DUPONT DE NEMOURS, INC. (DD): what the price requires

At today's price, DUPONT DE NEMOURS, INC. (DD) is priced for today's economics sustained for ~23.2 years. boothcheck doesn't publish a fair value or a price target; it shows what the price assumes, so you can judge whether that bar is too high.

Generated: 2026-07-14 · Exported: 2026-07-16 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/DD

Headline

FieldValue
TickerDD
CompanyDUPONT DE NEMOURS, INC.
Current price$132.18/sh
CompositionHealthcare Technologies 26% / Water Technologies 22% / Industrial Technologies 29% / Building Technologies 24%

What The Price Requires (Inversion)

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

FieldValue
Inversion basiswhole-company
Operating margin today4.1%
Must persist for23.2y
Multiple paid220x operating income

Solve inputs: computed at a 10.1% cost of capital; growth searched up to the 25% self-funding ceiling; each 1pp moves the implied horizon ~3 years.

How unusual the bet is: elevated

ReferenceValue
vs own history+1.87σ
sustained it ~10 years at this level15%
implied end-window share1%

Valuation X-Ray

Every valuation family lands below the price. The price therefore requires assumptions 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
Asset4.10x2expensive
Earnings—0—
Relative7.63x2expensive
Growth—0—

Families that call it expensive: Asset, Relative

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

Per-Model Detail (n=4)

ModelFamilyFVPrice/FVApplicableMethodology
DCF Perpetual GrowthGrowth$0.00—noNegative/zero FCF — equity value floored at $0
DCF Exit MultipleGrowth$0.00—noNegative/zero FCF or EBITDA — equity value floored at $0
Relative ValuationRelative$35.263.75xyesP/S fallback (negative EPS): Sector P/S 1.5x × TTM revenue — excluded from consensus
Simple DDMGrowth——no—
Two-Stage DDMGrowth——no—
Simple Excess ReturnAsset$34.013.89xyesReference only (book value floor): BV/sh $34.01, ROE negative
Two-Stage Excess ReturnAsset$30.614.32xyesReference only (book value with convergence): BV/sh $34.01, ROE converges to ke
Discounted Future Market CapGrowth$57.992.28xnoRev $9.7B, growth -11% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 4.8x / 5.6x / 6.5x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 8x)
Peter Lynch Fair ValueRelative$0.00—noNegative/zero EPS — earnings-based value floored at $0
Margin TrajectoryGrowth——no—
Earnings Power ValueEarnings——no—
Residual IncomeAsset——no—
Graham NumberAsset——no—
EV/EBITDA RelativeRelative$11.4911.50xyesEBITDA $0.51B × sector EV/EBITDA 8.0x
FCF YieldEarnings——no—
SBC-Adj FCF YieldEarnings——no—
Ben Graham FormulaEarnings——no—
ROIC-Justified P/BAsset——no—
P/Sales SectorRelative$35.263.75xnoRevenue $9.70B × sector P/S 1.5x
PEG Fair ValueRelative——no—
Earnings YieldEarnings——no—
Funds From Operations MultipleRelative——no—
Clinical Phase NPVGrowth——no—
MertonAsset——no—
V5 Mechanical———no—

Solvency

FieldValue
Net debt$6.5b
Net debt / NOPAT (after-tax)27.66x
Net debt / operating income (pre-tax)22.92x
Share count CAGR (buyback)-23.9%
Burning cashno

Interest expense is not separately reported in the latest filings, so interest coverage cannot be computed.

Bullet Takeaways

Bull Case

Start with the gap between what the trailing numbers show and what the company now is, because for DuPont that gap is the entire opportunity. Run any standard valuation against the last twelve months and the stock looks impossibly expensive, because trailing operating income is a wreck of separation costs, write-downs, and the partial-year noise of carving Qnity Electronics out of the company. That is the wrong picture. The DuPont that exists today spun off its electronics arm on November 1, 2025, distributing one Qnity share for every two DuPont shares, and took in about $4.2 billion of cash that went straight to debt reduction. What is left is a higher-margin, lower-debt company that the trailing income statement has not caught up to.

The first clean quarter shows what the remaining business earns. In the first quarter of 2026, revenue rose 4% to $1.7 billion, operating EBITDA climbed 15% to $414 million, and the operating EBITDA margin expanded 230 basis points to 24.6%. Adjusted earnings per share rose 53% year over year to $0.55, beating expectations. Those are not chemical-commodity margins; they are specialty-materials margins, and they come from franchises with genuine pricing power. The crown jewel is Healthcare and Water, which grew sales 6% at an operating EBITDA margin above 30%, anchored by Tyvek, the nonwoven material used in medical packaging and protective apparel that the company has been expanding, including a roughly $400 million investment in new Tyvek capacity at its Luxembourg site to meet "growing global demand."

The capital story reinforces the bull case. The share count has been falling about 5% a year, real buyback deployment that retires earnings power, and the $4.2 billion of separation proceeds went to deleveraging rather than empire-building. Management has guided full-year 2026 operating EBITDA of $1.73 billion to $1.76 billion on net sales of about $7.2 billion, and analysts covering the post-spin company carry a Buy consensus. The bet is simple: as the separation noise washes out of the reported results, the market sees a focused, cash-returning specialty company earning 24%-plus EBITDA margins, and prices it as one.

Bear Case

The sharpest bear point is not about chemicals at all. It is about a liability that no operating multiple can value: PFAS. DuPont's own 10-K is candid that the exposure is open-ended, stating it is "reasonably possible that the Company could incur additional eligible PFAS costs and Indemnifiable Losses in excess of the amounts accrued" and that "it is not possible to pre"dict the ultimate cost. A cost-sharing arrangement spreads the burden, but the company itself says that arrangement's "ultimate impact on the Company depends on a number of factors and uncertainties." When a company tells you in writing that a liability is unbounded and unpredictable, the prudent reading is that the equity carries a tail risk the operating story does not price. Every dollar of value the bull case builds from margins can be clawed back by a settlement nobody can yet size.

The valuation, read on what the company has actually demonstrated, is the second problem. No family of standard method reaches the price. The asset lens, book value plus returns, sits below it; the peer-multiple lens, valuing the revenue at specialty-chemical multiples, lands well below; and the trailing earnings are so depressed there is no clean earnings-power read at all. The price embeds something like fourteen years of growth held at the self-funding ceiling, a persistence only about 15% of comparable fast-growers have managed. The bull's answer is that the trailing numbers are noise. The bear's answer is that the burden of proof is on the recovery, and until several clean quarters confirm the 24%-plus margins are durable rather than a favorable first print, the price is paying in advance for a normalization that has not been demonstrated across a full year.

There is also a capital-allocation history worth weighing. DuPont is the product of serial mergers, spins, and realignments, the Dow merger and de-merger, the Qnity carve-out, the realignment of business units that the 10-K describes in its own dry language of "realigned certain product lines that comprise its business units." Each restructuring promises a cleaner, more valuable company, and each carries one-time costs, dis-synergies, and the risk that the parts are worth less apart than the slide deck claimed. The buyback is real and the deleveraging is genuine, but a management team that keeps rearranging the portfolio is also a management team whose reported results are perpetually adjusted, which is exactly the condition under which a depressed trailing multiple can stay depressed longer than the bull expects. Net debt of about $6.5 billion against thin trailing operating income leaves less room to absorb a PFAS surprise than the post-spin balance-sheet narrative suggests.

Valuation

The first thing to settle is which earnings to value, because the trailing income statement is misleading. Operating income over the last twelve months is depressed by the costs of separating Qnity and the accounting noise of the carve-out, so reading the price against it produces a multiple near 100 times that means nothing. On that distorted base, the price implies roughly fourteen years of growth held at the self-funding ceiling, a bet only about one fast-grower in seven has sustained even a decade. But the framework is pricing depressed earnings, and the more useful question is what the clean company earns: a first-quarter operating EBITDA margin of 24.6% on a roughly $7.2 billion annual revenue base, guided to $1.73 billion to $1.76 billion of operating EBITDA for the year.

Read against demonstrated fundamentals, no family of method reaches the price, which is what you would expect when the denominator is artificially low. The asset lens, anchored on book value around $34 a share, sits below the price; the peer-multiple lens lands well below; and there is no clean earnings-power read because trailing profit is negative on a GAAP basis. The honest interpretation is not that DuPont is wildly overvalued, it is that the standard methods cannot see through the separation noise, so the price is leaning on the forward recovery the methods structurally exclude. The pattern is a company in transition: the trailing methods say expensive because they are measuring the wrong year, and the price is a bet that the clean run-rate margins hold.

Solvency is where the section has to anchor, and it cuts two ways. The Qnity separation brought in about $4.2 billion that DuPont used to reduce debt, a real improvement, and the share count is shrinking about 5% a year. But net debt still stands near $6.5 billion against trailing operating income that is thin, and the genuinely uncapped item is off the income statement entirely: the PFAS liability the company itself describes as possibly exceeding what it has accrued. The operating downside is bounded by real assets and high-margin franchises; the legal downside is not bounded at all. The buyer at this price is underwriting both a margin normalization that the early prints support and a PFAS outcome that no one, including the company, can yet quantify.

Catalysts

The transformational event is recent and structural: DuPont completed the spin-off of its electronics business as Qnity Electronics on November 1, 2025, distributing one Qnity share for every two DuPont shares held and receiving approximately $4.2 billion in cash that it directed toward debt reduction and growth in its healthcare and water segments. That separation reshaped what DuPont is, leaving a focused specialty company and creating the trailing-versus-reality gap that defines the current setup.

The first full quarter as the slimmed-down company was a beat. First-quarter 2026 revenue rose 4% to $1.7 billion against a roughly $1.66 billion forecast, operating EBITDA increased 15% to $414 million, the operating EBITDA margin expanded 230 basis points to 24.6%, and adjusted EPS rose 53% to $0.55 versus an estimate of $0.49. Healthcare and Water led with 6% sales growth and an operating EBITDA margin above 30%, and the diversified industrials businesses lifted margins to about 22.9% on favorable mix and productivity. On the strength of the quarter, management set full-year 2026 guidance of net sales of about $7.16 billion to $7.22 billion, operating EBITDA of $1.73 billion to $1.76 billion, and adjusted EPS of $2.35 to $2.40.

The forward watch items are the durability of those margins and any movement on PFAS. Analysts covering the post-spin company carry a Buy consensus, reflecting confidence that the cleaner portfolio re-rates as the separation noise clears. The key risk that could interrupt the re-rating is not operational; it is a development in the PFAS litigation or a change in the cost-sharing arrangement, which sits entirely outside the quarterly cadence. Each clean quarter that confirms the run-rate margins, and each quarter without a negative PFAS surprise, is a data point in the bull's favor.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Healthcare & Water Technologies (reported)

Diversified Industrials (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

Qnity separation, November 1, 2025 · Q1 2026 earnings release, May 2026 · Q1 2026 guidance · analyst consensus, 2026

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