Drew FitzGerald
speaker
28 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Drew FitzGerald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
WSJ What’s News · What’s News in Earnings: Soaring Backlogs for Defense Companies · 27 Jul 2026
podcast
Well, the mood among these defense company executives is positive right now.
As you mentioned, Lockheed has a record $230 billion order backlog.
That's up nearly $40 billion this year, largely thanks to a roughly $35 billion deal for THAAD interceptors.
That's a very high-end, powerful missile interceptor that's been used a lot in the Middle East lately and is very backlogged all around the world.
Backlog is soaring, and that doesn't even account for some of these framework agreements that the Pentagon has issued these companies, which are kind of like IOUs.
They're not backed by congressional funding, and congressional funding is a big question for them, whether that will come through.
So that's a possible storm cloud on the horizon, but investors aren't really concerned about that right now because they have so many firm orders already on their books.
So another sign of how much demand is feeding these companies' bottom line, Northrop Grumman said it got the okay to supply solid rocket motors to Lockheed's PAC-3 interceptors.
That's another interceptor that has been used extensively in the Middle East and in Ukraine to knock down ballistic missile threats and also other types of missiles targeting cities and military installations.
That's an investment that Northrop made a while ago anticipating this boom in demand before it actually hit.
Now, not all of this is being fed by the war with Iran.
The Pentagon was pushing for this dramatic upscaling of production of high-end missiles more than a year ago.
But the war with Iran has really added urgency to some of these orders.
There's been lots of carrot for these companies, not as much stick.
These contractors have been dialing back their stock buybacks, it's true, but certainly not their dividends or their executive bonuses.
That's partly because they're pledging to hit their targets even without front-loading all of these big investments in new factories.
There have been plenty of ribbon-cuttings over the past year, but Lockheed's capital spending projections for this year are actually down.
That's because executives say they've found more efficiencies and are managing to get production up faster.
without spending as much as they thought they might have to early on.
Well, let's start with Boeing.
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