The appetite was the story. Applied Aerospace & Defense priced its initial public offering on Tuesday at $20 a share, raising $650M, and by the time the book closed the deal was said to be about ten times oversubscribed. A company that makes fuselage sections and solid rocket motor cases does not usually inspire that kind of scramble. In June 2026, defence hardware does.
The Huntsville, Alabama, firm sold 32.5 million shares at $20 each, a dollar below the top of its $18-to-$21 range, which is the kind of pricing that leaves something on the table for the first day of trading without admitting weakness.
At that level the company carried a market capitalisation of about $3.4bn. It begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday under the ticker AADX.
Applied Aerospace is not a startup wearing a defence-tech costume. It was founded in 1954 and builds the unglamorous middle of the supply chain: flight control surfaces, engine shafts, solid rocket motor cases, the structural pieces that other people’s rockets and aircraft are bolted onto. Its customer list is the tell. Alongside Boeing and GE Aerospace, it counts Anduril, the autonomous-systems company that has become shorthand for the new defence-tech wave, among its buyers.
