Earnings rose at BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va., for 2023, which the maker of nuclear naval reactors and manager of nuclear weapons sites attributed Tuesday mostly to favorable adjustments on government contracts.
For the year, net earnings were $246.3 million, or $2.68 per share, up about 7.7% from $238.6 million, or $2.60 a share in 2023. Annual revenue for 2023 was about $2.5 billion, up around 12% from some $2.23 billion in 2022, according to the company’s latest earnings press release.
Fourth-quarter net earnings were roughly $66.3 million, or $0.72 a share, up around 54% from some $43 million, or $0.47 a share, a year ago. Quarterly revenue was roughly $725.5 million, up about 16% year-over-year from $624.2 million.
BWX Technologies’ (BWXT) latest earnings, reported after U.S. financial markets closed on Tuesday, were above the analyst estimates gathered by Yahoo! Finance.
In the flagship Government Operations segment, which handles the nuclear naval and Department of Energy nuclear-site-management business, 2023 operating income was about $374.7 million, up about 11% from some $336.5 million in 2023. Segment revenue for the year was a little more than $2 billion, up around 12% year-over-year from about $1.8 billion.
Fourth-quarter segment operating income for Government Operations was $116.3 million, up about 13% from $102.8 million in the year-ago quarter. Quarterly segment revenue was about $601.6 million, up around 16% from $517.6 million a year ago.
The ongoing legal fight over the $45-billion Department of Energy radioactive tank waste cleanup contract at the Hanford Site in Washington is one of few “wildcards” affecting BWXT’s financial performance in 2024, CEO Rex Geveden said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts Tuesday.
The call was two days before DOE announced its decision to re-award the contract to a partnership of BWXT, Amentum and Fluor. A bid challenge is still being litigated.
“There are not a lot of wildcards that we have this year,” Geveden said in response to a financial analysts. “We have a pretty predictable set of businesses.” There are some probability-adjusted” projections in earnings assumptions on BWXT’s likelihood of retaining the award that a U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge set aside in June 2023. The matter is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
“Just like last year, certain items fell out, certain items came in.” Geveden said during the call. BWXT executives also said the company put the financial impact of missile compartment tube problems for nuclear subs behind them in 2023.
Meanwhile, in BWXT’s much smaller Commercial Operations segment, operating income for 2023 was $37.5 million, up about 37% from about $27.4 million a year ago. Revenue for the year was about $466.3 million, up around 9% compared with roughly $427.4 million last year.
Quarterly segment operating income for the Commercial Operations was roughly $15.9 million, more than quadruple the roughly $3.7 million from a year ago. Quarterly segment revenue was about $124.1 million, up roughly 16% compared with $107.1 million in the year-ago quarter.
Editor’s note, Feb. 29, 2024, 12:32 p.m. Eastern time. The story was corrected to show that BWXT’s earnings exceeded estimates gathered by Yahoo! Finance.
