Applied Aerospace & Defense arrived on the New York Stock Exchange on June 3 at $20.00 per share, the first public window into a buy-and-build that private-equity sponsor Greenbriar has been assembling since 2022 out of aerospace and defense component makers with histories stretching back more than a century. Underneath the listing sits a straightforward tension: the operating lines look strong - revenue compounding about 25% a year, adjusted EBITDA margins near 24% - while the bottom line had a net loss in every fiscal year of its run-up, including $17.0 million in fiscal 2025 and $15.1 million in the first quarter of 2026. The two are not contradictory; they are two ends of a balance sheet story. This is a company that borrowed roughly $1 billion to buy itself scale, and nearly every dollar of its profit is still flowing out the door as interest before it ever reaches the equity line.
The fresh capital changes the arithmetic. Net proceeds of roughly $604 million from the offering are earmarked to retire $548 million of term debt and $56 million of a revolving facility, cutting a leverage load that ran about 8.6x adjusted EBITDA at the end of the first quarter down to roughly 3.3x after the deal. The sellers are underwriting that fix: Greenbriar owns about 81% of the company after listing, so the public float is thin relative to the valuation, and management runs a sole-source, IP-driven model in which roughly 83% of revenue traces to U.S. government demand, directly or through prime contractors.
The thesis, then, is a balance-sheet repositioning enabling a cash story to show through. The proof is not the next quarterly revenue print - those are already guided by a $3.8 billion weighted pipeline and roughly $1.06 billion of pro forma backlog - but whether the operating strength converts into actual cash flow and GAAP profitability as interest falls. At roughly $20.59 the stock trades about where it listed, market cap near $3.5 billion, and the market is paying a premium multiple for a business that has not yet demonstrated it can turn adjusted profit into net profit and free cash. That is the open question, and the numbers below are the ones that answer it.