Leonardo DRS (NASDAQ:DRS) released first-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Tuesday. Read the complete transcript below.
This content is powered by Benzinga APIs. For comprehensive financial data and transcripts, visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/.
View the webcast at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/wq468j8j/
Summary
Leonardo DRS reported strong financial results for Q1 2026 with a 6% increase in revenue year-over-year and a 28% increase in adjusted EBITDA.
The company raised its full-year guidance, expecting revenue to range between $3.9 billion to $3.975 billion and adjusted EBITDA between $515 million and $530 million.
Key strategic initiatives include investing in R&D and capital expenditures to support growth in shipbuilding, air and missile defense, counter UAS, unmanned systems, and space capabilities.
Operational highlights include robust customer demand leading to a 17th consecutive quarter with a book-to-bill ratio of at least 1, achieving record funded backlog.
Management emphasized the alignment of their technology portfolio with U.S. defense budget priorities and highlighted successful execution in areas like tactical radars and infrared sensing.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to The Leonardo DRS first quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode following the Company’s prepared remarks. There will be an opportunity to ask questions and instructions will be provided at that time. As a reminder, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Steve Vather, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Steve Vather
Good morning and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining today’s quarterly Earnings Conference call. With me today are John Bieloni, our president and CEO, and Mike DePold, our CFO. They’ll discuss our strategy, operational highlights, financial results and outlook. Today’s call is being webcast on the Investor Relations section of the website where you can also find the earnings release and supplemental presentation. Management may also make forward looking statements during the call regarding future events, future trends and the anticipated future performance of the company. We caution you that such statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward looking statements due to a variety of factors. For a full discussion of these risk factors, please refer to our latest form 10K and our other SEC filings. We undertake no obligation other than as may be required by law to update any of the forward looking statements made on this call. During this call, management will also discuss non GAAP financial measures which we believe provide useful information for investors. These non GAAP measures should not be evaluated in isolation or as a substitute for GAAP performance measures. You can find a reconciliation in the non GAAP measures discussed on this call in our earnings release. With that, I will turn the call
John Bieloni
over to John thank you Steve and welcome everyone. We appreciate you joining us to discuss our first quarter 2026 results. This morning we’re pleased to report strong quarterly results and an excellent start to 2026. The team’s steadfast execution is translating into tangible financial outperformance as results clearly demonstrate. Revenue for the first quarter was up 6% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA grew 28% year over year, allowing us to deliver adjusted diluted EPS of $0.26 a share. Importantly, we’re delivering these results while maintaining healthy levels of organic investment in R and D and capital expenditures. This disciplined approach reflects our commitment to meeting both current and future customer needs as we continue to build on our foundation of growth. Let me share a few performance highlights from the quarter. Robust customer Demand drove our 17th consecutive book to bill of at least 1x revenue, bolstering our funded backlog to new company records and enhancing visibility and growth for the full year. That momentum, coupled with favorable material receipt timing, accelerated revenue growth and enabled outperformance against our expectations in Q1. Increasing volume, favorable program mix, and solid operational execution unlocked higher profitability and margin expansion. Overall, the strength delivered in the first quarter gives us confidence to raise our expected growth and profitability for the full year. Our differentiated technology portfolio and exceptional people are foundational to these results. I want to thank the entire team for their dedication and unwavering commitment to our customers, partners and shareholders. The global threat environment remains elevated with limited signs of near term easing. Against that dynamic backdrop, our focus remains on delivering differentiated technologies that drive overmatch and mission success for our customers. Our customers are operating with a clarity of a full year Appropriations for fiscal year 26 Additionally, there are indications that supplemental defense funding enacted through the last summer’s reconciliation package will be deployed this fiscal year, accelerating the procurement of critical capabilities. The overall funding and budget environment continues to be favorable. Last month, the Administration released its fiscal year 27 budget request proposing $1.5 trillion in total defense spending. As usual, Congress will consider and negotiate the final funding allocations. Importantly, we remain strongly aligned with our customer spending priorities including shipbuilding and industrial based resiliency, layered air and missile defense, counter uas, unmanned systems, space and missile replenishment. Furthermore, the recent tensions in the Middle east, along with ongoing conflict in Ukraine continue to reinforce several key lessons shaping requirements and budgets. First, missiles and one way drones are now so widespread that that attacks that were once anomalous are expected at scale and are proliferating. This reality is fundamentally reshaping requirements and the nature of warfare. Layered air defense and counter UAS are no longer optional, they are now required. Second, adversaries are increasingly targeting large radars and other high value assets that degrade infrastructure sensing and defensive capabilities to quickly create exploitable vulnerabilities. This is accelerating the shift towards distributed, resilient and modular sensing and battle management architectures that can be rapidly proliferated, replaced and scaled. We’re already seeing this trend in space with the shift from geosynchronous to low earth orbit satellites and is also beginning to manifest in the ground and naval arenas where unmanned vessels can be utilized as sensor and and effector equipped perimeters deployed around manned platforms. Third, volume scalability and effector cost symmetry are essential to counter growing threats. Magazine depth and munitions stockpiles are a key factor in operational endurance. We’re supporting production ramps across several weapon systems, advancing seeker capabilities for improved sensing on next generation missile platforms and introducing lower cost seekers to enable more symmetric countermeasures. Each of these trends represents a fundamental shift and plays directly to DRS strengths. DRS is a market leader in tactical radars and our technology continues to deliver significant operational and mission impact. Additionally, our tactical radars continue to see immense global demand and we are aggressively increasing throughput and production capacity to satisfy that appetite. Recent hostilities have again demonstrated that force protection cannot be confined to fixed sites it must also be embedded in maneuver units and proliferated at scale. Our force protection solutions span multiple domains. In the quarter we received a $533 million production contract IDIQ with the Distributed Aperture Infrared Countermeasure System or DEERCA, for aircraft survivability. DEERCM combines both missile warning and infrared countermeasures into one system and leverages multiple sensors to provide a 360 degree threat picture, each with a laser director to defeat increasingly capable missiles that threaten aircraft. As recent operations have demonstrated, both rotary and fixed wing platforms without this capability our vulnerable and contested airspace. Across our portfolio, our capabilities are modular and platform agnostic, optimized for size, weight, power and cost to meet customers specific needs. Let me illustrate that with a few examples. We can deploy power and propulsion technologies on a platform as compact as a medium unmanned surface vessel and scale all the way to the Columbia class submarine. That modularity approach is one we strongly advocate for as the Navy considers future service combatant platforms. Similarly, our infrared sensing capabilities span deployment from attritable Class 1 drones to the most sophisticated ground combat vehicles. And because our technologies are domain agnostic, that same sensing capability can deploy across ground, air, sea and space. We also stand to benefit as customers accelerate modernization and expand production rates, a tailwind evident throughout our portfolio. We’re investing in both research and development and capital against that broader demand. Overall, we view these trends as part of an enduring structural shift and they align directly with our core strengths. The business continues to perform well and we remain focused on three key strategic priorities, innovation, growth and execution. The diversity and differentiation of our portfolio creates multiple growth avenues. Our increased investment innovation is evident through the accelerated pace of procurement ready prototypes that meet the needs of our customers. Those capabilities include next generation multi domain counter UAS solutions, key technologies underpinning next generation command and control architectures, and cutting edge space sensing capabilities, among others. In the quarter, we demonstrated counter UAS mission execution from both unmanned ground and unmanned naval platforms, further validating a platform agnostic approach where our enabling technologies can be integrated into virtually any platform. We also released Thor, a tactical high performance embedded computing product. Thor is an open architecture rugged chassis designed to deliver high density processing as a tactical edge with native support for AI enabled operations and multi sensor data fusion. We remain deeply committed to a truly open architecture approach giving our customers the flexibility deploy best of breed hardware and software solutions not blocked to a single provider. Our approach is open, flexible, modular and affordable enabling customers to scale sustainably. Our capabilities extend beyond hardware into integration and software. We apply the same open and modular philosophy to software as we do hardware. Our platform level operating system Sage Core accelerates data fusion across disparate sensor and effective solutions, converting that data into actionable intelligence for improved and faster decision making. Sage Core is a key component of the integrated counter UAS solution being tested with our NAEP customers today. Our innovation and growth initiatives are backstopped by customer trust earned through consistent execution. As we add new efforts to the portfolio including the SDA Tracking Layer Trots 3 program, we’re applying the same operational rigor that guides execution across the company. Our customers operate in some of the most demanding and consequential environments in the world and earning their trust requires more than great technology. It requires consistent, reliable delivery and partnership. We take that mandate seriously and our ultimate measure of success is enduring, ensuring that our customers have what they need when they need it. We believe that solid execution enables growth and that philosophy and that philosophy is embedded in everything that we do. With that, I’ll turn it over to Mike to walk through the financials.
Mike DePold (Chief Financial Officer)
Thanks John. John covered the strategic backdrop and why our portfolio remains well positioned. Let me walk through first quarter results by key metric and then discuss our revised 2026 outlook. Overall, our first quarter results were well above the framework we provided on our last call as both revenue and profitability came in stronger than expected. Revenue in the first quarter was 846 million up 6% year over year. Quarterly revenue exceeded expectations on favorable receipt timing and the year over year growth came from programs related to tactical radars, infrared sensing and electric power and propulsion. The strong contribution from tactical radars and infrared sensing was evident in the increased ASC segment revenue. …
This post was originally published here
