L3Harris Technologies (NYSE:LHX) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.
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Summary
L3Harris Technologies reported a 9% organic revenue growth in Q3 2026, with EPS rising 33% to $3.28 and free cash flow increasing by 195% to $1.3 billion.
The company achieved a historic backlog of $53 billion, driven by strong performance in missiles, space, resilient communications, and electronic warfare sectors.
Strategic initiatives include capacity expansion for missile production, partnerships to enhance operational efficiency, and significant investments in space and communication technologies.
Future guidance has been adjusted, raising the revenue outlook to $23.5-$23.7 billion and EPS guidance to $12.25-$12.35 for 2026, while maintaining a free cash flow target of $3 billion.
Management emphasized a focus on improving delivery and execution, leveraging automation and AI for operational efficiencies, and sustaining shareholder returns through dividends and potential share buybacks.
Full Transcript
Hilary (Moderator)
Greetings. Welcome to the L3Harris Technologies third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, John Sweeney, Vice President, Investor Relations.
Thank you, John. You may now begin.
John Sweeney (Vice President, Investor Relations)
Thank you, Hilary, and good morning, everyone. Joining me today are our Chief Executive Officer, Sam Mehta, and Chief Financial Officer, Ken Sharp. This morning we published our third quarter earnings release detailing our financial results and updated 2026 guidance and provided a supplemental earnings presentation on our website. Before we begin, please note that our discussion will include forward-looking statements subject to risks, assumptions, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We will discuss GAAP results alongside non-GAAP financial measures of organic revenue, segment operating income, and free cash flow, which are reconciled to GAAP measures in the earnings release. For more information, please refer to our earnings release and SEC filings.
With that, let me turn it over to
Ken Sharp (Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you, Sam. While this is our first earnings call together, it has been great working with you as you’ve driven the business forward with a pragmatic approach, sustaining our strong momentum and bringing an increased focus to our operations. Sam, John and I appreciate the investor and analyst feedback that shaped this quarter’s earnings materials. These changes are intended to improve ecosystem ease of use and connect our financial results to operational execution.
Turning to our third quarter where our strong execution delivered solid financial results, orders were $19.3 billion, yielding a book-to-bill of 3.2 times. Backlog increased 27% to $53.2 billion and was up 47% year over year. The two largest awards were PAC-3 and THAAD, totaling $11 billion, consistent with our volume and pricing expectations. Revenue totaled $6.1 billion, up $401 million or 7% year over year. Organic revenue grew 9% despite one fewer week.
As previously discussed, an extra week contributes about $200 million, implying double-digit organic growth excluding the extra week in the prior-year quarter. International growth continues to be strong as allies ramp investments in national defense. International revenue grew 18% and, as a percentage of our total revenue, was 24%, increasing in the last year or so by about 300 basis points. Segment margin was 15.9%, consistent with prior year. Segment margin benefited from strong, disciplined execution with positive EAC performance across all three segments. Operating income of $786 million increased $165 million, or 27%, versus prior year. Operating income margin increased 200 basis points to 13% due to higher revenues and lower corporate cost. GAAP diluted earnings per share for the quarter was $3.28, up 33%. The $0.82 year-over-year improvement is due to higher revenue volume $0.28, higher operating income margins $0.51, lower interest expense $0.17.
This was partially offset by preferred stock dividends of $0.10. We also had investment gains offset by the Department of War preferred stock mark-to-market adjustment. Operating cash flow was $1.4 billion, up from $546 million in the prior-year quarter. Capital expenditures were $179 million, or 3% of revenue, which is historically elevated as we continue to invest to build out our missile capacity. Free cash flow was $1.3 billion, up nearly 200%.
Year to date, free cash flow is $1.8 billion with clear momentum to achieve our full-year guidance. Research and development costs were $143 million, or 2.4% of revenue, and helped drive our strong awards and organic growth. We believe maintaining R&D spend at current levels positions us well for the future. Moving to slide 9, let me provide some color on our Space and Mission Systems segment performance. Revenues grew 10% to $3.1 billion. Revenue increased due to higher volumes in space missile warning, missile tracking satellite programs, ISR aircraft, air traffic control modernization, and F-35 control systems. Space and Mission Systems segment operating margin was 10.9%, up 20 basis points from prior year. The margin expansion primarily reflects higher volumes and improved program execution.
Turning to Communications and Spectrum Dominance, which delivered revenue of $2 billion, up 3% year over year, driven by increased international volumes for our software-defined resilient communication radios and program ramp for our VAMPIRE counter-UAS systems, partially offset by lower volume in our spectrum superiority business. As we recently discussed at the Jefferies Conference, we experienced supply disruption for a small handful of components which reduced our third quarter revenue growth.
We were able to sort much of the supplier challenges by the end of the quarter and expect stronger fourth quarter revenue growth. Communications and Spectrum Dominance operating margin was 25.2%, up 50 basis points on favorable program performance and mix. Missile Solutions revenue increased 5% year over year. Organic revenue, excluding the divestiture of the commercial space propulsion business, increased 17%, primarily driven by increased volumes on key missile programs. Missile Solutions segment operating income margin was 12%, down 30 basis points due to mix. In the quarter, we closed on the sale of our commercial space propulsion business. Investment gains and losses associated with our retained ownership interest will be recorded as other non-operating income.
Now turning to cash conversion and leverage on slide 12, over the past few years our free cash flow has consistently exceeded net income. The team’s disciplined execution and strong cash generation have enabled us to reduce net debt leverage from 4.3 times to approximately 1.9 times, strengthening our balance sheet. At the end of the third quarter we had $3 billion in cash and short-term investments. In the fourth quarter, we expect to generate approximately $1 billion of free cash flow and repay $800 million of debt, bringing our projected year-end cash balance to $3.2 billion.
Looking ahead to 2027 and 2028, we expect to continue generating meaningful operating cash flow. We have sufficient cash to fund our $3 billion investment in missile capacity expansion, normal capital expenditures, and dividends. Even after these investments, we expect to have more than $5 billion in excess cash we intend to deploy. Let me turn to our capital allocation priorities. Our first priority is investing in the business, including our $3 billion missile investment. Second, we remain committed to our dividend. Third, while our leverage is attractive, we have the ability to further delever and create more dry powder. Fourth, we believe share repurchases are an important tool and are highly attractive at our current valuation. Lastly, for M&A, we do not expect to engage in any large-scale M&A in the foreseeable future.
We believe we will create the most value by focusing on our business and driving operational performance. Moving to our 2026 guidance, we are increasing the bottom end of our revenue guidance by $300 million to $23.5 to $23.7 billion, increasing the midpoint by $150 million. Accordingly, organic revenue growth is now 9% to 10%. Segment operating margin guidance is reaffirmed at low 16%. We are raising our EPS guidance to $12.25 to $12.35, up from our prior guidance range of $11.80 to $12.00. The updated range represents an increase of $0.40 at the midpoint, with about half of the increase due to lower interest expenses, which is now expected to be $515 million.
We are reaffirming our free cash flow guidance of $3 billion. To improve investor ease of use and comparability, we updated our free cash flow definition to exclude cash proceeds from asset sales at the segment level. We are making two adjustments: Space and Mission Systems full-year revenue is increasing $200 million to $11.9 billion. Communications and Spectrum Dominance revenue is reduced by $100 million to $7.9 billion. Now let’s turn to our 2028 financial framework. We are reaffirming organic growth expectation of 8%. We expect segment margins of approximately 16%, down from our prior estimate of 16.3%. This updated guidance assumes no significant gains from product line sales or investment income. We now expect 2028 free cash flow of $3 billion compared to our previous expectation of $3.5 billion. The revised outlook reflects three changes: funding approximately $250 million in company 401(k) contributions with cash rather than newly issued L3Harris shares, lower segment margin, and changes in capital expenditure timing to accelerate our missiles investments.
The $3 billion free cash flow guidance represents over 100% cash conversion. With that, I’ll turn the call back to Sam.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you, Ken. We are comfortable operating in a dynamic political and economic environment and remain confident that we are well positioned with our strong backlog in areas of continued priority and urgency. Finally, I would like to once again thank our employees and leadership team for delivering such a strong quarter. I will now turn the call over for questions.
OPERATOR
We will now be conducting a question and answer session. At this time, please limit yourself to one question per person. If you’d like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad and a confirmation message will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star one if you’d like to remove your question from the queue. If you have an additional question, please press star one again to get back in queue. For participants that are using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys.
One moment while we poll for questions. Thank you. Your first question comes from the line of Christine Liwag from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Christine Liwag (Analyst at Morgan Stanley)
Hey, good morning everyone, and congratulations, Sam, on your new role. So I guess I wanted to ask you about margins and your operational priorities. You delivered a pretty impressive 200 basis points of operating margin expansion this quarter, your first quarter in the head of L3Harris. So I guess part of it is given your background as an operations-focused leader, your comments around accelerating productivity through automation and AI, how much opportunity do you see to drive further efficiencies and expand margins, especially when you’ve got this robust revenue outlook ahead of you?
And I know we’re limited to one question, but I wanted to step back and say more broadly, as you put your stamp on L3Harris, should we think of your approach as largely accelerating the execution of the existing strategy, or are there areas where you need opportunities to do things differently? Thank you.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you, Christine. Appreciate the feedback. A couple things maybe from my perspective. Number one, on the lower corporate costs and the operating costs you mentioned and the growth from operating margin, that’s embedded in our DNA. Now we’ll focus on making sure whether it’s business process at the corporate office all the way down to the factory floor, we’re going to be relentless in our pursuit of productivity and efficiency gains, and that will be really across the entire enterprise.
What you might see, which is a little bit different, a change in strategy, the increased focus on driving the portfolio we have. We spent the last several years building this fantastic portfolio we have. Now it’s time to probably stop with as many moving pieces and focus on the business we have to drive better performance. And again, that means disciplined performance, disciplined execution, driving costs out of the business. Most importantly, accelerating converting, accelerating the backlog that we have into sales by accelerating execution through our business processes on our factory floors.
So that’s the most exciting part of the business for me, and you’ll see continued focus on it.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Ronald Epstein from Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Farrell Granat (Analyst at Bank of America)
Good morning, this is Farrell Granat on for Ron. I first just wanted to ask about your free cash flow, especially given the strong about $1.3 billion in 3Q. Can you outline how much of that was potentially a benefit of timing collections or a pull forward from 4Q, as well as bridging it to the maintained $3 billion full-year outlook?
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Well, we remain—first of all, we do remain confident in our $3 billion full-year outlook. You know, Ken mentioned it in his remarks. We remain committed to making sure that cash flow to net income is always greater than 100% in our business. I think that’s one of the strengths of the portfolio. We’re very careful and cautious and intentional in the way we negotiate agreements to make sure that we remain cash flow neutral or better in most of these negotiations, whether that’s in the missiles business with these framework agreements or with agreements like VAMPIRE for international customers.
Ken, any additional comments?
Ken Sharp (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, I would just add that, look, we have great momentum on cash flow. There’s been a lot of focus with the team to make sure our cash is more linear. So we don’t look at it certainly as Q4 pull-forwards; we just look at it as doing the hard work day in, day out, and the team’s doing a nice job. So, you know, we’re kind of 75% through the year. We have 60% of our cash generation. So we think we’re in a great place to deliver on our full-year guidance and look forward to delivering and getting on the next call.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Sheila Kayaolu from Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Sheila Kayaolu (Analyst at Jefferies)
Hey, good morning, Sam. So nice to officially hear from you. And Ken, of course. Maybe, Sam, for you, if you don’t mind, just starting with the 2028 targets. You’ve made some relatively modest changes to that framework that was approved by the board just eight months ago. Can you help us understand what was the impetus for this and just how you’re thinking about the framework more broadly from here? And of course, just as new CEO, I have to ask you, you know, the margin outlook doesn’t look aggressive at all over the next three years.
Is there any reason you’re thinking about that and how you’re thinking about capital deployment just given the sum-of-the-parts values, LHX at 2x the value of where you’re currently trading. So just how you’re broadly thinking about strategic capital deployment from here.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, thank you, Sheila. I appreciate the questions. A couple things. First of all, on the 2028 financial framework, you know, on the segment operating margin, feel confident in the 16%. We know, you know, previous guidance was around 16.3%. Really what we’ve done is removed any assumed benefit from product line sales or investment income from our calculation. So what you’ll see is a roughly 16% operating margin which more closely matches the actual underlying execution and operation of the business.
On the free cash flow side, a couple of big moving pieces there to go from $3.5 billion to $3 billion. The single biggest piece is really just a change in the way that we make our company 401(k) contributions. Previously we issued $250 million of new stock on a regular basis to do that. We will be funding that with cash now. That will limit the effect of dilution, which we know is not great. We also see a little bit of lower segment margin—again, some of that comes in mix: faster growth on some of the lower-margin businesses as we grow margin in those businesses over time—and then, you know, the opportunity to maybe pull forward a little bit of capital expenditure into 2028 so that we can continue to accelerate revenue in out years even beyond this framework.
Ken Sharp (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, maybe just to add, Sam, and Sheila, I really appreciate your comment about our sum of parts, and clearly we’re more valuable than what we’re trading at. So I think that’s very astute on your part. Certainly we’ve made comments that we’re going to generate pretty meaningful free cash flow. So we’re looking forward to deploying that in a very shareholder-friendly manner to drive value for the company. I’d just also maybe touch on Sam’s margin adjustment. You know, when you look at those non-recurring items and you kind of back away and you say, okay, where are we at today versus that, it’s about 50 basis points of margin—from roughly 16% to 15%—puts us somewhere around 15.5%. So we have some work ahead of us. Right. That’s where Sam’s very focused on the execution piece: drive the margin up. So I would expect you’ll see margins improve as we drive the performance of the business without some of these non-recurring items.
And Sheila, I would just add there’s also the disposition of the space propulsion business. That would be about $75 million as well on the free cash flow side.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Robert Stallard from Vertical Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Robert Stallard (Analyst at Vertical Research Partners)
Thanks very much. Good morning.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Good morning.
Robert Stallard (Analyst at Vertical Research Partners)
Sam, I don’t know if you touched on this. I missed the first bit of your call—unfortunately it’s a very busy morning—but I was wondering if you could give us an update on your thoughts on this potential missile IPO. You mentioned you have the internally generated cash flow to cover the CapEx requirements, but also that your valuation perhaps is not that generous. So an update on that would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, great question. Thank you. Appreciate that, Robert. Really the status of the IPO has not significantly changed or moved from the last time we discussed it, which was, you know, we established four criteria that we feel need to be satisfied in order to create value for our shareholders through the IPO. Those were government contract environment, which continues to look favorable. Of course, we locked down some great contracts in the meantime, so that’s moved in a positive direction.
We continue to execute strongly on the business. We’re doubling, tripling on key solid rocket motor programs with our deliveries. And of course the valuation has to be something which is a given, and that’s really the area that we continue to monitor to make sure that capital markets, capital formation, some of the valuation of our peer companies—you know, we’d like to see much more attractive valuations before we move forward. We continue to consider the timing of an IPO. Right now we’re targeting sometime in the middle of next year to continue that consideration.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of John Gauden from Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
John Gauden (Analyst at Citi)
Hey. Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my question. What I wanted to use my question on is just to focus on the organic growth outlook. I know there have been some tweaks to the 2028 framework, but you guys kept 8% organic growth. You’re already outperforming that this year. There seems to be a good setup into next year, even though you haven’t kind of offered crisp guidance on that. Needless to say, 8% does not feel like a high bar, given what we’re seeing in Missile Solutions, Space, et cetera.
Maybe we could just kind of discuss the puts and takes as we’re forming a view into next year.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Well, appreciate the question, John. Thanks. A couple things. Number one, we are very, very confident in our ability to be able to hit and possibly even exceed the 8% year-over-year growth that’s in our 2028 framework. Now, some of this depends on budgets, especially not only domestically but internationally, and making sure that, you know, about 24% of our sales on an annual basis are from international customers. So there are conditions that are outside of our control.
Having said that, with the $53 billion-plus backlog that we currently enjoy, we’ll do everything we can to accelerate that backlog into this period of the framework to see if we can meet and exceed that 8% CAGR that you referenced.
Ken Sharp (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, and just that, I mean, that guidance is two years out. Right. So we’re very focused on driving the business. We’ll certainly update that as we execute.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Peter Arment from Baird. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Peter Arment (Analyst at Baird)
Hey, good morning, Sam and Ken, and John—congratulations. Everyone else, same sentiments. Maybe if you could just quickly touch base, Sam. We’ve got a lot of inputs that we’ve heard from a lot of other players around the supply chain and kind of bottlenecks within that. And if you touched upon it, sorry I missed it, but just how you’re viewing the supply chain—like what is, you know, internal bottlenecks versus supplier-controlled bottlenecks—and kind of how you’re addressing that, just given all the framework agreements and everything else that you guys are winning.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, appreciate the question. Thanks, Peter. A couple of areas—you know, when we talk about supply chain, as we referenced, as Ken referenced it earlier in his remarks, we’re talking a little bit about CSD. There were a small handful of parts that were constrained having to do with printed circuit board manufacturing. We’re talking about things like laminates that were two or three tiers down in the supply chain. There are capacity constraints largely because of the pull on AI and data centers for microelectronics.
We’ve worked our way through those. We have to thank the Department of Defense for their assistance in doing so. They actually reached out directly to some of these suppliers in partnership with us to make sure that we got priority from the delivery so that we can make sure that we can protect the warfighter. We don’t expect that to have a material impact or any kind of effect in Q4 as we recover on the MSL side. On the Missile Solutions side, obviously a different set of challenges. Having said that, you know, about 25% of our $3 billion investment is directly supply chain and supply chain capacity. So we’re seeing the benefit of that coming online. Peter, this is multiple sources. This is developing multiple sources for critical bottleneck items. But I would say also making sure that our existing supply base modernizes its equipment, its production efficiency gains in their supply chain as well.
So we’re really kind of, you know, funding—we’re helping to develop the entire ecosystem to make sure we have a resilient supply chain really in all three of our segments. And I would just add the Department of Defense investment was very important to us because I think most people are aware we didn’t have contracts until really this quarter. That billion dollars allowed us to go out and start working with, invest, working with vendors, making commitments. And we had, I think up until these awards, about $2 billion of pre-contract costs floating around. And now we’ve gotten a lot of that on contract on our side. So we have been working.
Ken and the missiles team’s done a really nice job of getting out with the vendors and so forth. So I think we should be in pretty good shape.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Doug Harned from Bernstein. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Doug Harned (Analyst at Bernstein)
Thank you. Good morning. You know, on CSD, really two things there. The radio business is such an important high-margin business for you all. And one is you talked a lot about the things you can do with respect to cost reduction. So first part of this is how far can you go? You’ve been at these 25% margins because of the fixed-cost nature of this business. You would think there’s real upside potential there over time, but also as you look forward and we head toward NGC2—and I know you’ve won some things on this—but, you know, we saw it’s a very different structure with GD and Pacific Defense winning the core chassis last year and then looking at a push toward continuous competition on this program going forward. How do you see the transition over time from the current radio business that’s been so successful heading into NGC2?
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, appreciate the question, Doug. Listen, on NGC 2 in particular, we are an integral partner and part of NGC 2. It’s created a little bit of confusion because oftentimes in budget documents, it’s listed separately from our core radio programs like HMS. But rest assured that we’ve won our fair share of NGC 2 related awards, especially since we play very, very heavily in that transport layer. So we don’t expect any significant material reduction in the amount of awards and the amount of business we get from the Army under NGC 2.
As a matter of fact, in recent demonstrations, we’ve actually seamlessly integrated with companies like Anduril and Lockheed Martin as they build out their NGC 2 networks. So we remain confident that we’ll be a major player for the Army going forward, whether it’s NGC 2 or whether the Army reverts to funding individual line items, specifically in models that we play. Just a reminder, we always compete under the Army’s radio program. So whether it’s HMS or MANPACK or the different radio models we have, we have competitors in each of those areas where we compete on an annual basis.
So competition is nothing new for us in this space. From a cost perspective, we continue to find new opportunity every single day. Doug, an example would be the way that we’re using AI on the manufacturing floor to make our operations more efficient every day. And so as new technologies like AI and automation take hold and we incorporate them, we do expect to be able to maintain and grow margins in our radio business over time.
Ken Sharp (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, and just maybe touch on the margins, right. Because we’re big fans of the innovation the team does. Sam mentioned earlier about communications on the battlefield, which is kind of music to my heart. Making sure our warfighters get home is what the mission’s all about. Our radios are critically important in that. We talk about software-defined radios, we talked about Race Shield on the last call. Those capabilities are very important. So I think our focus right now is bringing technology, some that comes out of the radios like Race Shield that may be put on Vampire, for example. Those things are very important to us. So we’re not looking to accelerate the margin necessarily, but really accelerate the innovation across the whole business.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Richard Safin from Seaport Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Richard Safin (Analyst at Seaport Research)
Thanks very much. Good morning, everybody, and congrats, Sam. Thank you. So I have a two-part, very related question. The slide appendix details are pretty impressive and interesting. Curious as to what’s behind providing all that detail. And second, as I’m looking at that, contract mix has been moving towards cost type, and I was wondering how the surge in bookings and new awards might affect contract mix generally as we look ahead. Thanks.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Appreciate the question. I’ll answer the second part of the question first and maybe defer to Ken on the financial appendixes. We largely see a lot of the growth in our backlog is really associated with firm fixed price contracts. So we do have Next Gen Jammer, which we’re very proud of in our S2 business, and that’s within CSC that we captured. That’s cost type. That’s one of the exceptions. The vast majority of the business that we are booking and we booked in this previous quarter had firm fixed price contract types. So we look forward to being able to execute those efficiently so we can get the additional margin associated with productive and efficient execution. Ken, I’ll defer to you on the appendices.
Ken Sharp (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, thanks, Sam. And it’s interesting, I think this is some of Sam’s bent as well as being an operator and having details. I would also categorize as you kind of engage with investors. We have a great business, right? And it’s very clear to me because I’m in the details every day. And then when you get more into our numbers, it gets harder to understand our numbers. So we said how do we make that great business, that great performance clear? So our desire was to go look at our investor materials, and we got a lot of great investor feedback. So it was around how do you improve ease of use, understandability and all those places, you know, really to take Sheila’s question around the sum of the parts and why we’re not getting valued. So we want to make sure people understand the core performance. That’s really where we’re at. We’re going to go drive the business. Sam’s going to clearly drive the business.
That’s the focus and, you know, we’ll make sure that kind of the ease of use for investors and analysts is there.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Noah Papanok from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Noah Papanok (Analyst at Goldman Sachs)
Hey, good morning everyone. Yeah, thanks a lot. Want to ask about space and mission systems growth. The growth year to date is pretty strong. The backlog’s up a lot over the last few years. If I take the 2028 and appreciate the comments you’ve made here about, you know, that’s a few years out and maybe a bit of a moving target. But if I take the 2028 revenue forecast, it implies the organic growth would decelerate 2027 and 2028 quite a bit and I think be below market.
Can you talk about the puts and takes of that? What are the biggest growth drivers there? And is there anything, you know, slowing or rolling off that we should be aware of?
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Good morning, Noah. Thanks, Noah, for the question. We don’t see anything, you know, particularly slowing down. Some of this comes down to timing from a space standpoint. Continue to see strong growth. We saw that year over year, you know, this third quarter this year as compared to the third quarter last year. We do think on programs like ISR, which tend to be big and lumpy in nature — we’re talking about multibillion-dollar programs that are let many times from international customers — that the timing of those can get tricky, and so they can be a little bit lumpy in nature, frankly. I expect this number to be able to continue to change significantly based upon those billion-dollar-plus movements as our international customers in particular reconsider and move the timing of some of their planned missionized business jet purchases.
Ken Sharp (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, I would just say, Noah, we feel like we’re very well positioned and look forward to delivering on the guidance.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Miles Walton with Wolfe Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Apologies, please stand by. We will move to your next question from Ken Herbert from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Ken Herbert (Analyst at RBC Capital Markets)
Yeah, hi, good morning, and congrats on the quarter. And I wanted to just dig a little deeper, if we could, into the missile solutions. Obviously the contracts now flowing in reflected in the backlog. I know you provided some color around the structure of these contracts. But maybe just frame with us if you could how we should think about the risks to the execution near term on these contracts and how you structure them in terms of protecting and obviously being able to ideally expand margins in the business.
And just how we think about those progressing over the next couple of years as obviously you’re still in a very significant sort of investment phase as we think about the SRMs in this business.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I appreciate the question. Thanks, Ken. A couple things from a structural standpoint — I mentioned this before. We’re very, very thoughtful in the way they’re structured from an advance payment and milestone payment standpoint to make sure they remain, you know, in conjunction or very highly aligned with our capital spend to be able to go execute these contracts. I think the second piece of it is we do have protective provisions in the contract. So I think the Department of Defense prime contractors are very, very confident in the volumes materializing during the term of this seven-year term of this framework. And so, you know, we have very, very strong protections in the contract to make sure that there are financial mitigations that are afforded us if that somehow does not materialize.
Third, I will say is we ourselves have supreme confidence in this demand signal materializing over the seven-year period. It’s listed as a primary priority for the Department of Defense. I spent a lot of time in the Pentagon in my career. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Pentagon over the last couple of months. It’s been made very clear that this is the foremost priority from the senior-most levels within the Department of Defense. So we feel very, very confident about the demand signal, the enduring and resilient nature of the demand signal.
From an execution standpoint, a lot of that $3 billion plus investment that we’ve made — even the investments that we made so far in advance of receiving those framework agreements — is to make sure that we can execute, and those are areas of building a resilient supply chain with multiple suppliers so we can avoid single points of failure. Modernizing a lot of our internal equipment. We will be building over 100 buildings, adding approximately a million square feet to our manufacturing space in order to accommodate this new capacity.
And a lot of that will be building solid rocket motors in new ways with new equipment, new production methodology. So, you know, obviously a lot of execution before us and the proof will be in the results. But we remain confident. We’re very, very determined to make sure that we meet this national priority defense need.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Michael Charmoli from Truist Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Michael Charmoli (Analyst at Truist Securities)
Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the questions, Sam. Congrats. Just maybe on the longer-term 2028 targets and thinking about backlog, can you give us a sense of how much of kind of your current plan is already in backlog? I guess, what’s the coverage through 2028? And then you talked more about booking, you know, more firm fixed through. Should we expect then that the margin profile — and I could appreciate the conservatism and the ramp-up and scaling up of new production — but it would seem like there’d be a natural margin expansion lever if you’ve got more firm fixed contracts or if you’re shifting in that direction.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you, appreciate the question, Michael. First of all, we’re very, very excited about the quality of the backlog we built. You know, I think of the 53 billion or so, I think 22 billion is funded. Of the amount that’s unfunded, we remain very confident in that, primarily because of what I had mentioned in the previous question. The vast majority of that backlog is built around our Missile Solutions business, of which we have ultimate, very, very strong confidence that that will materialize given how much of a need this is for our nation and enduring priority.
You know, as far as margin and margin improvement, that is certainly the objective and the goal. I have grown up and I’ve come through the organization — in previous organizations and with my time at L3Harris — very deeply involved on the operations, execution and program management side, which is to say we’re always looking for opportunity to reduce costs and be able to go either manufacture product, deliver to our customers, innovate more efficiently and more productively.
So we will definitely look for additional opportunities to drive the margin upward, which certainly the opportunity presents itself. We’ll update our 2028 framework as we go, but I’m confident in the team and their ability to be able to drive the business to get better results.
Ken Sharp (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, and just maybe add — so just for clarity, the funded backlog is $31 billion. And when you go and think about execution, a lot of these are in the backlog, specifically a lot of new fixed-price work — clearly fixed-price work — doing a lot of what we know how to do. So I think, and our guide also infers this, that we have some acceleration of margin. I know it’s a little confusing with having approximately 16% in the out years, but that’s 16% without the product line sales and without investment income and so forth.
So you’re really, on an apples-to-apples basis, accelerating up probably 50 basis points of margin. So I think we feel like we’re in a really good position to do that.
OPERATOR
Your next question is from the line of Miles Walton with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
Emily (Analyst at Wolfe Research)
Hey everyone, it’s Emily on for Miles. Just checking you can hear me.
John Sweeney (Vice President, Investor Relations)
Yes. Hi, Emily.
Emily (Analyst at Wolfe Research)
Okay. Hi there. Thanks a lot. Quick question on the missile and munitions ramp. Quite a bit of the funding for that, at least in this fiscal year, is in reconciliation. How are you guys thinking about the trajectory of those programs given that aspect? And also on the budget, given we’re in a CR, are there any areas within the portfolio, particularly in CSD, that may be impacted by it?
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, we’re obviously very, very conscious of the budgetary environment we’re in, Emily. We feel very, very confident that as trade-offs happen, should trade-offs happen to the extent they happen, that we continue to operate and focus in areas that will be of the top priority of the Department of Defense — certainly missiles and munitions falls into that category. So I think if they are forced to make trades, and as they make trades in this budgetary environment, we consider this to be a very, very strong area that will continue to be funded.
As far as CRs, I often joke with my colleagues here, the three things that you can count on are death, taxes, and CRs. We’ve operated under a CR now for many, many years. We’ve been used to operating under a CR. The key for us is twofold, and I’ve already spoken about one, which is operating in areas that we know are the utmost priority. The second is making sure that we perform well against our program and our delivery requirements. What we say in our company is it never pays to be the slow gazelle here when it comes to execution and performance, so minimizing the number of red programs and overdue deliveries we have, so that when our customers are forced to make tough trade-offs, we don’t leave any of our programs vulnerable.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Scott Mikas from Melius Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Scott Mikas (Analyst at Melius Research)
Good morning, everybody. I wanted to go back to Rob’s question regarding the Missile Solutions IPO. I’m just curious, has there been any significant change in the ownership percentage you’d like to retain post-IPO? And if for some reason you couldn’t get the valuation you’d like through the IPO, is selling all of Missile Solutions or Aerojet a possibility?
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I mean, I’ll say a couple things there. I appreciate the question. Number one, we’re so excited about this Missile Solutions business. We think it presents tremendous value, whether we own 100% of that as L3Harris Technologies or we own a significant majority share. Nothing has significantly changed in our posture. So nothing has changed in our prospective ownership share, our posture, or the criteria against which we’re measuring the attractiveness of the IPO as we continue to monitor Solutions.
Ken Sharp (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, and just for clarity, we’re not required to do an IPO; we are required to pursue one, and we’ve been doing that. So I think we feel like we’re really in a good position. We have a strong balance sheet and strong cash generation to more than support the CapEx. So we’ll certainly visit it — like we said previously and we’ll say again — we’re going to visit it mid-2027, and that’s where we are.
OPERATOR
Your final question comes from the line of Gautam Khanna from TD Securities. Your line is open. Please proceed.
Gautam Khanna (Analyst at TD Securities)
Yes, thanks. Good morning, and sorry I joined late, so forgive me if you already answered this, but I was wondering if you could talk through the RF tactical demand backdrop, in terms of what you have in backlog, what sales are likely to be this year just to calibrate us, and then what are the big international pursuits and domestic pursuits over the next year that we should be monitoring? Thank you.
Sam Mehta (Chief Executive Officer)
Appreciate the question. We do have very strong backlog on the tactical radio portfolio. Of course it’s always tricky at any point in time when you look at the backlog because it is such a short-cycle business. I’ll remind you that we have a commercial business model here, so we build the forecast in anticipation of winning contracts that we can deliver quickly. I can tell you this: this year we will actually deliver more radios to international customers than we will domestic. We don’t see that as a weakness in the domestic market; we see that instead as a strength in the international market. You take a look around the world and see what’s happening in places like Ukraine.
Our international customers — our NATO customers, our European allies — are becoming more and more conscious of the fact that in order to win in a modern warfare environment, they need to overcome electronic warfare — all the non-kinetic effects that are being brought to bear to keep our warfighters from being able to effectively communicate with each other. So that is driving a significant demand cycle, significant growth year over year. We look forward to being able to capture more of that business as a lot of our European and NATO partners and allies want to retain some interoperability with their U.S. allied forces.
So we’re very, very bullish and excited about the international market for RF.
John Sweeney (Vice President, Investor Relations)
Great. Well, that concludes the call. Thank you, everybody, for joining. We look forward to updating you as we move through the quarter and on our next earnings call. Thank you very much, and have a good.
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