BKR
The good kind of beat
Baker Hughes opened the week with a clean little victory lap: second-quarter adjusted EPS came in at 64 cents, ahead of the 50-cent consensus, while revenue hit $6.74 billion versus expectations of $6.52 billion. The stock popped in premarket trading, because apparently markets still enjoy when a company does, in fact, make more money than everyone thought it would.
AI is hungry, and Baker Hughes brought snacks
CEO Lorenzo Simonelli said demand is still strong across data centers, gas infrastructure, and upstream markets. Translation: the whole energy-pipes-and-power ecosystem is getting a lift from AI's endless appetite for electricity. That’s been the theme all year, and Baker Hughes is trying to position itself as one of the tools behind the curtain.
Orders are doing the heavy lifting
Revenue was down 2% year over year, but the headline number hiding in the weeds was orders, which jumped 49% to $10.5 billion. That pushed the company’s book-to-bill ratio to 1.6x and lifted remaining performance obligations to $40.1 billion. In other words, future business is piling up faster than current revenue is shrinking.
A few more nuggets that matter:
- Industrial & Energy Technology orders more than doubled, helped by power generation and LNG demand
- Backlog in that segment hit a record
- The board also declared a quarterly dividend of 23 cents per share, payable August 17 to shareholders of record as of August 7
Management is leaning in, not hunkering down
Baker Hughes also nudged up its outlook. For Q3, it sees revenue of $6.57 billion to $7.17 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $1.115 billion to $1.295 billion. For fiscal 2026, it now expects revenue of $26.65 billion to $28.05 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $4.60 billion to $5.10 billion.
The bigger tell? It raised its full-year IET orders guidance and boosted its Horizon 2 target to more than $45 billion. That’s management basically saying: we’re not just riding the AI energy boom, we’re trying to surf it.
Big picture: if data centers keep gobbling power and LNG demand keeps growing, Baker Hughes has a pretty nice seat at the table — even if some of its legacy oilfield revenue is still getting dragged around by divestitures and geopolitical messiness.