Good morning. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Booz Allen Hamilton's Earnings Call covering Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Results. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, there will be an opportunity for questions. I'd now like to turn the call over to Mr. Nathan Rutledge.

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Booz Allen's second quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings call. We hope you had an opportunity to read the press release we issued earlier this morning. We have also provided presentation slides on our website and are now on Slide 2. With me today to talk about our business and financial results are Horacio Rozanski, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Matt Calderone, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. As shown in this disclaimer on Slide 3, please keep in mind that some of the items we will discuss this morning are forward-looking and may relate to future events or future financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from forecasted results discussed in our SEC filings and on this call. All forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by the foregoing cautionary statements and speak only as of the date made. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. During today's call, we will also discuss some non-GAAP financial measures and other metrics, which we believe provide useful information for investors. We include an explanation of adjustments and other reconciliations of our non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures in our second quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings release and slides. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to our CEO and President, Horacio Rozanski. We are now on Slide 4.

Thank you, Nathan, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the call. Today, Matt and I have the privilege of discussing with you another quarter of Booz Allen's market-leading performance. But before we get to that, I would like to open this call as I have done several times in the past, by putting our work in the context of world events. On October 7, the world was shocked by a murderous terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas on the people of Israel. We at Booz Allen, stand in mourning and solidarity with Israel, the victims, and their families. We pray for the safe return of all the hostages and would stand side by side with the U.S. government in condemnation of Hamas in support of Israel's defense and in the protection of all civilians. In the intervening weeks, Booz Allen has done what we do best. We have conducted listening sessions, creating spaces to support our colleagues in mourning or afraid for both our Israeli and Palestinian loved ones living in the region. We have launched a [Match Giving] (ph) campaign. And importantly, we have supported our U.S. client's missions. Because this is personal for me too. I have felt the warm embrace of the entire Booz Allen community. I am so proud and so grateful to each one of my colleagues for showing the best of Booz Allen at a time of crisis and loss. This morning, I felt it was important to share this with you for two reasons. First, because these horrendous events remind us of the urgency of our work, bringing leading-edge technology to critical missions, in the hope of preventing and deterring things like this from ever happening. And second, because our internal response is yet another reminder of the unique culture and people…

Thank you, Horacio, and thanks to all of you for joining our call. The Booz Allen team delivered another exceptional quarter. Our success across the portfolio in shaping demand and capturing opportunities, in hiring and deploying talent onto contracts, and most important, in serving our clients' mission sets us up very well for the remainder of this fiscal year and beyond. Booz Allen prides itself on delivering for our clients, our people and our shareholders, quarter after quarter and year after year. We are proud to be in a position today to raise our fiscal year 2024 guidance. Our team continues to build both momentum and resiliency for the long-term. And as Horacio noted, we are ahead of where we expect it to be against the adjusted EBITDA dollar goal in our three-year investment thesis. Now, let's dive into the specifics of our second quarter performance. Please turn to Slide 6. Total revenue for the quarter grew 16% year-over-year to approximately $2.7 billion. Organic revenue was up 14.8% year-over-year. Revenue excluding billable expenses increased 14.1% year-over-year to approximately $1.8 billion. Our exceptional top-line performance continues to be driven by strong demand for our services and solutions and steady headcount growth. Our business continues to exhibit strength across the portfolio. Across all markets, we are seeing the results of our leaders embracing the VoLT strategy. Our Defense business is driving, with revenue up approximately 24% compared to the second quarter of last fiscal year. Growth in this market is broad-based. We continue to bring technology and tradecraft to critical national missions. Our Civil business revenue was up roughly 17% year-over-year, with strong performance across the board. Our Intelligence business grew 4% year-over-year and has almost entirely absorbed the roll-off of a large classified contract. We had a number of significant new…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Mariana Perez Mora from Bank of America.

Good morning, everyone.

Good morning.

So, my questions is around AI. It was really impressive to see all the applications that you have on AI at the edge. And I'd like you to discuss how much growth you see there. And how dependent is this expansion or the timing of this on a budget situation?

Well, Mariana, it's good to hear an Argentinian accent this early in the morning and not be the only one. Well, I think, as you know from the conversations we had at Helix a couple of weeks ago, our business this year is forecasted, our AI business, in the $500 million to $700 million range and we see significant growth over the coming years. And that growth is broad-based. We talk a lot and we talk on these calls about the work we're doing in Defense, but our work Intelligence and our work across the Civil agencies on AI is also growing well. And as you saw, we have some unique solutions that are the product of our talent, some frameworks that are proprietary to Booz Allen and work we do with commercial partners to bring dual-use technology into these missions. That, I think, set us apart. So, we are very bullish about the future. To your question about budgets, clearly, we are looking very closely at what's happening on the Hill. As Matt pointed out, we are, at this point, making into our guidance the potential for a government shutdown. We hope it won't happen, but we need to be realistic about that. And we need to be realistic about the fact that, if budget compress in the future, the competition for resources across every federal agency will increase. Now having said that, from our perspective, VoLT has put us in the middle of key enduring missions where we're bringing unique capabilities and that's why we're both raising guidance and reaffirming that we're ahead of pace to deliver on our multi-year investment thesis. So, we feel really good about where we are.

And how much of your growth is insulated from -- in the near-term from this like budget certainty? So, said otherwise, how much upside do you have in the near-term, if you were to have a budget, like, early next year?

It's hard to predict precisely. We've tried to incorporate that in the way we -- that's why guidance is a range as opposed to -- it really is a broader range these years than it's been in the past to accommodate more scenarios. I think maybe the thing to point you to is the fact that, because budget passed last December, we saw the ability to work against a lot of latent underlying demand in the business. And that's why we're growing as well as we're growing now, and then we've had the success that we've had. I mean, this is really, I've been around for a long time, as you know, probably the best first half, I've seen at least since the IPO, possibly best first half we've had in my 30-plus years at Booz Allen. So, clearly there's momentum in the business, we're building resilience in the business in anticipation of funding challenges, but we are pedal to the metal.

Thanks so much.

Sure.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Bert Subin from Stifel.

Great, good morning. Just to follow-up to Mariana's question there, at your [AI end event] (ph), you provided data around the headcount and sales expectations just for the business across Booz. Those expectations indicated lower utilization of your AI workforce, just relative to your broader client-facing staff. How quickly should we expect revenue utilization to rise across AI? And how does that make you think about the growth opportunity beyond FY '24? Horacio, I know you said you're bullish, but is that something that can flip pretty quickly?

Yeah, Bert, I'll take it first. Look, I think we showed you, as you said -- we arranged the business from a revenue perspective and told you how many AI practitioners we have. But it's purely apples to apples, because we have AI practitioners that are supporting non-AI projects and vice-versa. Our AI folks are probably less utilized than the rest of the business because we are investing a significant amount in that business. There are a lot of folks who are building capabilities, supporting innovation, driving our AI governance model, et cetera. But we see significant growth there not just from those staff but from a broader set of staff that we're training and upskilling from a technology perspective. The other thing, I'll mention, it's relevant both to your question and to Mariana's is we also highlighted at the [AI end event] (ph), the extent to which AI is now being bundled into large procurements. And the success we're having when that in fact happens. Increasingly, we're seeing, not just for AI, but for Cyber, for Digital, for some of the hardware engineering and integration that we do that is bundled together, because if you think about our complex mission problem, it requires AI to enable it, Cyber to protect it, you've got to integrate it into a software and network system, oftentimes it has to be integrated into some type of hardware product. So, I wouldn't just think about AI from a traditional perspective. It really is having a much broader impact across the base of our business and is being integrated into the technology stacks we have writ large.

Let me add two small points to what Matt said, which very much resonates. One point is, if you look at the level of investment that we're putting into AI, it's relatively modest to the success that we're having. And a lot of that is because we start early on these technologies, and we wait and we plan and we position. So that the ones that go exponential, we can -- like AI has, we can stay ahead of the trend and we are still ahead of the game there and that's, that's really exciting. And then the second point, I'll point you back at the inter galactic level to the power of our single P&L, and the ability to really manage resources as an institution as opposed to in small buckets, which gave us the opportunity to flex our workforce in a way that is pretty unique to Booz Allen and that gives us all the growth that we're talking about.

Super helpful, Horacio and Matt. Just a follow-up for you, Matt, maybe thinking more about the cost structure. Maybe not directly related to AI, but partially your G&A expense at least as a percentage of your sales continues to fall, and is growing certainly much slower than your sales growth. Can we expect that to be an engine for future margin expansion, or is that something that normalizes over time?

It could generate more margins, but really this has been intentional over the past few years. We're shifting cost and investment from the infrastructure into the business. I mean, as Horacio said, relative to some of the hyperscalers, our investment in AI is modest, but we're investing a lot of money there. So, it has been a very intentional structured effort led by all of our business leaders to become as efficient as possible on the corporate side so we can invest in the business and in growth and in the capabilities our clients want.

Thank you.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Sheila Kahyaoglu from Jefferies.

Thank you. Good morning, Horacio and Matt. Thanks so much for that introduction and the Helix visit as well. When we think about your organic growth, just to start on that, organic growth, 15% in the first half, really great results, Defense, up 24%, another acceleration. How much of that is due to improving DoD outlays? And maybe if you could remind us your expectations across the different customer basis for the year in terms of the top-line?

Hi, Sheila, good morning. I'll start, Matt might want to add. I'll say the following. When you look across the entirety of our business, Defense, Civil and Intel, 24% and 17%, 4%-plus growth while absorbing changes in the contract portfolio, it's really broad-based. We are hitting on all cylinders across all of these. It's not one program, it's not one piece, it's not one dynamic. I think, in general, it's attributable to VoLT. VoLT is giving us both momentum and resiliency. The momentum is evident in the numbers, and in the fact that we're raising guidance while accounting for the potential for a government shutdown. And the resiliency is equally important, because to your point, I mean, we do see increased uncertainty in the funding picture. At this point, we continue to see clients moving aggressively against our key priorities in other cycles like this. We have seen clients maybe pull back in anticipation. And perhaps it's because of the missions we support, perhaps it's because of the geopolitical dynamics and the uniqueness of our offerings that we're still seeing that. But we are both growing fast and running tightly so that we can create the environment in which we can continue to both invest and protect our workforce if the budgets get tight or get interrupted for a period of time. So, we're excited about where we are across all the markets, in Defense, in particular. Like I said, I mean, every part of our Defense business is growing nicely. It's the only way to get to 24%, and it has really transformed to grow along the lines of bringing technology to mission.

No, that's super helpful color.

Yeah. Sheila...

Sure, Matt.

Obviously, 10% to 15% organic growth for the year, we're growing above market, clearly. But as Horacio said, it's the quality of the underlying growth and the depths of that, that really has us excited, because it gives us not just momentum but the resiliency to write out potential dislocation from a budgetary environment.

And Matt, just another follow-up for you, if I may. Can you talk about the accounts receivable balance in terms of the cash? How we should expect sort of working capital improvements from here on that balance? And also the impact revenues, how we should see that progression?

Sure. I'll take that in a couple of parts. First, and we've talked about the puts and takes on cash for a couple of calls now. On the positive side, we're certainly generating more profit, our CapEx has declined, and we've improved collections. But there are headwinds. The DoD settlement, obviously, higher cash taxes, driven by our growth in 174, higher interest expense. And as you mentioned, our outsized growth, we are consuming working capital to support it. I mean, just to give you one example, we're required to pay small businesses within 30 days. And so, as we're growing, we're typically paying them faster than we're collecting. With respect to our outstanding receivable balance, I think you're getting at the question of some of the unbilled receivables on our balance sheet, because you've asked that previously. We are working -- a meaningful portion of that is tied up with -- in past-year audits. We are working with DCAA, DCMA, both well and quickly to try to resolve that. It's going to be likely a multi-year process, but things are going well. And at this time, we have no ability to project what's -- when and how that will be resolved.

And just on the revenue line, I think that you called out $18 million from the reduction at the provision. So, those should be conceived as positive as you sort of retrieve those payments, is that how to think about it?

Yes. I mean, that, in particular, has to do with -- it changed our reg reserve we made relative to our '22 audit and the results of '22 audit, but there are going to be puts and takes over the next couple of quarters, and a couple years as we work to resolve these. So, it was a positive this quarter, we're not making any predictions about future quarters.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Louie DiPalma from William Blair.

Horacio, Matt and Nathan, good morning.

Good morning.

Hello, Louie.

Horacio and Matt, you forecast lower capital deployment through fiscal '25. Has your VoLT and your venture capital program been so successful and selling prices so high that you are no longer interested in another Liberty-sized acquisition? And are you signaling more stock buybacks with the extra capital now?

Yeah, Louie, thanks for the question. I'll start, I'm sure, Horacio will want to comment. I mean obviously, when we put the investment thesis in place two years ago, the world was a different place. It was different an interest rate environment, M&A market was much more robust and less political and macroeconomic risk. Strategic M&A very much remains a priority for us. It's an important tool in rounding out our ability to bring technology to mission at scale. To your question, we're getting a lot of value out of our venture investments, but they don't tend to not be at the kind of scale that you get from Liberty. So, explicitly, I would absolutely do the Liberty acquisition again. And we're looking for the next one. We've got a sizable pipeline of small- to mid-sized tuck-ins that we're prosecuting. And the range of $2 billion to $3.5 billion can still accommodate a significant amount of M&A activity over the next 18 months. I think we've only deployed slightly over $1.2 billion in the first 18 months. We're going to remain patient, disciplined as always in our approach, but that we can meet the adjusted EBITDA target in the investment thesis for deploying less capital than anticipated, really is a testament to our organic performance. And it just gives us a lot of flexibility to create additional value for shareholders. So, I would not read into this any change in our strategy, it's just a reflection of where we are.

Great. Thanks.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Cai von Rumohr from Cowen.

Thanks so much, and good quarter. So Matt, you mentioned that you booked $1.1 billion of the $1.8 billion on the Thunderdome. What did you guys book on the $630 million Space Force award and the $1.7 billion CDC award?

Yeah. So, Cai, I believe I said in our remarks, we booked all of the DMAC award, CDC, and I believe we booked all of the Space award as well. Thunderdome is going to be incrementally awarded. So, we only booked $1.1 billion out of the $1.85 billion there.

Got it. And can you comment about near-term bookings prospects? You know...

It's always hard...

...[indiscernible] big contracts still out there, or are we looking at more task orders?

It's a combination, Cai. It's always hard to predict quarter-by-quarter, because as you know, these things can slip in terms of awards and then the protest environment creates some uncertainty. Looking ahead, I don't think we're going to have a historically stellar quarter next quarter. There are a couple of large awards that may or may not happen. We don't have a significant amount of recompete risk in the portfolio in the next 12 months. So, as you know, this is why we talk about LTM more than each individual quarter. And the LTM of almost 1.3 times, and more importantly, our qualified pipeline, which is up 35% year-over-year. Says we're really in good shape from a demand perspective.

Yeah. Cai, just to give a little color on that. I've had the chance to both talk to clients about needs and talk to our team about the work that we're going after, and I would say the demand picture for technology into core mission is actually accelerating, not slowing down. And so, as Matt said, while it's almost impossible to predict bookings on any given quarter, the demand picture absent significant budget disruption is very strong.

Well, last year you had a 0.1 book-to-bill, so it was particularly weak. Is that going to be the norm that we get this very strong second quarter which we got this year? And then we should look for a very, very weak, near zero Q3, or is there any opportunity that Q3 could be a little bit better, clearly below 1, but better?

I think that -- I'll start. I'm sure Matt will want to do color on this one. But I think on the -- first of all, I think that this quarter, the last quarter of the government fiscal year, the second quarter for Booz Allen is always the strongest because of just the way in which outlays happened and the way money is obligated through the budgeting cycle. So, that will -- that has always been the case, that continues to be. As you've seen over the last few years, the rest of the quarters are actually less predictable, because they are predicated on when will these big jobs get awarded. And that process, it really changes every year. It is really -- I would not take last year and translate it into this year directly. But as Matt said, there's a lot in the pipeline. It is over $26 billion in the pipeline. So, could some of those things hit this year, we would -- this quarter, we would like them to. But either way, we certainly have the backlog necessary to continue to grow. We have the people here to continue to grow and we have the momentum to get that done.

Yeah, Cai, if you look...

Terrific.

...at our leading indicators and by historical measures, we're in as good a shape as we've almost ever been, right? On the demand side, we talked about not just the backlog in the book-to-bill, which is looking backwards, but the proposal pipeline looking forwards. On the supply side, at the end of the quarter, our consulting -- our clients staff headcount was up over 11%, more than 4% -- sequentially for the first half of the year, which puts us ahead of the pace that we've typically wanted to be in of 3% to 5% headcount growth. And we're managing the business really well. But there's a lot of volatility out there, right? And I think that's what we're preparing for. And that's why we built-in two to four week assumption of a partial government shutdown. Just to quantify that, before you -- we said the last shutdown of this scale which was in 2018 to 2019 cost us about $0.02 to $0.03 at the bottom-line. But that shutdown, I remember, occurred over the holidays, it was limited in scope and was at a time when we were both smaller in size in aggregate and we had a meaningful amount of time to make-up lost billing hours, which we did. So, we're assuming the impact this time will be 3 to 4 times of that. So again, put that in the context of our overall guidance, we raised top-line 4%, adjusted EBITDA 4% and EPS 3%, plus the government shutdown assumption, we're just in a great spot.

Terrific. Thank you very much.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Matt Akers from Wells Fargo.

Yes, good morning. This is Eric Yan on for Matt. Just wondering if you see the headcount kind of shifted with FocusedFox running off. Maybe that's around end of September. I think it's about like 400 people on the program. Do you know like how many you were able to retain and shift to other work and how many are lost?

Yeah, we've almost completely absorbed, as I said in my prepared remarks, the impact of that contract loss. There's just small team left doing mission-critical work on that contract from Booz Allen. We had about -- we said we had about 400 people on that contract. We kept more than half, and redeployed, many of them to mission-critical activities. But pulling up, we said we wanted to grow headcount 3% to 5% this year, we're at 4%, and I'm really encouraged by the numbers I'm seeing even for this quarter. So, that's why I said in the script, we're likely going to exceed the 3% to 5% range. And historically, that's been what we need to maintain our organic growth objectives.

Okay, thanks. Just one more on the Section 174, with the updated guidance from IRS. Do you see an impact from that going forward?

No.

Okay, thanks.

Thank you. At this time, I would now like to turn the conference back over to Horacio Rozanski for closing remarks.

Thank you, Gigi. And thank you all for your questions and for being here this morning. I hope, Matt and I successfully conveyed how excited we are about both the momentum and the resilience we see in our business. And also of the opportunities that are ahead for our people, for our clients and for all of our investors. If you'll indulge me for a moment, I'd like to close the call by calling out our annual innovation publication called Velocity, which is now available on our website. And this year, it's fully centered on artificial intelligence. In this year's Velocity, you get to hear from Booz Allen experts and from our industry partners on the ubiquity of AI, its transformative capabilities, how harnesses it for good, and a lot more. So, I hope you'll enjoy reading it. And we would love to hear your feedback. And on that note, thank you again for joining, and have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.