Fajasy on X
How did a boiler maker founded in 1867 become the Navy’s reactor supplier? BWX Technologies’ $BWXT history runs through two spin-offs and a decade of acquisitions: → 1867: George Babcock and Stephen Wilcox found Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) to make steam boilers. → 1953-1955: B&W builds components for the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine. → 1978: J. Ray McDermott, an offshore engineering firm, buys B&W. → 2008: B&W buys Nuclear Fuel Services, the Erwin, Tennessee plant behind the Navy’s fuel. → 2010: B&W spins off from McDermott as a standalone public company. → 2015: B&W spins off its boiler business as Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises $BW and renames itself BWX Technologies, keeping the naval and other nuclear businesses. → 2016-2020: Buys GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy Canada (fuel for CANDU, Canada’s heavy-water reactor design, 2016), Nordion’s medical isotope business (2018), and nuclear parts maker Laker Energy (2020), building out the Canadian commercial business. → 2022: Wins Project Pele, the Pentagon’s prototype transportable microreactor. → 2025: Buys the Aerojet Ordnance Tennessee (A.O.T.) unit of L3Harris $LHX for ~$100M in January and closes the Kinectrics deal (a Toronto-based nuclear engineering and testing firm, ~US$525M including assumed liabilities) in May. → 2026: Closes its purchase of Precision Components Group (PCG), a U.S. maker of heat exchangers and other heavy components, for ~$200M on July 1. Most recently, on August 3, Nordic Capital, a private equity firm, agreed to buy just over 80% of $BWXT’s medical isotope business for $750M plus up to $50M more. $BWXT wasn’t looking to sell until Nordic reached out, CEO Rex Geveden said on the Q2 call the same day. CFO Mike Fitzgerald said on the same call that the medical business should bring in $130M of 2026 revenue, at a margin “modestly accretive” to the 13% $BWXT expects from its commercial segment. Nordic’s $750M for just over 80% implies ~$0.9B for 100%, or ~7x revenue. At a ~14% margin, that’s ~50x EBITDA, more than double the 22.5x EBITDA $BWXT trades at. So $BWXT is selling a small side business at a premium to focus on what it calls its core businesses, nuclear national security and nuclear power.
