Canadian Pacific Kansas City closed at 91.40 on July 29, little changed after a steady run: 6m +25.6%, 12m +20.4%.
The business reads like a classic railroad: years of high margins, a big revenue step-up, then slower top-line tape-reading. Revenue moved from 8.7B in 2022 to 12.4B in 2023 (+42.5%), then to 14.4B in 2024 (+15.8%) and 15.0B in 2025 (+3.9%).
Margins are the other tidy page. The company’s operating margin sits up in the mid-30s — 37.5% in 2025 — and the filing flags recent improvements: operating margin changed +1.5 percentage points in the latest annual period, and net margin changed +1.9 percentage points in the latest annual period.
The valuation picture is where the tension lives. Market cap is 83.8B and enterprise value is 83.6B. On earnings [CP](https://jodie.ai/t/CP) trades at P/E 20.2x with an earnings yield of +4.9% and a cash-flow yield of +6.3%. That P/E is shown as a -33.6% gap versus the filing-peer median; at the same time, EV/sales is 5.6x — a +61.2% premium to peers. Those two signals point in different directions: the market is attaching relatively rich sales multiples but a cheaper earnings multiple.
The company’s own scenario math highlights how fragile the outcome is to that multiple.
In the filing the scenarios are laid out mechanically: the bull and the base both assume revenue CAGR +19.7% — identical top-line growth — but they use different exit P/Es (30.5x for bull, 20.2x for base). The bear assumes lower revenue CAGR +7.9% and exit P/E 14.2x.
That structure puts the spotlight on one number. The filing’s sensitivity shape is explicit: the bull-to-bear spread is wide (~216 points), driven mostly by the exit multiple the market assigns. In plain terms, whether CP’s future translates into a much-higher outcome or a much-lower one is largely a function of how rich a P/E buyers are willing to pay at the end, not just how fast revenue grows in the near term.
Put another way: you can build scenarios that all use the same revenue engine — the company’s own bull and base both pick +19.7% CAGR — and still end up in very different places because the terminal P/E moves the fulcrum.
That dynamic helps explain why a company with steady margins and a big revenue step in recent years can simultaneously look expensive on EV/sales and cheaper on P/E. It also explains why market moves can hinge as much on sentiment about multiples as on incremental operational beats.
Peering across peers named in the filing — [LHX](https://jodie.ai/t/LHX), [CDNL](https://jodie.ai/t/CDNL), [LTBR](https://jodie.ai/t/LTBR), [DXPE](https://jodie.ai/t/DXPE), [RBA](https://jodie.ai/t/RBA), [GGG](https://jodie.ai/t/GGG), [GHC](https://jodie.ai/t/GHC) — the arithmetic of exit multiples is the thing that widens or narrows the gap between optimistic and pessimistic outcomes.
No single sentence in the filing promises a particular multiple. The document simply lays out the numbers and shows how sensitive the payoff is to them. That’s the tension investors are parsing: neat margins and clear growth history on one side, and an outcomes sheet where the terminal multiple does the heavy lifting on the other.
*Scenario inputs and sensitivity described above are taken from the company filing.*