what it is. This isn’t a wide-moat business. The switching costs are real, changing a dispensing pump supplier mid-product-cycle means regulatory re-approval, compatibility testing, and supply chain headaches, but they’re not impenetrable. A large competitor with lower costs could chip away over time. The moat is really more of a “sticky mud” than a proper castle moat: not impossible to cross, but annoying enough that most customers don’t bother unless you give them a good reason to. For a value play, that’s fine. You don’t need a brilliant moat. You need enough durability to hold the business together while the discount closes.
The ROIC Story
ROIC is running around 12% on the operating businesses. Decent, not exciting. Critically though, with $913 million in net cash depressing the return on total capital figure, the underlying business assets are actually working reasonably hard. If you strip out the idle cash and look at what the operating businesses earn on the capital actually deployed in them, the picture is cleaner. This is a business that earns its keep, it just happens to have a massive cash balloon tied to it that’s distorting every ratio you try to calculate right now. For a value investor, that distortion is the opportunity, not the problem.
The Risks
The risks here are concentrated in one place: what management does with $900 million. If they overpay for acquisitions, which is extremely common when boards suddenly feel rich, they’ll destroy in eighteen months what took years to build. The packaging M&A market isn’t cheap; multiples for quality targets run 10–14x EBITDA, and a bad deal at the wrong price could turn a fortress balance sheet into a leveraged mess within two years. There’s also a subtler risk: management inaction. If the cash just sits uninvested for three-plus years, the investment thesis doesn’t break, but it also doesn’t resolve. You can be right about the value and still underperform because the catalyst never shows up.
2. THE NUMBERS
Current Valuation
Price: ~$39
Market Cap: ~$1.42B
Cash: $1.31B
Debt: $397M
Net Cash: $913M
Enterprise Value: ~$507M this is the number that matters. You’re paying $507 million for the actual operating businesses.
The EV is what the market is really placing on the packaging and cylinders operations. Against 2025 continuing revenues of $645.7 million, that’s an EV/Revenue multiple of 0.78x. For context, the closest comparable AptarGroup, which makes similar dispensing products for similar customers trades at roughly 2x revenue. Silgan Holdings trades at about 1.2x. TriMas at 0.78x is either a bargain or a warning sign, and the businesses themselves don’t have anything obviously wrong with them.
Profitability Snapshot (Continuing Operations)
Revenue 2025: $645.7M
Operating Margin 2025: 5.3% (guided to expand 300+ basis points in 2026 through cost-out actions)
Adjusted EPS 2025 (continuing ops): $0.55
Adjusted EPS guidance 2026: $1.50–$1.70 (midpoint $1.60)
That EPS jump looks explosive, but a chunk of it is interest income (~$0.25/share) from the cash pile. Strip that out and the operational EPS is around $1.35. Still a big improvement on $0.55.
Valuation Metrics
Forward P/E on $1.60: ~24x looks expensive at first glance
But back out the cash. Net cash per share is $913M / 36.3M shares = roughly $25 per share. The stock is at $39. So you’re paying $14 per share for the actual business.
$14 per share on ~$1.35 of operational EPS = roughly 10x P/E on the operating business alone. Now it looks cheap.
Earnings Yield (on total price): ~4.1% barely above the 10-year Treasury. But the earnings yield on just the operating business, ex-cash, is closer to 9.6%. That’s meaningful.
S&P 500 Earnings Yield: ~4.0%. The headline TRS yield barely beats it, but the ex-cash operating yield smashes it.
Shareholder Returns
Dividend: $0.16/year → ~0.4% yield. Token.
Buybacks: the company repurchased over $150 million of stock between November 2025 and March 2026, taking shares from ~40.7 million to ~36.3 million an 11% reduction in six months.
At the current pace annualized, buyback yield is running around 10–12%. That pace will slow, but even at a more moderate 5%, total shareholder yield is north of 5%.
Interest income on idle cash: ~$9M per quarter, roughly $36M annually. That’s 2.5% of the current market cap, coming in at zero operational cost.
Quality Indicators
Balance sheet: net cash of $913M. Effectively unleveraged. The safest balance sheet in the room by a wide margin.
Interest coverage: irrelevant, they’re a net receiver of interest, not a payer.
Debt/Equity: negative in the best possible sense.
3. THE NAPKIN MATH
This is a value play, so the math works differently than a compounder analysis. We’re not modeling ten years of reinvestment at high ROIC rates. We’re asking: what happens when the gap between intrinsic value and market price closes? And when does that happen?
Scenario A: The Clean Re-Rating (Base Case)
The market is pricing the operating businesses at 0.78x EV/Revenue. If that re-rates to 1.2x still below Silgan, still well below Aptar, the operating business EV rises from $507M to roughly $775M. Add back the $913M net cash at face value. Total implied equity value: $1.69B. At 36.3M shares, that’s $46.50 per share. From $39, that’s a 19% return plus buybacks and dividends along the way. Timeline: 12–24 months if a catalyst emerges (acquisition announcement, further buyback acceleration, or just the market noticing the discount).
Scenario B: Buyback Machine (No Catalyst Needed)
No re-rating. No acquisitions. Management just keeps buying back stock at $39 with the cash pile. If they deploy $300M in buybacks over the next two years at current prices, shares outstanding drop from 36.3M to roughly 28.6M a 21% reduction. 2026 EPS of $1.60 spread over 28.6M shares becomes roughly $2.10. At even 18x a conservative packaging multiple the stock should trade at ~$38 on pure earnings math, but now you own a proportionally larger piece. Effective return to remaining shareholders: solidly positive just from the mechanics of shrinking the share count.
Scenario C: Management Blows the Cash (Bear Case)
They announce a $700M acquisition of a packaging company at 13x EBITDA, the market hates it, the multiple on the combined entity compresses, and the stock drifts back to $32–34. This is the real bear case and it’s not a small risk. The history of industrial conglomerates doing large transformational deals with freshly-received divestiture proceeds is not encouraging reading.
The Return Summary
Base case re-rating: +19% price appreciation + ~4–5% annual shareholder yield = strong 1–2 year return
Buyback-only scenario: mid-to-high single digit annual return, no catalyst required
Bear case bad deal: –15% to –20% drawdown before recovery
vs S&P 500 at ~10% annually: base case wins on a 1–2 year horizon, loses badly on a 5-year horizon if growth doesn’t materialize.
4. MY PROPRIETARY INSIGHT
The $25 Bill Hidden in the Stock
Here’s the frame that most people aren’t using. At a $39 stock price, $25 per share is net cash money sitting in accounts earning 4.4% right now. That means you’re buying $25 in cash plus a real operating business for $39. You’re valuing the packaging and cylinders businesses at a total of $14 per share, or roughly $508 million.
Now look at what Blackstone and Tinicum just paid for the TriMas Aerospace business: 18x EBITDA. That was a fastener business with strong aerospace cycle tailwinds, sure, but it tells you what sophisticated PE buyers pay for TriMas-quality industrial assets at peak conditions. If TriMas Packaging were carved out and sold in a private market transaction, the floor for that business is probably $800M–$1B based on EV/EBITDA comps in the packaging space. The market is pricing it at $508M. That gap is the trade.
The historical pattern in small-cap industrials supports this. Post-major-divestiture, the “stub” that remains tends to trade at a discount for 6–18 months as the market processes the transformation, reassigns analyst coverage, and waits to see what management does with the proceeds. Then one of three things happens: a smart acquisition gets announced and the market re-rates, buybacks shrink the float enough that the per-share math forces the price higher, or an activist gets involved. All three are plausible paths here. None requires the business to suddenly grow faster.
The Interest Income Nobody Is Pricing Correctly
Management guided approximately $9 million in interest income per quarter from the invested cash call it $36 million annually. At TriMas’s current tax rate of 27–29%, that’s roughly $26 million net, or about $0.71 per share. The stock trades at 24x forward earnings, but $0.71 of those earnings per share is pure Treasury-rate cash income that disappears the day they deploy the capital. The market is either ignoring this or discounting it too harshly. Either way, you’re collecting it while you wait for the real catalyst, which isn’t a bad position.
5. MY TAKE
Sleep Well at Night Score: 6.5/10
The balance sheet is the best in the sector, the downside is genuinely limited, and the discount to intrinsic value is real and quantifiable. The 6.5 instead of an 8 is entirely management risk one bad acquisition undoes the whole setup and there’s no structural protection against it.
What Excites Me
The ex-cash P/E of roughly 10x on a stable, sticky packaging business with margin improvement underway is legitimately cheap for the quality of the asset. The buyback pace since November 2025 has been exceptional 11% float reduction in six months signals that management knows the stock is cheap and is acting on it. And the interest income from the cash pile means you’re getting paid ~2.5% of market cap annually just to sit and wait, before any operational improvement shows up.
What Worries Me
A single large ill-timed acquisition could turn a beautiful balance sheet into a debt problem in one press release. The operational earnings power without the interest income kicker is still modest $1.35/share adjusted is not a lot of cushion for a $39 stock. And this is a slow, under-covered small cap the discount could persist for years without a catalyst, and patient money isn’t always patient enough.
Bottom line, you’re paying $39 for a stock where $25 is cash and the business underneath is priced like it’s about to go away it isn’t, and that gap looks like it wants to close.