AeroVironment Stock Soared on a Blowout Quarter. Is the Drone Boom Just Getting Started?

Shares of AeroVironment (NASDAQ: AVAV) soared more than 20% this week, to around $171, after the drone and defense specialist reported its fiscal fourth-quarter results. The quarter was a blowout by almost any measure -- record revenue, adjusted profits that more than doubled, and a funded backlog that swelled past $1 billion.

Is this the start of a multiyear up cycle in military drones and the systems built to stop them, or a one-quarter spike that borrows from future demand and leaves a harder comparison behind?

The answer rests less on the drones AeroVironment is already known for and more on what it's building next.

Image source: Getty Images.

A blowout quarter

AeroVironment's fiscal fourth-quarter revenue (the period ended April 30, 2026) jumped 133% year over year to a record $641.6 million. That headline figure, however, was bolstered by the company's acquisitions of defense technology firms BlueHalo and Empirical Systems Aerospace. Strip the deals out, and organic growth was about 31% -- still a strong rate, and the better gauge of underlying demand.

Profitability climbed even faster. AeroVironment's non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) more than doubled to $140.1 million, lifting the adjusted EBITDA margin to 22%. Adjusted earnings per share were $1.84, up from $1.61 a year earlier.

The figure that speaks most directly to the up-cycle question, though, is backlog. AeroVironment closed the year with a funded backlog of $1.2 billion, up about 65% from $726.6 million a year earlier. Full-year bookings reached $2.7 billion against revenue of roughly $2 billion, for a book-to-bill ratio of 1.4 -- orders came in well ahead of what the company could ship. That kind of forward visibility isn't what a one-quarter spike looks like.

Looking ahead, counter-drone is the story

This is where the multiyear thesis lives. Sure, AeroVironment is best known for its Switchblade loitering munitions -- the small, low-cost attack drones that have become a fixture of modern warfare. But the faster-growing opportunity may sit on the other side of that fight: knocking enemy drones out of the sky.

Counter-drone, or counter-unmanned aircraft systems (counter-UAS), brought in about $200 million of revenue in fiscal 2026. Next to the loitering munitions business, that's still modest.

But management doesn't expect it to stay that way.

"It will not surprise me in the next 3-5 years that our directed energy and our counter-UAS business would be equally as large, if not 2-3 times bigger," CEO Wahid Nawabi said on the company's fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call.

AeroVironment builds its counter-drone defense in three layers. The first is the Titan family of radio-frequency jamming systems, whose sales roughly doubled over the prior year. The second is an early stage directed-energy weapon called LOCUST. And the third is a kinetic interceptor, Freedom Eagle-1, that physically destroys an incoming drone. The pitch to customers is that no single tool stops every threat.

Demand, for now, is moving the right way. Management pointed to "unprecedented" levels of demand across its markets and guided for fiscal 2027 revenue of $2.125 billion to $2.225 billion. The midpoint implies about 10% growth -- a step down from this year's acquisition-boosted pace, but healthy for a business this size, and it doesn't lean on the counter-drone ramp inflecting yet.

So, is the growth stock a buy? At about $171, AeroVironment trades at roughly 54 times the midpoint of management's fiscal 2027 adjusted earnings guidance -- a rich multiple. And even after this week's jump, the stock sits well below the 52-week high near $420 it touched before a steep slide earlier this year.

Personally, I read the backlog and the demand signals as the start of an up cycle rather than a one-off -- but the stock's valuation already bakes a lot of that in. For investors who want exposure to the drone and counter-drone theme, I'd keep any position small or maybe even wait for a more attractive entry point.

Daniel Sparks and his clients have no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends AeroVironment. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.