French nuclear giant AREVA, in the middle of a massive restructuring, said Wednesday it stemmed its corporate losses in 2016 and returned the segment of its business dealing with nuclear cleanup to operational profitability during the year.
Overall, the company’s 2016 loss was just under $700 million, a 66-percent improvement compared with 2015’s multibillion loss.
Last year, AREVA agreed to sell its troubled engineering unit to the French government — which owns most of the company’s shares — and spin off its nuclear fuel-cycle business into a subsidiary temporarily dubbed NewCo. The company now books both its front-end and back-end nuclear business within NewCo.
Globally, the back end returned to operational profitability in 2016, with segment earnings of almost $70 million, compared with a loss of nearly $195 million in 2015. Segment revenue tumbled a little more than 4 percent year over year to about $1.6 billion in 2016.
Back-end backlog rose nearly 25 percent to roughly $12 billion in 2016, the company reported, growing at a much faster clip than the front-end segment, where unfulfilled orders rose about 5 percent year over year to $11.5 billion.
Overall, and excluding results of the AREVA NP business being sold back to Paris, NewCo took in a 2016 operating income of more than $450 million, compared with an operating loss of about $105 million in 2015. NewCo’s 2016 revenue fell a little over 3.5 percent to just over $4 billion.
AREVA’s North American business is a participant on major DOE cleanup sites across the country, including the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., the Hanford Site in Washington State, and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
