Leidos Holdings Inc

Leidos has received a five-year, $301 million contract to help the U.S. Army monitor and protect military networks against cyberattacks. The follow-on contract calls for round-the-clock cyber operations supporting the Department of War Information Network, the global communications network used by U.S. military organizations. The award adds to Leidos' backlog and extends an established Army relationship in a defense area benefiting from persistent demand. Leidos plans to equip its cyber specialists with AI-enabled tools intended to improve situational awareness, accelerate threat detection and coordinate responses across military networks. The company said its previous work on the Army program combined cyber operations, engineering and technology development, helping reduce the time between identifying a potential attack and responding to it.

Punta Cana Airport and SeeTrue have deployed SeeTrue's artificial intelligence platform to detect drugs and undeclared currency at the airport's checkpoint. The technology is part of an integrated checkpoint security solution recently deployed with Leidos, using the ClearScan checkpoint CT baggage scanner running SeeTrue's AI-based threat detection algorithms. This marks the first use of SeeTrue's AI-driven algorithms for enhanced detection of drugs and undeclared currency with ClearScan technology at an international airport. The deployment was supported by PBS Dominican Republic Office, Leidos' local partner, and has increased checkpoint efficiency and passenger processing capacity at Punta Cana Airport.

Leidos reported second-quarter revenue of $4.6 billion, a 7% year-over-year increase, and raised its full-year guidance for revenue, earnings, and cash flow. Organic revenue grew 4%, adjusted EBITDA margin was 13.8%, and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share rose to $3.26 from $2.37 a year earlier. The company generated a record $793 million in operating cash flow and $761 million in free cash flow, while net awards reached $5 billion for a book-to-bill ratio of 1.1. Defense bookings were particularly strong with a 2.2 book-to-bill ratio, and the Homeland segment posted 32% total growth. Leidos now expects fiscal year 2026 revenue between $17.5 billion and $17.9 billion, non-GAAP diluted EPS of $12.05 to $12.45, and operating cash flow of approximately $1.75 billion. The improved outlook incorporates headwinds from the suspension of incentive payments in the Veterans Benefits Administration medical disability examination business, which is expected to sustain around second-quarter revenue levels with margins near 20% for the rest of the year. CEO Tom Bell highlighted accelerating procurement activity across defense and intelligence segments and pointed to a $12 billion pipeline of visible opportunities over the next 12 months.

CoreWeave shares rose about 10% on Monday as investors weighed strong Big Tech results and sustained demand for AI computing infrastructure ahead of the company's August 11 earnings report. The cloud infrastructure provider, which builds its platform around Nvidia graphics processors for AI training and inference, is expected to report a quarterly loss of $1.27 per share compared with a loss of 27 cents a year earlier, with revenue forecast at $2.56 billion, up from $1.21 billion. Analysts currently have a consensus Buy rating and an average price target of $140.53. Recent quarterly results from Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Meta showed higher revenue, with cloud and AI contributing to performance, including 37% growth in Amazon's AWS revenue and 43% growth in Microsoft's Azure. Separately, CoreWeave and Leidos announced a partnership to build secure AI cloud services for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, supporting classified workloads, cyber operations, threat modeling and tactical AI deployments.

Leidos has been selected by Sierra Space to provide infrared sensing payloads for 18 missile warning and tracking satellites as part of the Accelerated Missile Defense Tranche 3 Tracking Layer. The payloads combine infrared sensing with onboard digital signal processing to generate tracking data directly aboard the satellite, reducing latency. Leidos will also supply ground support equipment, mission expertise, operations support and sustainment. The company has already demonstrated these technologies on orbit with four Tranche 0 payloads operating since 2023, and is delivering sensors for Tranche 1 and Tranche 2. The AMDT3 award extends Leidos' contributions across multiple Space Development Agency tranches and supports the broader Golden Dome for America missile defense objectives.

CoreWeave surged more than 10% in premarket trading Thursday after partnering with Leidos to pursue secure AI-cloud work for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies. Under the collaboration, CoreWeave will provide its AI-native cloud platform while Leidos leads mission integration, security architecture, accreditation support, and customer delivery. Proposed services include classified model training and inference, intelligence-analysis tools, cyber simulation ranges, synthetic data, and edge-to-cloud orchestration. The agreement builds on CoreWeave Federal, launched to bring the company's commercial AI infrastructure into government environments, with Leidos adding decades of federal contracting experience. However, the contemplated work remains subject to future definitive agreements, and deployments will depend on mission requirements and federal appropriations.

Shares of AI cloud infrastructure companies rebounded sharply on Thursday, with Nebius Group up 27% to $188.77, CoreWeave up 24% to $75.45, and Oracle up 7% to $125.54. The gains came as a risk-on mood lifted the NASDAQ 100 by 3%, helping the hardest-hit AI names recover from a prior selloff driven by credit-swap cost fears. Oracle's rise was supported by news that it is adding Google's Gemini AI models to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, while CoreWeave rallied on a newly announced collaboration with Leidos to deliver secure AI cloud services for U.S. national-security missions. Nebius had no company-specific catalyst, suggesting its surge was largely a technical bounce amplified by positive AI sentiment following Microsoft's strong earnings. The broader cloud sector remained flat, with the First Trust Cloud Computing ETF up just 0.43%, indicating the move was concentrated in a handful of oversold AI infrastructure pure-plays.

Leidos Holdings has launched Parcata, an AI-driven platform that autonomously detects and patches cybersecurity vulnerabilities in real time, and has partnered with DHL Supply Chain to support the UK Ministry of Defence with upgraded logistics and supply chain services. Both developments are positioned as part of Leidos' NorthStar 2030 strategy and were announced ahead of mid 2026. Leidos shares recently closed at $114.37, with the stock up 6.6% over the past week and 13.9% over the past month, though it is down 37.7% year to date and 28.2% over the past year. The launch of Parcata and the DHL partnership add fresh company-specific developments for investors to track, potentially shaping where the company focuses capital and engineering talent under its NorthStar 2030 plan.

Leidos successfully demonstrated a tactical cyber detection capability during the U.S. military's Valiant Shield 2026 exercise. The demonstration took place during the multinational field training exercise held in Guam from June 22 through July 2. The company's Cyber and Electromagnetic Activities Resiliency System, or CRS, detected simulated cyber intrusions and identified unusual activity across tactical platforms and networks, providing operators with early warning of potential cyber threats before they could affect military operations. Leidos said CRS is intended for military environments where conventional cybersecurity tools may have limited visibility into connected mission systems, monitoring mission equipment, sensors and networks for signs of unusual cyber activity. Jason O'Connor, president of Leidos Intelligence, stated that cyber resilience is now essential to military readiness and that the exercise showed CRS can provide awareness in realistic field conditions.

StockStory identifies three industrial stocks with exciting potential for sustainable market-beating returns. Graham Corporation, with a market cap of $1.22 billion, has posted 20.3% annual revenue growth over five years and a 13.5 percentage point operating margin improvement. Byrna, valued at $80.33 million, achieved 35.1% annual revenue growth over two years and reached free cash flow breakeven. Leidos, at a $14.11 billion market cap, saw 17.6% average backlog growth over two years and a 5.1 percentage point free cash flow margin increase over five years.

Lockheed Martin is facing delivery delays on the U.S. Army's Dark Eagle hypersonic missile program due to quality defects in manufacturing. Lt. Gen. Frank Lozano, the Army's top missile program official, said the final two missiles from the initial eight-missile installment could be delivered in about two months, potentially making the unit at Fort Lewis-McChord fully combat ready. The Army hired Boston Consulting Group roughly a year ago to help improve production, while Leidos Holdings is also a prime contractor on the program. The U.S. has spent more than $12 billion on hypersonic weapons since 2018 but still trails China and Russia in deployment. At least $50 billion remains earmarked for the Army program and the Navy's related Conventional Prompt Strike weapon, though the Government Accountability Office warns that quality and production problems have delayed testing and deliveries, with the Navy's production rate well below its target of 12 rounds per year.

Leidos Holdings and DHL have formed a strategic alliance to pursue the UK Ministry of Defence's Future Defence Support Services programme. Operating as the Logistics & Mission Support Alliance, the partnership combines Leidos' defence integration expertise with DHL's logistics capabilities to deliver integrated and scalable logistics support. The alliance will function as a single team, managing infrastructure and maintaining surge capacity for defence operations, while leveraging advanced technologies including artificial intelligence, data analytics and automation to optimize logistics and improve demand forecasting. On XETRA, DHL shares were trading 0.11 percent down at 56.92 euros, while Leidos shares were down 0.99 percent at $107.22 in pre-market activity on the NYSE.

While SpaceX dominates aerospace headlines, a simple stock screen reveals Lockheed Martin, Huntington Ingalls, and Leidos all boast stronger fundamentals. Lockheed Martin, the world's largest pure-play defense contractor, generated $5.7 billion in free cash flow over the past year, dwarfing SpaceX's $19.8 billion cash burn. Huntington Ingalls, a military shipbuilder, produced $792 million in free cash flow, exceeding its $605 million net income. Leidos, a defense technology specialist, trades at just 7.2 times free cash flow and 0.8 times annual sales, making it the cheapest of the trio. All three are profitable and cash-flow positive, in stark contrast to SpaceX's $8.7 billion net loss.

Mechanical Orchard announced the Summer 2026 release of its Imogen mainframe modernization platform, which now integrates with Amazon Web Services Transform to automate verification based on production data flows and includes a new build pipeline that sharply increases the speed of delivering modernized code into production. The integration pairs business rules extraction from AWS Transform with Imogen's behavioral replication, which builds a synthetic replica of legacy data flows to surface runtime behaviors before code reaches production. The release also makes generally available an autonomous build and verification pipeline that eliminates human code review while enforcing security and compliance programmatically, with current customers regularly exceeding 10,000 lines of code per engineer per week. Additionally, Mechanical Orchard has entered a strategic partnership with Leidos to bring Imogen's behavior-based modernization to U.S. federal government agencies running aging mainframe systems.

Stock index futures were higher before the opening bell on Thursday as investors shrugged off rising tensions in the Middle East. Nasdaq 100 futures rose 0.43%, S&P 500 futures gained 0.29%, and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures edged up 0.10%. The U.S. military began launching fresh strikes on Iran hours after President Donald Trump declared the eight-week ceasefire was over, with the latest attacks signaling that efforts to secure a lasting peace agreement were breaking down. U.S. Treasury yields eased as demand for government bonds increased, with the 10-year Treasury yield slipping 1 basis point to 4.57%, the 2-year yield falling about 3 basis points to 4.20%, and the 30-year yield edging down to 5.07%. Top gainers in premarket trading included Leidos up 3.56%, Mid-America Apartment Communities up 1.98%, and CRH up 1.97%, while decliners included Regions Financial down 3.42%, Cincinnati Financial down 2.69%, and United Rentals down 1.72%.

StockStory highlights three value stocks with compelling risk-reward profiles. Urban Outfitters trades at 11.4 times forward P/E, supported by 4.8% average comparable store sales growth over two years and share buybacks boosting earnings per share. Leidos trades at 8 times forward P/E, with 17.6% average backlog growth and a 5.1 percentage point free cash flow margin expansion over five years. Boston Scientific trades at 12.9 times forward P/E, driven by 15.7% average organic revenue growth and a 9.1 percentage point free cash flow margin expansion over five years.

Leidos Holdings has secured four awards under the U.S. Department of State's Evolve contract, a multiple-award indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity program with a $10 billion ceiling, to modernize IT systems for American diplomats worldwide. The awards cover cloud and data center services, application development, network and telecommunications, and customer and end-user support, with a 12-month base period and six option years. Separately, Jefferies analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu downgraded Leidos from Buy to Hold and cut the price target to $140 from $185, though the new target still implies nearly 29% upside. The downgrade reflected a reassessment of the company's defense technology growth prospects.

Leidos has demonstrated a working cell prototype under DARPA's Expeditionary Carbon Utilization for Energy Resilience and Stabilization program that cycled up to 1,000 times in testing, advancing a closed, rechargeable system designed to store energy as carbon-based fuel. The ExCURSion program aims to eliminate the tradeoff between batteries and fuel by integrating carbon combustion, capture, and regeneration into a single platform, with the goal of producing fuel on demand from inputs such as carbon dioxide, water, and electricity. Leidos' approach relies on high-rate carbonate reduction processes in engineered electrolytes and advanced materials that shuttle critical chemical species between electrodes. The intended operational benefits include fewer fuel convoys, reduced exposure to threats, and improved mission endurance, while also reducing dependence on certain critical minerals and traditional fossil fuels. The work is supported by DARPA under Contract No. HR001125C0012.

Following SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO, analysts are pointing to Rocket Lab and Leidos as attractive plays in the space economy. Rocket Lab posted record first-quarter revenue of $200 million, up over 63% year over year, with a $2.2 billion backlog, and its Neutron reusable rocket is set to debut late this year with a five-launch deal already secured. Leidos reported $4.4 billion in first-quarter revenue, a 4% increase, and holds a $48.4 billion backlog, including a NASA AEGIS contract valued at up to $2.5 billion for telecommunications and cybersecurity infrastructure. Both companies are seen as essential infrastructure and defense partners that could benefit as SpaceX lowers the cost of reaching orbit and satellite volumes surge.

Leidos has deployed the cloud-based Joint Management Tool with the Defense Information Systems Agency and U.S. Space Command, giving combatant commands real-time visibility into global satellite communications and sharply cutting command-level reporting and analysis time. The rollout highlights Leidos' role in modernizing military communications with modular, commercial-off-the-shelf software that can be rapidly updated as operational requirements change. The deployment reinforces Leidos' relevance in software-heavy defense work, though the more immediate share price driver remains how investors reassess margin prospects and contract exposure after the Defense Health Agency signaled a move away from Leidos as lead systems integrator. Leidos Holdings' narrative projects $20.4 billion revenue and $1.7 billion earnings by 2029, requiring 5.5% yearly revenue growth and an earnings increase of about $0.3 billion from $1.4 billion today. Two Simply Wall St Community fair value estimates for Leidos span roughly US$183 to US$274 per share, underscoring how far apart individual views can be.