BALL CORPORATION (BALL): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $63.77, BALL CORPORATION (BALL) is priced for +3.5% growth. boothcheck publishes no house fair value, target price, or buy/sell rating; individual model outputs and user-controlled scenarios are analytical inputs, not Boothcheck targets. Narrative composed 2026-07-25.

Generated: 2026-08-30 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/BALL

Headline

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.

Solve inputs: computed at a 7.1% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage.

How unusual the bet is: within-range (limited comparison data)

Valuation X-Ray

The price is justified by relative-multiple and growth-DCF; earnings-power land below the price.

How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.

Families that justify the price: Relative, Growth Families that call it expensive: Earnings

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 9.0%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=16)

Economic-Unit Decomposition (Sum Of The Parts)

The disclosed units share an operating capital structure; consolidated cash-flow lenses remain coherent and the unit split is explanatory.

No total common-equity value is stated. One or more material units lack a supported unit value. The displayed values are an indicative subtotal; consolidated debt and cash cannot be applied to a fraction of the company.

Solvency

Operating profit is negative or near zero and the company has no demonstrated through-cycle (mid-cycle) operating margin to normalize against, so years-to-repay cannot be computed honestly.

Operating profit is negative or near zero and there is no demonstrated through-cycle (mid-cycle) operating margin to normalize against, so interest coverage cannot be computed honestly.

Bullet Takeaways

• All three of Ball's regional can businesses earned more in 2025 than in 2024: comparable operating earnings of $772 million in North and Central America, $495 million in EMEA, and $327 million in South America, where segment margin ran at 15 percent, the best of the three.
• The concentration risk cuts in both directions, and the FY2025 10-K states the narrower half of it plainly: "Our packaging businesses have a narrow product range, and our business would suffer if usage of our products decreased or if decreases occur in the demand for the beverages and other goods filled in our products."
• The next real information arrives with second-quarter results on August 4, 2026, where enterprise volume against the 2 to 3 percent full-year growth range management framed in May is the number that decides the year.

Bull Case

A hundred-year-old metal converter does not usually get read as a growth business, and understanding why this one does starts with what its revenue line actually measures. Ball's sales move with the price of aluminum rather than with its own commercial progress, because the contracts are built that way. The FY2025 10-K describes container sales contracts "that include aluminum-based pricing terms that generally reflect the same price fluctuations under commercial purchase contracts for aluminum sheet". Take the metal back out and what remains is volume multiplied by a converting spread. That is the business. It is also why the top line is the least informative number in the filing.

Underneath it, all three regions moved the same direction in 2025. North and Central America, which the 10-K identifies as "Ball's largest segment, accounting for 48 percent of consolidated net sales in 2025", produced $772 million of comparable operating earnings, against $747 million in 2024 and $710 million in 2023, on segment sales of $6,286 million. EMEA ran $354 million, then $416 million, then $495 million across those same three years, with segment margin climbing from 10 percent to 12 percent. South America earned $327 million at a 15 percent segment margin, the highest of the three. Three regions, three different consumer cycles, one direction of travel.

South America is the piece worth slowing down on. "Four companies currently manufacture substantially all of the aluminum beverage containers in the regions served by our beverage packaging, South America, segment." Ball's plants there shipped roughly 20 billion containers during 2025. Four producers supplying a continent is not a structure a new entrant disrupts by building one line and cutting price, because can plants are capital-heavy, they have to run more or less continuously to make money, and the freight cost of moving empty containers any distance keeps supply regional by physics rather than by agreement. The 15 percent margin is what that structure looks like once it reaches the accounts.

Set against the wider packaging cohort, those regional economics hold up. CCK, the closest listed comparable in beverage cans, carries a 12.2 percent operating margin on $12.7 billion of trailing revenue growing 7.0 percent. PKG earns 11.7 percent, GPK 7.0 percent on a revenue line that was marginally lower year over year, and OI, whose glass containers compete for the same shelf, sits near break-even at 0.2 percent. Ball's segment margins are struck on the company's own comparable basis, which sets aside business consolidation charges, so the comparison is directional rather than exact. Directionally it puts Ball at the profitable end of its own industry, with its South American business above everything in it.

The capital allocation record needs no management commentary to read. Share count has fallen about 4.8 percent a year over the four years to March 2026, and in the second quarter of 2025 Ball entered an accelerated repurchase agreement to buy 250 million dollars of its own shares. A shrinking denominator sitting under rising segment earnings is the whole compounding mechanic here, and unlike a volume forecast, it has already happened.

The customer base is an asset and a dependency in the same sentence. Ball sells "mainly to large, multinational beverage, personal care and household products companies with which we have developed long-term relationships", and the filing adds that "This is evidenced by our high customer retention and our large number of long-term supply contracts." The bear reads that as concentration, and the bear has a point. The bull reads the identical sentence as multi-year visibility on volume in a business whose plants must run continuously to earn anything at all, which is the difference between a factory and a bet.

Bear Case

The uncomfortable structural fact about converting metal into cans is that the converter is rarely the most powerful party at its own table. On one side sit the aluminum rolling mills. On the other sit a handful of the largest beverage companies in the world. Ball's own risk disclosure puts the dependency in writing: "Because we depend on a relatively limited number of major customers, our business, financial condition or results of operations could be adversely affected by the loss of any of these customers", and the same passage notes those contracts are terminable in specified circumstances, including a failure to meet quality, volume or pricing requirements. The filing then narrows the point further: "Our packaging businesses have a narrow product range, and our business would suffer if usage of our products decreased or if decreases occur in the demand for the beverages and other goods filled in our products." A can line cannot be repurposed into something else while it waits.

That is the business today's price has to be underwritten against. At $63.82 the market is paying about 22 times company-wide operating income, and what that price requires is operating profit compounding around 3.8 percent a year for five years before settling into a slower long-run pace. The rate on its own is not heroic, and it sits inside what Ball has recently delivered. The demand is the duration. Five uninterrupted years of compounding in a business whose volume ultimately tracks how much beer and soda gets drunk, across three regions with different currencies and different consumer cycles, is a longer clean run than the category tends to hand out. If it breaks, what corrects first is the multiple, not the earnings.

The industry's own cost structure is what makes a soft year expensive. The 10-K describes a market "which is relatively capital intensive and characterized by facilities that run more or less continuously in order to operate profitably". Fixed-cost leverage is a wonderful thing on the way up, which is most of what the 2023 to 2025 segment progression shows. It works identically in reverse. A volume year that lands a few points below plan does not shave a few points off earnings; it removes the contribution that was covering plants which keep running regardless.

The valuation methods split cleanly on this question. Peer multiples and the forward cash-flow methods reach the price. The earnings-power methods, which value the company on what it earns right now and credit no growth at all, land a long way beneath it: the price sits roughly 128 percent above where that family of methods centers. The most literal of them takes a five-year average of operating income, about 0.72 billion dollars, taxes it, and capitalizes the result as a perpetuity that never grows. That is a deliberately unfriendly lens, and it is the nearest thing on offer to a floor if 2025's improvement turns out to have been the top of a cycle rather than a new plateau.

Meanwhile the balance sheet moved the opposite way from the share count. Long-term debt stood at 6,991 million dollars at the end of 2025 against 5,312 million a year earlier, per the debt note in the FY2025 10-K, with part of the increase raised in euros: 850 million euros of 4.25 percent senior notes due 2032 issued in May 2025, alongside a 500 million dollar repayment on the revolving facility. Borrowing in the currency the EMEA plants earn is sensible hedging. It is still more borrowed money, taken on in the same window the company was retiring stock, and it is why a disappointing volume year now lands harder than the same year would have landed two years ago.

The region carrying the best margin is also the least predictable one. South America is 16 percent of the business and the place where currency, inflation and consumer spending swing hardest, and the pattern showed up immediately in 2026: volumes there fell in the first quarter and then recovered by roughly 20 percent in April against the prior April. That is a business with a genuine 15 percent margin and a genuinely wide distribution around it. The five straight years of compounding the price asks for has to survive at least one full turn of that cycle, and probably two.

Valuation

Begin with what $63.82 assumes. The market is paying about 22 times company-wide operating income, and inverting that price gives a concrete requirement: operating profit growing roughly 3.8% a year for five years, then fading to a slower terminal pace. Measured against what Ball has recently delivered, the rate is ordinary. The length of the run is the actual ask, and it is the only part of the assumption that has to be believed rather than observed.

The methods used to triangulate the price disagree in a specific and readable way. The price sits about 5 percent above where the forward-growth methods center, about 16 percent above the peer-multiple methods, about 42 percent above the asset-value methods, and about 128 percent above the earnings-power methods. Read as a pattern rather than as a list, that is a company priced on continuation. The approaches that credit forward growth and current market comparables defend today's price comfortably. The approaches that freeze earnings where they sit today do not come close.

The two ends of the spread are worth naming, because they are answering different questions. The cash-flow method that reaches highest holds the multiple the shares trade on today flat all the way to its final projected year, which makes it a statement about how the market will price cans at the end of the decade rather than a statement about the cans. At the other end, the earnings-power method averages five years of operating income, roughly 0.72 billion dollars, taxes it, and capitalizes it forever without growth. The gap between the two is the content. Most of what the buyer pays today rests on the business continuing to improve, not on what it currently earns.

Cohort position sharpens rather than settles it. CCK, the nearest listed beverage-can comparable, carries a 12.2 percent operating margin on $12.7 billion of trailing revenue growing 7.0 percent. PKG earns 11.7 percent, GPK 7.0 percent on revenue that slipped slightly year over year, and OI sits near break-even at 0.2 percent. Ball's own regional margins, struck on the comparable basis its filing uses, run 12 percent in North and Central America, 12 percent in EMEA and 15 percent in South America. That places the operating business at the strong end of its industry, which is a different statement from saying the price is at the strong end of the industry's multiples.

The balance sheet is the last input and it is pulling in two directions at once. Share count has come down about 4.8 percent a year over four years to March 2026, which is repurchase deployment appearing in the one place it cannot be dressed up. Long-term debt went the other way, reaching 6,991 million dollars at the end of 2025 from 5,312 million, funding plants and bolt-on acquisitions alongside those repurchases. At current earnings neither the servicing burden nor the cash generation is under visible strain. What the added borrowing removes is slack: with five years of compounding already embedded in the price, a soft volume year now shows up in the earnings and in the multiple at the same time.

Catalysts

The most recent print was a genuine step up. First-quarter 2026 revenue came in at $3.60 billion against $3.10 billion in the same quarter of 2025, roughly 16 percent higher, with comparable operating earnings up about 10 percent year over year. Management attributed part of the gain to the integration of Benepack, and reaffirmed a full-year outlook built on double-digit growth in comparable diluted earnings per share.

Benepack is the reason EMEA capacity is worth watching this year. Ball agreed in December 2025 to acquire 80 percent of Benepack's European beverage can operations, two plants located in Belgium and Hungary, for total consideration of about 184 million euros, and completed the purchase in late January 2026. It lands in the segment whose comparable operating earnings climbed from $354 million in 2023 to $495 million in 2025, so the integration either extends that trajectory or interrupts it, and the answer starts showing in the segment line this year.

Second-quarter results are scheduled for August 4, 2026, before the New York open. Two things in that release matter more than the headline. The first is enterprise volume against the 2 to 3 percent full-year range management framed in May, with North America running toward the lower end on capacity constraints and the enterprise toward the upper end. The second is South America, which fell in the first quarter and then ran roughly 20 percent above the prior year in April. Whether that April recovery held through the summer is the single cleanest read available on the highest-margin part of the company.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Beverage Packaging, North and Central America / Beverage Packaging, EMEA / Beverage Packaging, South America (reported)

• AMCR (AMCOR PLC)
• FY2025 10-K: …more than 40 countries. Se e Note 4 , " Acquisitions and Divestitures " f or more information on the Berry acquisition. Today, we are the global leader in developing and producing responsible consumer packaging and dispensing solutions across a variety of materials for nutrition, health, beauty and wellness…
• FY2025 10-K: …innovation and design, to the work we undertake within our own operations and with our upstream and downstream partners to develop a more responsible packaging value chain. We believe there will always be a role for the primary packaging we produce to preserve food, beverages, and healthcare products, as well as…
• CCK (CROWN HOLDINGS, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …CUSTOMERS The Company's largest beverage can customers consist of many of the leading manufacturers and marketers of packaged consumer products in the world, including Anheuser-Busch InBev, Coca-Cola, Heineken, Keurig Dr Pepper, Molson Coors, Pepsi-Cola, and Refresco, among others. In addition to sales to Coca-Cola…
• FY2025 10-K: U.S. dollar results by the current year average foreign exchange rates and then multiplying those amounts by the applicable prior year average exchange rates. NET SALES AND SEGMENT INCOME 2025 2024 Net sales $12,365 $11,801 Year ended December 31, 2025 compared to 2024 Net sales increased primarily due to $507 from…
• GPK (Graphic Packaging Holding Co)
• FY2025 10-K: …customers include GlaxoSmithKline, Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott, Novartis, L'Oréal S.A., Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. The Company also sells paperboard in the open market to independent and integrated paperboard packaging producers. Sales of the Company's principal products are primarily accomplished…
• FY2025 10-K: …liquidity considerations. Products During the first quarter of 2025, the Company realigned its financial reporting structure under two reportable segments, Americas Paperboard Packaging and International Paperboard Packaging. The Company's reportable segments are described as follows: Americas Paperboard Packaging…
• PKG (PACKAGING CORP OF AMERICA)
• FY2025 10-K: …America. We operate ten mills and 91 corrugated products plants and related facilities. We are headquartered in Lake Forest, Illinois and operate in the United States. We report in three reportable segments: Packaging, Paper and Corporate and Other. For segment financial information see Note 19, Segment Information,…
• FY2025 10-K: New and Recently Adopted Accounting Standards 30 Non-GAAP Financial Measures 31 Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk 33 Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data 34 Item 9. Changes In and Disagreements With Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure 76 Item 9A. Controls…
• IP (INTERNATIONAL PAPER COMPANY)
• FY2025 10-K: …products industry. See Note 21 - Financial Information by Business Segment of Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data for further details regarding the Company's business segments. The majority of our business is focused on creating fiber-based packaging that protects and promotes goods, enables worldwide…
• FY2025 10-K: Anders Gustafsson / S / J ACQUELINE C. H INMAN Director February 27, 2026 Jacqueline C. Hinman 131 Table of Contents /s/ C LINTON A. L EWIS, JR. Director February 27, 2026 Clinton A. Lewis, Jr. / S / D AVID A. R OBBIE Director February 27, 2026 David A. Robbie /s/ K ATHRYN D. S ULLIVAN Director February 27, 2026…
• SLGN (SILGAN HOLDINGS INC)
• FY2025 10-K: …our products primarily by a direct sales force, including manufacturer's representatives, and for our custom containers business, in part, through a network of distributors. Because of the high cost of transporting empty containers, our metal containers business generally sells to customers within a 300 mile radius…
• FY2025 10-K: …in our dispensing and specialty closures business as compared to 2025, with continued growth in dispensing products. We are a leading manufacturer and supplier of metal containers in North America and Europe, primarily as a result of our acquisitions but also as a result of growth with existing customers. During the…
• OI (O-I GLASS, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …cost position and driving profitable growth. The Fit to Win initiative will deliver immediate cost benefits, while the long-term strategy focuses on substantially improving the competitive position. By deepening penetration in core markets and expanding into development and seedling markets, the Company aims to…
• FY2025 10-K: …2%. Average selling prices declined, which decreased net sales by $14 million in 2025. Glass container shipments, in tons, were down approximately 3% in 2025 (down approximately 2.5% excluding the impact of divestitures), which decreased net sales by approximately $172 million compared to the prior year. The Company…

Methodology Note

• Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
• Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
• Economic-unit decomposition (SOTP): each disclosed business unit is assigned its native valuation basis before any multiple is applied. Operating units are valued on enterprise value; funded financial units are valued on their own common equity, because their borrowings fund earning assets rather than levering the parent. A company total is stated only once every material unit carries a supported value and the parent capital bridge reconciles.
• Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
• Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.

Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.