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Hexcel (HXL) has drawn investor attention after recent trading left the stock with mixed short term performance, including a 2.1% one day decline, alongside stronger returns over the month and past 3 months.
See our latest analysis for Hexcel.
At a share price of $82.81, Hexcel’s recent 12.1% 1 month share price return and 16.0% 3 month share price return suggest improving momentum. The 28.5% 1 year total shareholder return points to a stronger longer term picture.
If Hexcel’s recent move has you thinking about where else capital might work in the sector, it could be a good time to scan aerospace and defense stocks for other aerospace and defense names on your radar.
So with Hexcel trading at $82.81, showing a 14.6% intrinsic discount, and sitting just shy of its analyst price target, should you view this as a genuine entry point, or has the market already priced in the growth story?
Hexcel’s most followed narrative puts fair value at $76.86, which sits below the current $82.81 share price, and that gap is what the story tries to explain.
Regular long term supply agreements and the ability to negotiate price increases and pass throughs in contract renewals as inflation raises input costs, despite some headwinds from legacy contracts, should gradually support better pricing, net margins, and EPS over time, especially as volumes recover and more contracts come up for renewal.
Read the complete narrative.
Curious what earnings path and margin rebuild need to hold for that fair value to stack up? The narrative leans heavily on compounding profit growth and a future valuation multiple that assumes investors stay comfortable with those projections.
Result: Fair Value of $76.86 (OVERVALUED)
Have a read of the narrative in full and understand what’s behind the forecasts.
However, you still need to weigh the risk that key customers adjust production plans or that long term contracts continue to squeeze margins if costs remain elevated.
Find out about the key risks to this Hexcel narrative.
While the popular narrative sees Hexcel as about 8% overvalued at a fair value of $76.86, our DCF model tells a different story. On that framework, Hexcel at $82.81 is trading roughly 15% below an estimated fair value of $96.92, which points to a potential mismatch between narrative caution and cash flow math. Which lens do you trust more when the story and the spreadsheet diverge?
Look into how the SWS DCF model arrives at its fair value.
HXL Discounted Cash Flow as at Jan 2026
Simply Wall St performs a discounted cash flow (DCF) on every stock in the world every day (check out Hexcel for example). We show the entire calculation in full. You can track the result in your watchlist or portfolio and be alerted when this changes, or use our stock screener to discover 868 undervalued stocks based on their cash flows. If you save a screener we even alert you when new companies match – so you never miss a potential opportunity.
If you see the numbers differently or simply want to stress test your own assumptions, you can quickly build a custom view and Do it your way
A great starting point for your Hexcel research is our analysis highlighting 2 key rewards and 1 important warning sign that could impact your investment decision.
If Hexcel has sharpened your thinking, do not stop here. A wider watchlist can help you spot opportunities you might otherwise miss entirely.
This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
Companies discussed in this article include HXL.
Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com
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France’s move this week to push millions of state workers to use a homegrown alternative to Zoom and Microsoft Teams marks the latest chapter in a decades-long effort by European governments to wean themselves off US Big Tech.
France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu sent a letter to ministries on Thursday ordering them to shift their video calls to Visio, an internally developed Zoom alternative, by the end of the year.
“To guarantee the security, confidentiality and resilience of public electronic communications, it is therefore imperative to deploy a unified videoconferencing solution, controlled by the State, based on sovereign technologies,” he wrote.
The same logic was evident on Friday, when the French government blocked satellite operator Eutelsat from selling its ground antenna business to private equity firm EQT, citing the group’s strategic nature as a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service.
Despite long-standing struggles to persuade Europeans to switch from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon to local options, renewed concern about US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has brought new urgency to calls for a so-called “tech decoupling”.
That has fuelled fresh efforts by European governments to spur local alternatives from communications apps and cloud providers to satellites and artificial intelligence.
This week’s French moves came just days after the European parliament passed a resolution calling on member states to “strengthen European technological sovereignty by facilitating the procurement of European digital products and services, where possible”.
The EU still relies on non-EU countries — primarily the US — for more than 80 per cent of its digital services and infrastructure, according to the parliament’s report.
For decades, efforts to create European versions of cloud computing, messaging and enterprise software have foundered because people and companies are loath to switch over to often inferior or inconvenient alternatives.
The small number of successful examples has largely been piecemeal. In October, for instance, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein celebrated a “milestone for digital sovereignty” with the migration of some 40,000 state workers’ email mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to open-source alternatives.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron has been one of the most prominent advocates for Europe to become more independent from the US on everything from technology to weapons systems.
He has championed local cloud-computing providers as well as Paris-based artificial intelligence company Mistral, seen as one of Europe’s few bulwarks against US and Chinese dominance of AI.
Now, Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which is part of Denmark, have raised the spectre of a trade war in which Europe’s reliance on Silicon Valley could prove a big economic liability.
“What has changed today, more than the nature of the problem, is the likelihood that it could materialise abruptly: extraterritorial sanctions, access restrictions, regulatory blackmail,” said Francesca Musiani, a research director at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
“In that context, decoupling stops being a theoretical hypothesis and becomes a risk-management scenario.”
France itself has a chequered history of failed state-backed technology initiatives that were announced with great fanfare by presidents from Jacques Chirac to Macron, only for them to prove to be a waste of public money and time.
In 2008, France and Germany poured hundreds of millions of euro into developing Quaero — a locally made search engine billed as a sovereign alternative to Google and Yahoo — then closed it after five years. Google’s market share in search in Europe still stands at about 90 per cent.
Then, Paris tried to spur the development of a “sovereign cloud” by backing two competing projects led by telecoms groups Orange and SFR, arguing that the US cloud providers could not ensure that French user data stayed in Europe and was not vulnerable to US law enforcement or spying.
Again, uptake was minimal since the services were not as good, so the government instead regulated changes to try to make US and other foreign products more secure for the public sector and companies.
Saul Klein, London-based tech investor at Phoenix Court, said countries should be working together to ensure Europe has strong players in the industry’s next frontiers, citing Dutch chip equipment giant ASML’s €1.3bn investment in Mistral last year.
“I don’t see the point of a French Zoom,” he said. “It’s unlikely for any sovereign state to be able to do something on their own that will compete scientifically or technologically against an American or Chinese alternative . . . One has to fight the next set of battles.”
According to the research firm IDC, European companies still spent about 80 per cent of their total $25bn investments on cloud computing infrastructure in 2024 at the top five US cloud providers, which have themselves made deeper commitments to store European data locally.
David Amiel, France’s junior minister for the civil service, told the FT that the country would not be able to reach President Macron’s goals of “strategic autonomy” — meaning reducing dependencies across the economy — without a renewed push for European companies to provide more of its technology.
“We must wean ourselves off our addiction to non-European tools,” he said. “But they must be up to the best quality standards, otherwise they will fail.”
The Visio project piloted by Amiel’s ministry has the long-term goal of creating more tools for the public sector that eventually could replace Microsoft Office or Google Suite.
Last year, it launched an internal secure-messaging app called Tchap that now has about 300,000 users and aims to supplant WhatsApp or Signal.
Amiel said some applications would be done in partnership with European tech companies so the government would not develop only on its own.
A military official told the FT. “If we want to become more independent, we need to do this even if it’s not convenient at first,” the person said.
Another staffer was more critical: “I hate Tchap and already have enough apps to check!”