Competition

The rival record

Copart sells salvage and total-loss vehicles for insurance companies through an online auction platform, VB3, and takes a fee (or, in a few markets, buys the car and resells it for its own account) rather than the gross sale price [1]. That model — a two-sided marketplace whose supply is concentrated in insurance carriers — defines who Copart actually competes with, and it is a narrower field than a "used-vehicle" screen suggests. In fiscal 2025 Copart generated $4.6 billion of revenue and $1.7 billion of operating income, and drew 81% of the vehicles it processed from insurance-company sellers [2].

This tab lays out that record: who overlaps where, what each rival's own filings and calls say, how the named-competitor list has moved as the industry consolidated, and what the filings disclose about the terms that make an insurance-supply relationship easy or hard to switch. It is the comparative source shelf a moat argument has to survive; it does not make that judgment. Arena structure and value-chain economics belong to Industry; the raw per-competitor source pages sit in Competitors.

Copart names its principal competitors in its own words: "RB Global (including its subsidiary Insurance Auto Auctions, Inc.), Carvana, Openlane, Manheim, Inc. and ACV Auctions Inc.," with LKQ Corporation as "the largest national dismantler," a buyer that "may purchase salvage vehicles directly from insurance companies, thereby bypassing vehicle remarketing companies like Copart entirely" [1].

The one direct-model rival, and the adjacents

Only one of the named competitors runs Copart's exact business — salvage and total-loss auctions for insurance carriers: Insurance Auto Auctions (IAA), now a subsidiary of RB Global. The others overlap at the edges. Openlane and ACV Auctions are whole-car wholesale marketplaces that connect dealers and commercial fleets, not insurance-salvage venues. Carvana is primarily an online used-car retailer that also owns the ADESA physical whole-car auction network. CarMax — staged in the peer set but not named by Copart — is a used-car retailer. LKQ is an alternative-parts and dismantling business that competes as a buyer of total-loss cars, and can source them directly.

Overlap read against Copart's disclosed model and its named-competitor list [1]; each rival's model confirmed from its own filing: RB Global/IAA [4]; Openlane [6]; ACV Auctions [7]; LKQ [8].

The direct rival — IAA / RB Global. IAA is the one competitor built around the same insurance-salvage flow. RB Global (formerly Ritchie Bros.) "completed its acquisition of IAA, Inc. … for a total purchase price of approximately $6.6 billion" on March 20, 2023, describing the deal as a move "to create a leading omnichannel marketplace for vehicle buyers and sellers" [4]. One comparability caveat runs through everything below: RB Global now reports "one operating and reportable segment" that folds IAA's automotive-salvage marketplace together with its legacy commercial, construction and transportation auction business [5]. Its consolidated $4.6 billion of revenue is therefore not a clean salvage-only figure to set against Copart's.

The whole-car adjacents — Openlane and ACV. Openlane describes itself as "a leading digital marketplace for wholesale used vehicles" facilitating "approximately 1.5 million annual vehicle transactions with a gross merchandise value … of $28.8 billion in 2025," selling for dealers and commercial fleets and generally not taking title [6]. ACV competes "mainly … with large, national physical vehicle auction companies, such as Manheim … Adesa, a subsidiary of Carvana, and OPENLANE," a market it calls "largely consolidated" [7]. Neither firm names insurance salvage as its arena — their supply is dealer and fleet whole-car, so they compete with Copart's non-insurance growth push, not its core.

The bypass buyer — LKQ. LKQ is not a remarketer at all; it is a dismantler whose economics depend on buying total-loss cars, noting that "the availability and pricing of total loss vehicles used in our salvage products operations" is a supply input for it [8]. Copart flags the same relationship from the other side: dismantlers "may purchase salvage vehicles directly from insurance companies, thereby bypassing vehicle remarketing companies like Copart entirely" [3].

How the named-competitor list moved

Copart re-writes its list of "largest national or regional vehicle auctioneers" each year, and the last four filings track the industry's consolidation almost line by line. In fiscal 2021 the list named IAA as a standalone company alongside "KAR Auction Services, Inc. … (including its subsidiary ADESA, Inc.)" [9]. By fiscal 2023 IAA had become a subsidiary of "Ritchie Bros.," and KAR/ADESA had dropped off entirely [10]. By fiscal 2024 two new names — Carvana and Openlane — had appeared, reflecting Carvana's purchase of ADESA's US physical auctions and KAR's rebranding to OPENLANE [11].

Source: Copart Form 10-K competition sections, FY2021 [9], FY2023 [10], FY2024 [11], FY2025 [1].

Two structural facts fall out of that sequence. First, US salvage auctions have narrowed toward a two-firm field — Copart and IAA — with the whole-car names entering the list because of adjacency, not because they run salvage yards. Second, the ownership changes moved IAA behind a much larger, more diversified parent (RB Global) and put ADESA's physical network under a cash-hungry retailer (Carvana), which changes who has the balance sheet and the incentives to compete for insurance supply.

Rivals' numbers, side by side

The peers span three revenue conventions, and comparing the headline top lines directly would mislead. Copart and the marketplace firms (RB Global/IAA, Openlane, ACV) report net fee or consignment revenue; the retailers (Carvana, CarMax) and the parts business (LKQ) report gross vehicle or parts sales. The table below carries a "reporting basis" column so the mismatch is explicit; margins and market value, which are unit-consistent, sit alongside.

Latest fiscal year each (Copart, Openlane, RB Global, ACV, Carvana, LKQ = FY2025; CarMax = FY2026, ended Feb 2026). Revenue/op. margin: Copart FY2025 10-K income statement [12]; peers from reported financials and filings — RB Global [4], Openlane [6], ACV [7]. Market caps and free cash flow as reported; ACV op. margin is negative (an operating loss). Values in US dollars.

Two reads survive the caveats. Copart's operating margin — 36.5% in fiscal 2025 — sits well above every peer that reports on a comparable basis; RB Global, the closest-model rival, ran 15.5%, and the whole-car marketplaces Openlane and ACV ran roughly 10% and an operating loss, respectively. And Copart carries the largest equity value of the group even though its revenue is a fraction of the retailers'. The retailers' and dismantler's revenues are larger because they book the whole car or part, not a fee — a difference of accounting, not of contested turf.

Restricting the comparison to the fee-and-marketplace cohort — where margins are like-for-like — shows the same gap over time, and shows that it is not a one-year artifact.

Operating margin as reported; RB Global and Openlane report on differing fiscal calendars (Dec 31) versus Copart (Jul 31). Copart from its 10-K income statements [12]; RB Global and Openlane from reported financials. Copart's operating margin narrowed gradually as it scaled purchased-vehicle and international activity.

Copart's own scale and its dependence on insurance supply frame the whole comparison:

Source: Copart FY2025 10-K — revenue and operating income [12]; insurance-sourced share of vehicles processed [2]. Free cash flow from reported cash flows.

Copart itself grew steadily across the period, revenue rising from $2.69 billion in fiscal 2021 to $4.65 billion in fiscal 2025 while operating income rose from $1.14 billion to $1.70 billion [13] [12].

Source: Copart Form 10-K income statements — FY2021–FY2022 from the FY2023 10-K [13]; FY2023–FY2025 from the FY2025 10-K [12].

Where volume is actually moving

Copart discloses unit trends but not a market-share figure, so the disclosed data and management's characterization of it have to be kept apart. On the data side, the structural driver is total-loss frequency — the share of accident vehicles insurers write off rather than repair. Copart put US total-loss frequency at 22.6% for calendar 2025 through September, "an increase of 80 basis points or so year over year according to CCC," and described "its longterm upward trend consistent with nearly the entirety of the history of our company and our industry" [14]. Rising total-loss frequency expands the salvage pool that Copart and IAA divide.

Against that tailwind, Copart's own insurance volumes softened recently: it reported that "global insurance units for 2026 declined 8.4% … a 5.6% decline, excluding catastrophic volumes," with US insurance units down 9.5% (7.3% ex-catastrophe), attributing the move to "a combination of market share evolution among insurance carriers themselves, soft claims counts … offset by rising total loss frequency" [14]. That is management's read of a mix of carrier share shifts and claims softness — not a disclosed loss of salvage share to a named rival, and worth separating from the structural total-loss story.

Management also frames its competitive set more broadly than the salvage names. Asked about competition, the CEO said auction-mediated volume in the US is "5x or more of the volume that we sell per year," that even an insurance carrier "can sell their cars through other intermediaries" or "have more of them repaired," and that "in many respects, we compete with the repair shops. The higher the returns we generate, the more we can win the rights to resolve that claim versus the repair industry" [15]. On that framing, the binding contest is auction returns versus the repair alternative, with the named auctioneers one part of a larger opportunity set.

The switching reality

Two things govern how sticky an insurance-supply relationship is: the contract terms, and the returns that make a seller want to stay. Copart's filings speak to both — and, unusually, disclose that the contracts themselves are not long-dated locks.

Copart contracts "with the national, regional or branch office of an insurance company," with agreements "customized to each vehicle seller's needs" that "generally provide that we will sell vehicles generated by the vehicle seller in a designated geographic area," and no single customer accounted for more than 10% of consolidated revenue in fiscal 2025, 2024 or 2023 [1]. Its risk factor is explicit that these are not multi-year guarantees: it cites "the absence of long-term contractual commitments between us and our sellers," "particularly in the U.K., and other foreign markets," and warns "there can be no assurance that our competitors will not gain market share at our expense" [3].

Source: Copart FY2025 10-K — customized agreements and customer concentration [1]; absence of long-term commitments and share-loss risk [3]; retention framing [16].

The record here is genuinely two-sided, and worth stating as such. The paper contracts are short and customizable, which on its face lowers switching costs; yet Copart reports that its integrated technology and returns generate "high client retention" and let it "expand our national supply contracts" [16], and its growth strategy leans on "our ability to achieve high net returns and broader access to buyers through our national coverage" when pursuing insurance-supply agreements [17]. The evidence that binds sellers is performance-based, not contractual — which is exactly why the recent US insurance-unit softness and the "market share evolution among insurance carriers" comment are worth watching rather than dismissing.

International — a different competitive mix

Copart earned 83% of its fiscal 2025 revenue in the US and 17% internationally, where US service revenue was $3.45 billion against $517 million abroad [18]. Abroad the model and the rivals differ: Copart often acts as principal, "primarily in the U.K.," buying vehicles and reselling them for its own account, and its "principal competitors are vehicle auction and sales companies, vehicle dismantlers, and privately-held independent remarketers" rather than the named US auctioneers [2] [1]. The absence of long-term seller commitments is disclosed as most acute in these foreign markets [3], and Openlane's own filing confirms it competes in the same UK/European whole-car ground [6].

Taken together, the record shows a US salvage arena that has narrowed to Copart and IAA/RB Global, a set of whole-car and retail firms that overlap only at the edges of Copart's non-insurance push, a profitability gap that is real on comparable metrics, and a switching regime built on returns rather than paper — with recent US insurance-volume softness that the rival filings and calls do not yet explain. Those are the facts a moat judgment has to reckon with; the judgment itself belongs to the chapters.