Brunswick Corporation (BC): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $80.44, Brunswick Corporation (BC) is priced for +1.1% 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: 2026-07-29 · Exported: 2026-08-01 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/BC

Headline

FieldValue
TickerBC
CompanyBrunswick Corporation
Sector / IndustryIndustrials
Current price$80.44/sh
CompositionPropulsion 36% / Engine P&A 23% / Navico Group 13% / Boat 28%

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

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

FieldValue
Inversion basiswhole-company
Operating margin (value-band context)5.8%
Operating margin (mid-cycle)11.1%
Margin compression (value-band)-5.3pp
Trailing margin (depressed year)-0.8%
Implied growth1.1%
Multiple paid13x mid-cycle operating income

The operating-margin figure is value-band context at year 12: derived from the framework's value band, a separate calculation — not part of the priced-in solve.

Solve inputs: computed at a 8.9% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage; each 1pp of cost of capital moves the implied operating-profit growth ~5.7pp.

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

ReferenceValue
vs own history-0.21σ
implied end-window share0%

Valuation X-Ray

The price is justified by relative-multiple and growth-DCF; asset-based/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.

FamilyMedian price/FVModelsReads
Asset3.48x2expensive
Earnings3.49x3expensive
Relative0.38x3justifies
Growth0.74x3justifies

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

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 6.6%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=11)

ModelFamilyFVPrice/FVApplicableMethodology
DCF Perpetual GrowthGrowth$208.960.38xyesFCF base $0.4B, growth 9% (input: historical growth), terminal g 4.0%, WACC 6.6%, 6yr projection
DCF Exit MultipleGrowth$108.430.74xyesExit EV/EBITDA: 27.7x / 29.7x / 31.7x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull), 6yr
Relative ValuationRelative$210.010.38xyesP/S fallback (negative EPS): Sector P/S 2.5x × TTM revenue — excluded from consensus
Simple DDMGrowthno
Two-Stage DDMGrowthno
Simple Excess ReturnAsset$24.383.30xyesReference only (book value floor): BV/sh $24.38, ROE negative
Two-Stage Excess ReturnAsset$21.943.67xyesReference only (book value with convergence): BV/sh $24.38, ROE converges to ke
Discounted Future Market CapGrowth$68.591.17xyesRev $5.5B, growth 9% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 0.8x / 1.0x / 1.1x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 8x)
Peter Lynch Fair ValueRelative$0.00noNegative/zero EPS — earnings-based value floored at $0
Margin TrajectoryGrowthno
Earnings Power ValueEarnings$60.491.33xyesNormalized EBIT (5y avg op income, one-time charges added back) $0.52B × (1−22%) / WACC 6.6% → EPV (no growth)
Residual IncomeAssetno
Graham NumberAssetno
EV/EBITDA RelativeRelative$12.846.26xyesEBITDA $0.25B × sector EV/EBITDA 12.0x
FCF YieldEarnings$23.033.49xyesFCF $340.1M / Kₑ 9.3% — zero-growth perpetuity
SBC-Adj FCF YieldEarnings$16.214.96xyesSBC-adj FCF $0.30B (FCF $0.34B − SBC $0.04B) capitalized at Kₑ
Ben Graham FormulaEarningsno
ROIC-Justified P/BAsset$3.8720.79xyesBV $24.38 × (ROIC 1.0% / WACC 6.6%) (excluded from median)
P/Sales SectorRelative$210.010.38xyesRevenue $5.52B × sector P/S 2.5x
PEG Fair ValueRelativeno
Earnings YieldEarningsno
Funds From Operations MultipleRelativeno
Clinical Phase NPVGrowthno
MertonAssetno
V5 Mechanicalno

Solvency

FieldValue
Net debt$2.5b
Net debt / NOPAT (after-tax)5.26x
Net debt / operating income (pre-tax)4.10x
Interest coverage5.7x
Share count CAGR (buyback)-4.0%
Burning cashno

Leverage and coverage are computed on normalized mid-cycle operating income (mid-cycle margin 11.1%); the trailing year was depressed.

Bullet Takeaways

Bull Case

There is a right way and a wrong way to read a mature cyclical near the bottom of its cycle, and the wrong way is to take the trailing income statement literally. Brunswick lost money on operations over the last twelve months. It also has a through-the-cycle operating margin near 11.1%, which is the margin its own history says the business earns when boats are selling normally. Both numbers are real. Only one of them describes the business. The whole bull case is the argument that the trough figure is the temporary one, and the March quarter, where sales rose 13% against the prior year, is the first hard evidence in a while pointing that way.

The reason the recovery leverage sits with Brunswick rather than with a boat builder is that the company sells the part everyone needs. The FY2025 10-K describes its engine business bluntly: "The Propulsion segment designs, manufactures, and sells engines, controls, rigging, and propellers globally to over 900 boat builders (both independent and Brunswick's Boat segment) and a network of more than 9,000 marine dealers and distributors". Mercury outboards hang off the transoms of boats built by competitors. When the marine market recovers, Brunswick participates in most of it regardless of which hull the buyer picks, and its own Boat segment is roughly a quarter of revenue rather than the whole story.

The second structural point is what happens after the boat is sold. The Engine Parts & Accessories distribution operation is described in the filing as "leading distributors of Brunswick and third party marine parts and accessories throughout North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, offering same-day or next-day delivery service to a broad array of marine service facilities". Parts demand tracks boats in the water, not boats being bought. A boat sold four years ago still needs an impeller, an oil change and a propeller this summer, and the owner buying that propeller has no idea whether wholesale ordering is up or down. That is the segment that keeps working while the cyclical one does not. Extended service contracts add to the same effect: the filing notes that extended warranties typically run an additional one to three years, with payment collected up front and revenue recognized across the term.

Brunswick's position in the marine supply chain shows up in other companies' filings too. LCII, a supplier of components across recreational vehicles and marine, lists its customer base in its own 10-K as "Major customers include Brunswick Corporation (symbol: BC), Polaris Inc. (symbol: PII), Blue Bird Corporation (symbol: BLBD), Skyline Champion Corporation (symbol: SKY), and Cavco Industries, Inc. (symbol: CVCO)." Being named first among the customers a components maker builds capacity around is a reasonable proxy for scale in a fragmented industry.

Navico Group is the piece the market probably discounts most and the one with the clearest comparison. It sells marine electronics, and its most obvious competitor is GRMN, which earns a 26.5% operating margin on a much larger revenue base spanning aviation, fitness and automotive. Navico does not earn anything close to that today. What the gap says is that marine electronics carries structurally attractive economics when it is run at scale, and that the distance between Navico's current contribution and what the category can produce is an internal execution problem rather than a market that cannot pay.

Management has behaved as though it believes the trough is temporary. Share count has come down about 4% a year across the four years to April 4, 2026, which is an unusual thing to do while carrying meaningful debt through a downturn. It is also the clearest available statement of where the board thinks the shares are relative to normalized earnings. The bear will say buying stock with borrowed money during a cyclical trough is exactly how balance sheets get damaged. That objection is fair, and the answer is that the company has been retiring its most expensive borrowings at the same time: during 2025 it repaid the remaining principal on its 6.625% Senior Notes due 2049 and its 6.5% Senior Notes due 2048. Buying back stock and retiring high-coupon debt in the same year is a company acting on a view, not drifting.

Bear Case

A boat is bought with borrowed money, on a Saturday, by someone who did not have to buy anything. That single sentence contains most of the bear case. Interest rates set the monthly payment on a purchase nobody needs, and they simultaneously set the cost dealers pay to hold inventory on the lot. When rates rise, both sides of Brunswick's channel tighten at once: the retail buyer walks, and the dealer stops reordering. The company's own risk disclosure describes the mechanism without embellishment: "These factors and recent economic headwinds could weaken demand for marine products and result in sustained lower dealer stocking levels." Sustained is the word that matters. A weak quarter is a quarter; sustained destocking is a repricing of the entire wholesale run rate.

Trade policy sits on top of that as a second external lever. The FY2025 10-K is direct about it: "In addition to having to pay the tariffs, the volatile trade policy environment may lead to declining consumer confidence, inflation, lower economic expectations, and ultimately reduced demand for our products and services." Note the structure of the argument the company itself makes. Tariffs hurt twice, once in the cost of goods and again through the confidence of the customer, and only the first one can be engineered around by moving a supply chain. Fuel is a third lever pulling the same direction, since the filing observes that "Higher energy and fuel costs increase operating expenses at our manufacturing facilities and the cost of shipping products to customers." Higher fuel prices also make a large outboard engine more expensive to actually use.

None of these variables is in Brunswick's control, and today's price does not appear to be charging much for them. The market is paying roughly 13 times a through-the-cycle operating income figure of about 599 million dollars, which asks for only about 1.7% annual growth in operating profit over five years. That looks undemanding until you notice what it assumes. The trailing twelve months produced an operating loss. Getting from a loss to a normalized figure near 600 million is not growth in any ordinary sense; it is a full cycle recovery treated as the starting line. If the recovery is slower than assumed, the price is not paying 13 times anything. It is paying an infinite multiple of what the business is currently earning.

The industry data does not yet say the cycle has turned everywhere. PII, which competes in both powersports and pontoon and deck boats, is running a negative operating margin of about 4.8% on roughly 7.3 billion dollars of revenue. HOG, another maker of expensive financed toys, saw revenue fall about 9.8% year over year. These are not company-specific stumbles; they are the shape of discretionary durables when consumer credit gets expensive. Brunswick's own Boat segment showed the same pattern in 2025, where the filing breaks the sales change into volume down 4.6% and product mix and price up 2.1%. Selling fewer units at higher prices works until it does not, and it is precisely the pattern that precedes a discounting cycle.

The dealer network is the pressure point where all of this lands. The filing states plainly that "Maintaining a reliable network of dealers is essential to our success." and warns that "In addition, dealers or distributors could decide to reduce their level of inventory of our products." Brunswick does not sell to boaters. It sells to dealers who bet their own borrowed working capital on what boaters will do next season. That is a demand signal filtered through someone else's balance sheet, and it turns down faster than end demand does.

Leverage is what converts a soft cycle into a serious problem. Net debt runs about 2.51 billion dollars, roughly 4.19x through-cycle operating profit, with interest covered about 5.4 times on that same normalized basis. Read against trailing operating profit, which is negative, neither ratio exists at all. The company is not burning cash and there is no near-term solvency question, but the honest framing is that the balance sheet is sized for the normalized business and is currently being carried by the trough one. Continuing to retire shares at about 4% a year in that condition is a decision that looks excellent if the cycle turns in 2026 and considerably less so if it does not.

The fair concession is that management has been more right than wrong when it commits to a number. Guidance has been raised on 10 separate occasions since 2011 against only 2 cuts. That is a real track record, and it argues the current normalized framing is not fantasy. It does not, however, change the arithmetic: the price is underwriting a return to through-cycle economics, and the timing of that return is set by interest rates and trade policy rather than by anything the company does in its factories.

Valuation

At $79.83, the market is paying about 13 times Brunswick's through-the-cycle operating income. Invert that arithmetic and the embedded requirement is about 1.7% annual growth in operating profit over five years, which sounds like almost nothing to ask. The catch is hidden in the word through-the-cycle. That normalized figure is close to 599 million dollars, built from the company's own historical margins applied to current revenue, while the last twelve months produced an operating loss of about 32 million. The price is not paying a low multiple of what Brunswick earns. It is paying a moderate multiple of what Brunswick has shown it can earn, and asking for very little on top of that once it gets back there.

That calculation carries a real sensitivity worth stating. It runs at a cost of capital near 9% with a 4% terminal growth rate, and each additional percentage point of cost of capital lifts the required operating-profit growth by roughly 5.8 points. For a company whose end demand is itself set by interest rates, that is a double exposure: rates move the customer's payment and the discount rate at the same time. Treat that implied pace as approximate and directional, not as a measurement.

The methods split cleanly along one line, and the line is whether a method looks at trailing earnings or through them. The approaches built on revenue and on a recovery in cash flow both land above today's price. The earnings-power and book-value approaches land far below it, with the price sitting roughly three and a half times above where the earnings-power methods reach. That is not a signal that the stock is expensive in the usual sense. It is what always happens when you capitalize a cyclical trough: a method that treats the last twelve months as permanent will value a company at a small fraction of what a normalized method does. The reader's job is to decide which of those two descriptions of Brunswick is closer to the truth, and that is genuinely the whole question here.

Two filing-sourced inputs are worth putting under the arithmetic. Navico Group posted net sales of 800.4 million dollars in 2025, which sizes the marine-electronics piece against the roughly 5.5 billion dollars the whole company turns over. And the Boat segment's 2025 sales change decomposes into volume down 4.6% offset by product mix and price up 2.1%, which is the composition of revenue that holds up on paper while unit demand is falling underneath it. Volume, not price, is the variable that has to turn for the normalized margin to come back.

The cohort makes the point about basis rather than about position. Comparing Brunswick's trailing operating margin to PATK at 7.0% or LCII at 7.0% is comparing a trough to a run rate, since those component suppliers serve recreational vehicles and housing alongside marine and their cycles are not synchronized with the outboard market. The more useful comparison is PII, whose marine and powersports mix is closest and which is also running a negative operating margin right now. When the closest comparable is in the same condition, the read is a sector cycle rather than a company problem.

On the balance sheet, net debt of about 2.51 billion dollars sits against a revolving facility of 1.0 billion dollars maturing October 11, 2029, plus a commercial paper program that had 290.0 million dollars outstanding at a 4.27% weighted average rate as of December 31, 2025. Leverage runs about 4.19x through-cycle operating profit and interest is covered about 5.4 times on the same normalized basis. Neither ratio is computable against trailing operating profit, which is negative, and that is the honest boundary on the downside here: the company is not burning cash, the maturities are termed out, and the share count has fallen about 4% a year over four years, but the debt was sized for the business at 11.1% margins and is currently being serviced by a business at a loss.

Catalysts

The next hard data point is five days out. Brunswick reports second-quarter 2026 results on July 30, 2026 before the market opens, with a call that morning hosted by chairman and chief executive David Foulkes and chief financial officer Ryan Gwillim. That print matters more than a typical quarter because the previous one broke the pattern: first-quarter 2026 net sales came in at 1,378.1 million dollars, up 13% against the same quarter of 2025, and GAAP diluted earnings were $0.32 a share.

What made that quarter interesting was the mix underneath it. Mercury reported retail unit growth of about 11% against a U.S. outboard engine industry up about 6% in the quarter, which is share gain rather than a rising tide. Share gains in the engine business are the mechanism by which the normalized margin gets rebuilt, because propulsion carries the segment economics and it reaches boats built by other companies. One quarter is not a trend, and the July print is the first opportunity to see whether the same mix held through the spring selling season, which is when boats are actually bought.

Two variables sit outside the company's reporting calendar and will do more to set the outcome than any single quarter. The first is the rate path, which determines both the retail buyer's payment and the carrying cost of dealer inventory. The second is trade policy, which the FY2025 10-K identifies as a cost and a confidence problem at the same time. Neither resolves on a schedule, which is why the useful thing to track in the July report is not the headline but the dealer stocking commentary: wholesale orders turn before retail does, in both directions.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Propulsion (reported)

Engine P&A (reported)

Navico Group (reported)

Boat (reported)

Methodology Note

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.

Sources

Q1 2026 results, reported April 30, 2026, and Q2 2026 earnings call scheduled for July 30, 2026 · Q1 2026 results, reported April 30, 2026 · FY2025 10-K · Brunswick Q2 2026 earnings call announcement, July 9, 2026 · Brunswick first quarter 2026 results, reported April 30, 2026 · Brunswick first quarter 2026 earnings call, April 30, 2026

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