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The company will pay about $30 million to resolve a federal investigation into its diversity efforts. The probe was part of a broader government look into how large contractors handle these internal programs. While the dollar amount sounds large, it is a tiny fraction of what Lockheed Martin earns in a single month. This settlement closes a legal distraction without affecting the company's massive backlog of military contracts or its core business of building defense systems. For a company worth over $130 billion, this is a minor cost to put the matter behind it.
Source: WSJ
The U.S. Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin a $694 million contract to build its first production batch of air-launched hypersonic missiles. These weapons travel at more than five times the speed of sound and can maneuver during flight, making them much harder for traditional defense systems to stop.
This deal marks a shift from testing the technology to actually building it for the military's arsenal. While the dollar amount is small compared to the company's massive $292 billion backlog, it confirms Lockheed's lead in the race to build high-speed missiles, which is a key part of its growth plan for the next several years.
Source: PRNewsWire
Morgan Stanley raised its rating on the stock to overweight, which is its way of saying it expects the company to perform better than the broader market. This move follows a strong earnings report where the company's backlog, or the total value of signed orders waiting to be filled, hit a record 292 billion dollars.
While the average analyst target sits at 638 dollars, this upgrade signals a shift in how one of the most followed firms on Wall Street views the company's growth path. The massive order book for F-35 jets and missile systems provides a level of predictable future cash that is hard to find in other industries.
Source: Morgan Stanley
After Lockheed Martin's October results, we updated our fair value and raised our projections for long-term revenue. We have added the potential for costs to exceed funding on the F-35 Lot 20 contract to the risks we track. We have also started tracking whether the company continues to pause buying back its own shares after no repurchases occurred over the last nine months. We lowered our expectations for profit margins in the aircraft division after higher costs on F-16 and C-130 production reached 9%.
Lockheed Martin reported a strong third quarter, with earnings of $7.97 per share beating the $7.52 analysts expected. Sales rose 11 percent to $20.7 billion, driven by high demand for defense systems. The stock rose about 6 percent following the report, even as the broader market fell.
The most important detail is the backlog, which tracks the value of signed contracts for work to be done in the future. It jumped to a record $292 billion, up from $173 billion just months ago. This surge was led by a massive $52.5 billion award for PAC-3 missile interceptors, which are used to shoot down incoming threats. For a long-term owner, this provides years of highly predictable revenue and suggests the company is successfully moving into higher-margin missile defense programs.
See the full quarter, and how our tracked metrics did
Source: 8-K filing
Management has turned a corner after a choppy 2025, delivering back-to-back beats that suggest they have finally aligned their production speed with the surge in global defense orders.
| Expectation | |
|---|---|
| EPS | $8.35 |
| Revenue | $22.66B |
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