BRUKER CORPORATION (BRKR): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $58.50, BRUKER CORPORATION (BRKR) is priced for +24.4% 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: 2026-09-07 · Exported: 2026-09-09 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/BRKR

Headline

FieldValue
TickerBRKR
CompanyBRUKER CORPORATION
Sector / IndustryTechnology
Current price$58.50/sh
CompositionBSI BioSpin 26% / BSI CALID 35% / BSI NANO 32% / BEST 8%

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)4.4%
Operating margin (mid-cycle)10.4%
Margin compression (value-band)-6.0pp
Trailing margin (depressed year)1.3%
Implied growth24.4%
Multiple paid30x 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 8.7% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage.

How unusual the bet is: n/a

ReferenceValue
vs own history+1.02σ

Valuation X-Ray

Every valuation family lands below the price. The price therefore sits beyond what those standard frames encode.

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
Asset3.81x2expensive
Earnings3.55x1expensive
Relative0
Growth1.52x2expensive

Families that call it expensive: Asset, Earnings, Growth

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 7.9%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=5)

ModelFamilyFVPrice/FVApplicableMethodology
DCF Perpetual GrowthGrowth$0.00noFCF base $0.1B, growth 0% (input: historical growth), terminal g 0.5%, WACC 7.9%, 5yr projection
DCF Exit MultipleGrowth$40.271.45xyesExit EV/EBITDA: 36.0x / 38.0x / 40.0x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull), 5yr
Relative ValuationRelativenoP/S fallback (negative EPS): Sector P/S 2.5x × TTM revenue — excluded from consensus
Simple DDMGrowthno
Two-Stage DDMGrowthno
Simple Excess ReturnAsset$16.213.61xyesReference only (book value floor): BV/sh $16.21, ROE negative
Two-Stage Excess ReturnAsset$14.594.01xyesReference only (book value with convergence): BV/sh $16.21, ROE converges to ke
Discounted Future Market CapGrowth$36.801.59xyesRev $3.5B, growth 0% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 2.2x / 2.6x / 3.0x (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$16.493.55xyesNormalized EBIT (5y avg op income, one-time charges added back) $0.37B × (1−11%) / WACC 7.9% → EPV (no growth)
Residual IncomeAssetno
Graham NumberAssetno
EV/EBITDA RelativeRelativenoEBITDA $0.27B × sector EV/EBITDA 12.0x
FCF YieldEarnings$0.015850.00xyesFCF $51.3M / Kₑ 9.3% — zero-growth perpetuity (excluded from median)
SBC-Adj FCF YieldEarnings$0.015850.00xyesSBC-adj FCF $0.03B (FCF $0.05B − SBC $0.02B) capitalized at Kₑ (excluded from median)
Ben Graham FormulaEarningsno
ROIC-Justified P/BAsset$0.46127.17xyesBV $16.21 × (ROIC 0.2% / WACC 7.9%) (excluded from median)
P/Sales SectorRelativenoRevenue $3.46B × sector P/S 2.5x
PEG Fair ValueRelativeno
Earnings YieldEarningsno
Funds From Operations MultipleRelativeno
Clinical Phase NPVGrowthno
MertonAssetno
V5 Mechanicalno

Economic-Unit Decomposition (Sum Of The Parts)

One or more material disclosed units has unresolved economics. Unknown/general is not evidence of homogeneity: segment SOTP is primary but incomplete, consolidated cash flow may remain only a secondary cross-check when every unit shares an enterprise basis, and one sector multiple or target margin is withheld.

UnitRoleValuation basisRevenueReported profitValue evidenceStatus
BSI BioSpinoperatingenterprise$878.8mwithheldunresolved no unit value
BSI CALIDoperatingenterprise$1.2bwithheldunresolved no unit value
BSI NANOoperatingenterprise$1.1bwithheldunresolved no unit value
BESToperatingenterprise$263.2mwithheldunresolved no unit value

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

FieldValue
Net debt$1.6b
Net debt / NOPAT (after-tax)4.91x
Net debt / operating income (pre-tax)4.35x
Interest coverage6.0x
Share count CAGR (dilution)0.2%
Burning cashno

Leverage and coverage are computed on normalized mid-cycle operating income (mid-cycle margin 10.4%); the trailing year was depressed.

Bullet Takeaways

Bull Case

Follow the trajectory rather than the level. Revenue in the first quarter of 2026 came in at 823.4 million dollars, up 2.7% on the year, while organic revenue fell 4.4% and diluted earnings under standard accounting dropped to two cents a share from eleven. That is a poor quarter by any reading. Underneath it, orders were doing something different: bookings for the instruments segment grew at a high single-digit organic rate and the book-to-bill ratio stayed above 1.0 for a third consecutive quarter. In capital equipment, orders arrive two or three quarters before the revenue does. The reported line is describing the past.

What the orders are for is a genuinely broad catalogue. The 10-K lists the platforms plainly: "magnetic resonance, mass spectrometry, gas and liquid chromatography, X-ray, microscopy, metrology", sold into "life and materials science research, biopharmaceuticals, applied markets, microbiology, in-vitro diagnostics, and nanotechnology". The largest of the four businesses, BSI CALID, serves "pharmaceutical, biotechnology and diagnostics companies, contract research organizations, academic institutions, medical" customers. That mix matters because the pressure of the last two years has come from one customer type, academic and government buyers, not from all of them at once.

The margin question is where the argument gets interesting. The trailing operating margin sits at roughly 0.1%, which for a company with more than three billion dollars of revenue means the year's profit essentially disappeared. But the through-cycle figure for this same business is 10.4%, and the difference is not a mystery. In the second quarter of 2025 "the Company initiated a corporate-wide restructuring plan to be implemented across multiple functions and geographies to address macroeconomic conditions and uncertainties challenges, drive cost efficiencies and margin improvements, as well as to address lower demand levels". Restructuring charges, impairments and the cost of integrating recent acquisitions all land in the same reported line. Strip the cycle out and the business has demonstrated roughly ten cents of operating profit per revenue dollar. It is currently earning none.

That leaves real headroom, and the peer group shows where the ceiling sits. A runs a 21.5% operating margin, DHR 19.2%, TMO 17.5% and WAT 16.0%, all selling similar instruments into overlapping laboratories. Bruker's own through-cycle rate is roughly half the best of them, which is either a permanent structural deficit or a target. Management has been willing to commit publicly to targets before: since 2009 it has raised guidance on 14 separate occasions and cut it on 7, a ratio that suggests a team that generally forecasts its own business accurately rather than one that habitually promises.

The bull case is therefore narrow and testable. It requires the order book that is already above one to convert, the restructuring to hold, and the academic funding environment to stop deteriorating. None of those requires a new technology or a new market. It requires the same company doing what it did before the last two years.

Bear Case

What sits inside this price is not a growth rate. It is a duration. At today's level the market pays about 32 times the operating income this business earns across a full cycle, and that multiple resolves into an assumption that operating profit compounds at the fastest pace the company can self-fund for roughly 5.6 years. The near-term pace is not the fragile part; the company has delivered that rate in stretches. The fragile part is how long it must hold. Of comparable fast growers, only about 34% sustained that pace for that long.

Start with where the recent growth actually came from. The FY2025 10-K attributes the revenue increase to acquisitions, stating it was "driven mostly by ELITechGroup within the BSI CALID Microbiology & Infection Diagnostics division and NanoString within the BSI NANO Bruker Spatial Biology division, partially offset by organic revenue decline". Bought growth masking organic contraction is a pattern with a short shelf life, because the acquisitions stop being new and the underlying trend reappears. It reappeared in the first quarter of 2026, when organic revenue fell 4.4%.

Some of those purchases have already been marked down. The company tested goodwill and found that "the carrying amount of the Bruker Spatial Biology (\"BSB\") reporting unit within the Company's BSI NANO Segment and Automation (\"AUT\") reporting unit within the Company's BSI BioSpin\" required impairment charges recognized for the period ended September 30, 2025. An impairment is an admission, in accounting form, that the price paid assumed cash flows that are no longer expected.

The demand side is exposed to a variable no management team controls. The 10-K is direct about it: "Any changes in capital spending or changes in the capital budgets of our customers could significantly reduce demand for our products", and it notes that the business depends on "the financial condition and funding priorities of various governments and government agencies". Research instruments are discretionary capital purchases with multi-year lives. A laboratory under budget pressure does not buy half a mass spectrometer; it waits a year. That makes revenue lumpy in exactly the direction that damages a company carrying debt.

And it does carry debt. Net borrowings stand at about 1.6 billion dollars, or roughly 4.58 times operating profit, with operating income covering the interest bill about 5.5 times over. Both of those ratios are computed on what the business earns in a normal year, not on what it is earning now, which is close to nothing. That is the correct way to measure a cyclical company and also the reason the balance sheet is a genuine constraint: the coverage holds if the cycle turns, and the arithmetic gets steadily less comfortable the longer the turn takes to arrive.

The valuation lenses that do not depend on a recovery all land far below the price. The book-value read sits near a quarter of it. A no-growth valuation, which capitalizes a five-year average of operating income with one-off charges added back and assumes the company never grows again, reaches roughly the same place. Only the peer revenue-multiple lens reaches today's price, and it does so by valuing sales rather than profits, which is precisely the metric that flatters a company whose profits have vanished.

Valuation

Two numbers frame everything here, and they are far apart. The trailing operating margin is about 0.1%. The margin this business has earned through a full cycle is 10.4%. Every question about the price reduces to which of those is the better description of the future.

The market has already answered. At 60.45 dollars a share the price works out to roughly 32 times through-cycle operating income, and inverting that multiple gives the assumption in plain terms: operating profit compounding at the fastest rate the company can fund from its own cash flow, sustained for about 5.6 years. Measured against Bruker's own record, that pace is inside what it has delivered before. Measured against everyone else's record, sustaining it that long is the harder half: roughly a third of comparable fast growers managed it. Each additional percentage point of growth shortens the required runway by nearly two years, which is a useful way to see how sensitive the whole structure is to modest changes in execution.

The methods split cleanly along one line: whether they need the recovery to happen. The price sits about 7% above where peer revenue multiples land, close enough to call that lens agreement, and it agrees because revenue never collapsed. Everything anchored to profit or to assets lands far lower. The book-value lens reads the price at close to four times what the balance sheet carries. The no-growth earnings lens, which takes a five-year average of operating income, adds back one-time charges and assumes zero growth forever, sits a similar distance away. The price runs about 52% above the forward cash-flow methods, and those reach even that level only by assuming the business is eventually sold at the same rich valuation it carries right now. Read as a group: nothing but the revenue comparison defends this price without a margin recovery.

The peer set explains why the recovery is plausible and why it is not guaranteed. A earns a 21.5% operating margin on 7.2 billion dollars of revenue, DHR 19.2% on 24.8 billion, TMO 17.5% on 45.2 billion, RVTY 12.4% on 2.9 billion. Bruker's 3.5 billion dollars of revenue sits at the smaller end of that group, and its through-cycle margin of 10.4% is below every one of them. Scale buys purchasing power, service-network density and R&D amortization in this industry, and Bruker has less of all three than the companies it sells against.

The balance sheet sets the clock. Net borrowings of about 1.6 billion dollars work out to roughly 4.58 times operating profit, and operating income covers the interest bill about 5.5 times over, both measured on what a normal year produces rather than on the current trough. The share count has been essentially flat, rising about 0.2% a year over the last four years, so shareholders have not been diluted while this played out. What the buyer at today's price owns is a good instrument franchise at a trough, priced as though the trough is temporary and the recovery arrives in time to compound at the maximum rate the company can fund from its own cash flow, for the full stretch the price assumes.

Catalysts

The first quarter of 2026, reported on May 6, gave both sides something. Revenue of 823.4 million dollars rose 2.7% on the year while organic revenue fell 4.4%, and diluted earnings under standard accounting came in at two cents a share against eleven cents a year earlier. Management attributed the pressure to United States academic demand, tariffs and currency, and noted the quarter still landed ahead of its own expectations.

Guidance was left where it was, which in a year of downward revisions across the sector is itself information. The company continues to expect full-year 2026 revenue of 3.57 billion to 3.60 billion dollars, implying reported growth of 4% to 5% and organic growth of 1% to 2% against 2025 revenue of 3.44 billion. Reaffirming a range after a quarter in which organic revenue declined means management expects the back half to carry the year.

The leading indicator to track is orders rather than revenue. Bookings in the instruments segment grew at a high single-digit organic rate, the book-to-bill ratio stayed above 1.0 for a third consecutive quarter, and management guided to a return to organic revenue growth in the second quarter of 2026 at a low to mid single-digit rate. That second-quarter print is the nearest test of whether the order book converts, and it arrives before any of the longer-dated questions about margins or academic budgets get answered.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

BSI BioSpin (reported)

BSI CALID (reported)

BSI NANO (reported)

BEST (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 earnings release, May 6, 2026

View the full interactive BRKR report on boothcheck