JBT MAREL Corp (JBTM) stock intrinsic value fair value estimate & owner earnings analysis

JBT Marel (formerly John Bean Technologies) builds and services food-processing machinery: freezers, fryers, cooking systems, filling and packaging lines, and poultry, meat and fish processing lines. It also sells the parts and service that keep that installed equipment running. On January 2, 2025 it acquired Marel, an Icelandic processing-equipment maker. That more than doubled the company. Revenue rose from $1.72B in 2024 to $3.80B in 2025, and the share count rose from about 32 million to about 52 million. It also sold its airport-equipment business in 2023. Because of this, the years before 2025 describe a different, smaller company. We measure earning power from the combined business only: 2025 owner earnings of about $241 million, or $4.64 per diluted share. How we measured owner earnings: we start with operating cash flow ($341.7M in 2025). We remove the swings in receivables, inventories, payables and customer prepayments (a $26M drag). We then deduct stock compensation ($23M) as a real cost, and capital spending ($103.6M). We treated all 2025 capital spending as maintenance because the revenue jump was bought, not built. Large non-cash charges are already handled by starting from cash flow. These include roughly $179M of acquisition-related amortization, $148M of pension expense from settling the U.S. pension plan, and inventory step-up. The cross-check ties exactly. The old company's per-share owner earnings ranged from $2.49 to $6.05 over 2016-2024, but on 32 million shares and a different business mix, so we do not use them as the level. Owner earnings per share fell 23% in 2025 (from $6.05 to $4.64) because of the larger share count, even though total owner earnings rose. We assume no growth in year one. Because much of the earnings come from acquired customer relationships that gradually lose value, we do not grow earnings in any case. Instead we let the earning stream fade after year ten. We credit no growth at all. The filing names cost and revenue synergies from the Marel deal as an expected benefit. It also flags integration risk. Synergies are management targets rather than secured results, and market growth or share gains are not something we can evidence. So all three cases assume flat owner earnings for ten years. The first half of 2026 shows revenue up about 7% from a year earlier, but we treat that as too recent to change the level. Bear case (about $36 per share): earnings settle around $3.20 per share, close to the trough of 2022 ($2.69), and then fade about 5% a year. The company now carries about $1.9B of debt, roughly half of it floating-rate, and around $400M of convertible notes fall due within a year. Integration problems or a downturn in food-equipment orders would hit shareholders hard. The business still survives, because it is in compliance with its covenants and has about $1.76B of undrawn revolver. Base case (about $62 per share): $4.64 held flat for ten years, then fading about 3% a year. The fade reflects the installed base and service stream continuing but competition and acquired-intangible decay eroding it. Bull case (about $84 per share): capital spending and integration costs normalize so earnings reach about $5.90 per share, in line with the best per-share years the old company demonstrated ($6.03 in 2019 and $6.05 in 2024). They stay there for ten years and then fade about 2% a year. What would make this wrong: 2025 is the only full year of the combined business. If it carried one-time integration cash costs we could not separate out, the true earning power is higher. If Marel's earnings prove weaker than the old JBT's, or heavy interest costs persist, it is lower. We could not reconcile how much of the 2025 operating cash flow reflects one-time deal and integration costs.