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Good morning.
Boston Scientific is paying a hefty price for its flimsy firewall. The medical device maker announced Tuesday that it expects to miss its quarterly and full-year financial targets after a cyberattack left its global operations mired in “disruptions and limitations of access” and temporarily prevented it from processing and shipping orders. Shares in the company fell 5.9%.
Boston Scientific said in a filing that, while much of its operations are back to normal and the unauthorized access has ceased, some affected systems are still being worked on and “the timeline for a full restoration is not yet known.” What is known is that the ordeal has been enough to jeopardize management’s 5.5% to 6.5% annual sales growth forecast. It’s fair to say the immediate future, like any formerly compromised servers, remains cloud-y.
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MARKETS
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Stock data as of market close on September 8, 2026.
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On Tuesday, GE Aerospace announced its largest deal yet in the post GE-breakup era, and it’s an acquisition straight out of central casting.
The industrial giant agreed to pay nearly $12 billion for longtime castings supplier Consolidated Precision Products (CPP). Sure, it may appear as a ho-hum example of vertical integration, but a confluence of forces has made castings the chokepoint of a pan-industrial bottleneck and bringing the supplier in-house places GE Aerospace in the center of the industry.
Cast Away
Casting, or the process of pouring liquid hot metal into molds to create new component pieces, may sound simple. But for the incredibly complex modern aircraft engines and equipment made by GE Aerospace, it’s a process that can actually take years, if not decades, hence the intense bottleneck bedeviling the entire industrial machines business. While CPP has been a supplier to GE Aerospace for more than 15 years, the company said Tuesday that it will continue to maintain “a significant book of third-party business” once it’s brought in-house. That includes business with a who’s who of heavyweight names including Honeywell, RTX and Lockheed Martin. CPP expects to garner about $2 billion in revenue during its fiscal 2027, with about 60% stemming from commercial aerospace clients and another 20% from the defense sector.
For GE Aerospace, which is buying CPP at about 26 times its projected 2027 earnings, the acquisition represents a critical chance to expand its own production capacity, which has been thoroughly outstripped by a post-pandemic boom in demand:
- In its most recent earnings call, GE Aerospace said its backlog had ballooned to $210 billion. That comes as the company, a major supplier for both Boeing and Airbus, says orders for its commercial engines are up about 50% through the first half of the year.
- At the same time, the company has copped to significant delays due to supply-chain snags. In the second quarter, spare parts delinquencies and delays increased 20% from the prior quarter, CFO Rahul Ghai said in a conference call with analysts.
  SpaceX Marks the Spot: The company’s investment “in mission-critical casting capacity is needed to support the strong simultaneous demand across commercial engines, aftermarket and defense,” CEO Larry Culp said in a statement Tuesday. Culp is far from the only industrial CEO who sees castings as mission critical these days. The deal, expected to close in the second half of next year, comes just after Elon Musk suggested SpaceX could move to develop its own in-house casting capacity as its AI unit faces a shortage of power turbines.
Written by Brian Boyle
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Photo via Sprott
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The World Nuclear Symposium kicked off in London today, focused on the international plan to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. Speakers will include the CEOs of Cameco and Kazatomprom, the two largest uranium producers.
On many attendees’ minds will be uranium’s current supply problem. For 13 years, utilities haven’t contracted enough uranium to replace what their reactors use, a shortfall projected to reach 1.25bn pounds of the cosmic rock by 2045. The pledge to triple nuclear capacity could push that toward 2.75bn.
When a resource turns scarce and demand climbs, prices can follow. Here are two ways to get direct exposure:
Access this nuclear shift in your portfolio with Sprott.*
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Winter is coming, bringing cooler temperatures but no reprieve for geopolitical hot zones. It’s a good time to be the world’s largest defense contractor.
On Tuesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that EU member states had approved the use of 3.2 billion euros (roughly $3.7 billion) of its 90 billion-euro Ukraine Support Loan to buy Patriot interceptor missiles. The news comes amid depletion of Ukraine’s air defenses while Russia is expected to ramp up attacks as the cold season approaches.
Lockheed Martin stands to benefit from the EU’s agreement: It manufactures the Patriot’s PAC-3 MSE interceptor missiles.
Rallying on Replenishments
Lockheed Martin has been boosted by broad missile demand as Western countries look to refill their missile stockpiles and build their arsenals. Just this week, Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson said Sweden was buying its HIMARS artillery rocket system in a deal worth roughly $728.8 million.
But the company has been racking up sales closer to home, too. In late July, the US government awarded Lockheed Martin a seven-year contract for up to $53.86 billion for its missile interceptors, which brought its total multi–year contract value to $58.62 billion. The money will allow Lockheed Martin to triple capacity by the end of the decade, the company said. The US has been working on replenishing its weaponry stockpiles, which were considered insufficient even before the war with Iran (despite the president saying last week that the country has “virtually unlimited amounts” of ammunition).
Wall Street seems to think Lockheed Martin’s success isn’t just a short-term surge in defense spending:
- UBS just upgraded the company’s stock to buy from neutral and raised its 12-month price target to $674 from $581. The stock ticked up 2% for the day and has gained roughly 8% this year.
- In the second quarter, Lockheed’s sales jumped 11% year over year to $20 billion, and the company hiked its full-year revenue forecast to as much as $81.75 billion.
Other Winners: Despite the world being rife with conflict, Investor’s Business Daily recently reported that its aerospace/defense industry group tracker has notched fewer gains than might be expected. (There’s often a lag between when companies win orders and those orders being reflected in a stock price.) But there have been some standouts. SIFCO Industries, which makes forgings and machined components, has surged 272% this year. Aerospace and defense company Astronics is up 62%, and Ducommun, an engineering company, is up 74%.
Written by Mallika Mitra
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Photo via Alumni Ventures
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The world’s two biggest chipmakers have seen the (ultraviolet) light.
ASML announced Tuesday that Samsung and TSMC agreed to adopt its high-numerical aperture (NA) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines to manufacture semiconductors by 2028 and 2030, respectively. If that sounds like too much technical mumbo jumbo, basically it means the already flush company’s photolithography machines could soon print money.
UV Monopoly Protection
The list of companies that can make extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, which are essential to manufacturing the most advanced semiconductors for AI, smartphones and high-end computing, is as follows: ASML. This 100% commercial monopoly has helped lift shares in the Dutch firm 126% in the past year. The more AI demand intensifies, the more demand for AI infrastructure intensifies and the greater the need for ASML’s machines to print the chips needed at new advanced data centers. With Wall Street forecasting trillions of dollars in AI capital expenditures for years, that cycle could run for a while.
ASML, whose machines print microscopic circuit patterns on silicon wafers, debuted its Low NA EUV, now widely used, in 2013. What TSMC and Samsung agreed to adopt on Tuesday is more advanced High NA EUV lithography. It can print smaller features with more precision than Low NA, which means chipmakers can fit more transistors on each semiconductor, increasing their processing power.
Barclays analysts called the announcement a “positive” for High NA EUV machines, viewed as crucial to ASML’s revenue growth. ASML rose 2.91% in New York on Tuesday, and Wall Street sees room for more gains:
- The average target price of $2,414, according to Zacks Investment Research, implies the stock has a 40% upside.
- ASML, Intel, Samsung and TSMC separately agreed Tuesday to double the size of photomasks, the template stencils used to print silicon wafers with UV light, from 6 inches to 12, another step toward faster production.
Poor Imitation: ASML’s stock sank in late July following reports that a state-backed Chinese rival had begun mass-producing ultraviolet lithography tools. At the time, JPMorgan dismissed the selloff as “disproportionate,” noting China has been making lower-end equipment for years “without any impact on ASML’s market share.” Last week, UBS analysts joined in, writing that China is years behind and unlikely to rival ASML’s technology any time soon.
Written by Sean Craig
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Disclaimer
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