NYSE
BWXT
7 stories
$13B Market cap · 2026-10-07
@odeliaenergy Shipyard nuclear is $BWXT's home turf, it already builds two to three reactors a year for Navy subs and carriers. And this isn't the only transportable deal, on October 5 Prodigy picked its 20MW microreactor for a transportable plant in New Brunswick. https://t.co/bPIYua98gd
Continue reading here for how $BWXT plans to deploy $5.5B of capital through 2030: https://t.co/bPIYua98gd
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.
Nuclear should bring in $3.7B of the $3.8B of revenue BWX Technologies $BWXT expects in 2026. $BWXT builds nuclear reactors and their heavy components, manufactures nuclear fuel, then services reactors once they’re running. It reports two segments: → Government Operations (73% of 2025 segment revenue, $2,350.1M): Reactors and fuel for the Navy’s submarines and aircraft carriers, uranium processing for the government, microreactor programs, and stakes in the joint ventures running government nuclear sites (booked as equity income, not revenue). → Commercial Operations (27%, $853.1M): Steam generators (heat exchangers turning reactor heat into steam), reactor pressure vessels, fuel, and field services for power utilities, mostly in Ontario. Also Kinectrics (a Toronto-based nuclear engineering and testing firm acquired in 2025) and a medical isotope unit $BWXT is selling. Naval propulsion is the core, at “a little bit less than 1/2” of revenue, CEO Rex Geveden said at $BWXT’s Investor Day on September 29, 2026. Special materials (the government uranium business) makes up 15-20%, and commercial power ~30%. The U.S. government accounted for 68% of 2025 revenue, directly or through prime contractors, down from 76% in 2024 as the commercial side grew. Four large utilities accounted for another 17%, per the FY2025 10-K. What keeps the Navy from switching suppliers is licensing. Only two plants in the U.S. hold Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licenses to produce fuel from high-enriched uranium (HEU, enriched to 20% or more, which is what naval reactors run on). Both belong to $BWXT (Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Tennessee, and its Lynchburg plant), and the 10-K calls Nuclear Fuel Services “the sole provider of nuclear fuel for the U.S. Navy.”
Read the deep dive on $BWXT here: https://t.co/ogaS6FmtMk I cover how BWXT became the Navy’s reactor supplier, where its growth comes from, what military base power and data centers are worth to BWXT today, and the management, insider selling, and financials behind the plan. Then I conclude with what $145.70/share already assumes and whether I’m buying.
The Pentagon wants every major U.S. military installation to generate its own power. In August 2026, the Army chose five companies for Janus, a program expected to put more than 20 commercial microreactors on military bases. One of the five already builds the reactors for the Navy’s submarines and aircraft carriers, and its stock is down almost 40%. That company is BWX Technologies $BWXT, and even after a 7.6% jump on October 6, the stock is down 38.9% from its $238.42/share peak on April 15. $BWXT didn’t fall alone: → The VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF $NLR is down 33.4% from its January high, even after rising 5.5% on October 6. → Curtiss-Wright $CW, which supplies pumps and valves for the same submarines and carriers, is down 30.2% from its July high. So $BWXT got caught in a broader nuclear and defense selloff, but it fell further than both $NLR and $CW after guiding to slower growth in 2027. Meanwhile, $BWXT’s business got stronger: → Guidance up twice: 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance rose from $645-660M in February to $662-672M in August. → An $8.4B backlog, more than double the $4.0B $BWXT had at the end of 2023. → CEO Rex Geveden calls $BWXT “the sole provider for naval reactors.” The Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan, released in May, calls for a new carrier every four years instead of every five. → The Army chose $BWXT’s 20-megawatt reactor for Janus at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on August 26. On October 5, Prodigy Clean Energy, a Montreal-based developer of factory-built nuclear plants, chose the same reactor for a transportable power plant in New Brunswick. → 2030 targets: $BWXT targeted $5.5-6.0B of revenue and $1.1-1.2B of adjusted EBITDA in 2030. It’s on track to meet or beat all three targets it set in February 2024. Still, here’s what could hold the stock back: → $BWXT expects growth to slow in 2027. Its preliminary framework calls for high-single-digit growth in both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. → Even after the 38.9% drop, $BWXT isn’t cheap in absolute terms. It trades at 20.9x NTM EV/EBITDA and 29.3x earnings. → By CFO Mike Fitzgerald’s count, only a little over half of the revenue growth to 2030 comes from what $BWXT calls its “predictable core,” the programs backed by backlog and long-term contracts. The rest depends on new orders and acquisitions. → $BWXT’s Janus release discloses no dollar figure. Owning reactors is a new business model for $BWXT, with capital commitments it hasn’t disclosed. → No $BWXT insider has bought stock in the open market since at least January 2025, including during the drop from $238 to $135. → The government is running on a continuing resolution through December 11. At $145.70/share, BWXT has a market cap of $13.35B and an EV of $15.0B ($13.35B + $2.05B of debt - $0.40B of cash). It trades at 22.5x 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance and 30.7x non-GAAP EPS guidance. In return, you get an $8.4B backlog, more than double the $4.0B BWXT had at the end of 2023. And on NTM estimates, its EV/EBITDA has dropped to 20.9x from ~35x in March, back to its 2024 levels. So is the Navy’s reactor supplier on sale, or does the market see a slowdown the numbers don’t show yet? That's what I answer in my new ~6,800 word deep dive on $BWXT! Credit to @GrumpierBTDay for the idea.
@Waksman84 $bwxt was chosen here not OKLO yet ppl are bidding oklo that burns 200M a yr on 1m revenue over proftabke compounded bwxt trading at 52 wl doing 3.5 billion in revs lol
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