What happened
NuScale Power (SMR 3.61%), a start-up developer of nuclear power plants known as small modular reactors (SMRs), is lighting up the stock market Thursday morning after reporting earnings last night.
As of 9:55 a.m. ET today, NuScale stock is up 12%.
So what
NuScale is still in the very early stages of becoming a profit-making company. Sales for the second quarter more than doubled over the year-ago period, but still amounted to just $5.8 million. And while the company earned a tiny gross profit in the quarter (even less than a year ago), heavy spending on operating costs and, especially, research and development left it with a $29.7 million net loss on the bottom line, or $0.13 per share, twice as much as a year ago.
So NuScale didn't spend a lot of time talking about earnings or revenue in its press release. Instead, the company highlighted its financing commitments to help it continue setting up a new SMR in Romania, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's acceptance of its design application for a new SMR model last month.
Now what
NuScale isn't doing a whole lot of business just yet. CEO John Hopkins says the company is still moving "closer to commercialization" but is not quite there yet. But it is already manufacturing at least one SMR, which Hopkins thinks puts the company "truly in a class of one in our industry."
For better or worse, I guess that makes NuScale a top dog and first mover in this bleeding-edge industry of small modular nuclear reactors. Whether the company can evolve from speculative investment to sustainable business, however, remains to be seen.
