Zach Parker
Analyst · Canaccord. Please go ahead
Thanks, Chris, and good morning to everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter conference call. Starting with slide 3, I'll begin by providing a high-level overview of our financial performance and some color around the outlook for fiscal 2020. As you can discern from our press release, we have delivered attractive fourth quarter results with revenue at $54.2 million for the quarter and operating income coming in at $3.4 million for the quarter, both reflecting the highest values since restructuring the business to a government contractor almost a decade ago, and for the year revenue rose to $160.4 million. Note, that this is our first report reflecting full quarter contribution from our recent acquisition. By the way, we have now enjoyed top line organic growth year-over-year for nine consecutive years since 2010. Not only did our newly acquired operations post strong performance, but the remainder of our business grew 6% organically as well. These results clearly demonstrate that we remain well aligned with our strategic growth objectives and continue to provide differentiating value to our customers in key mission-critical agencies of the Federal government. Operating income rose to $3.4 million for the quarter and $10.0 million for fiscal 2019. Our team has been phenomenal in growing the company into a diverse technology-enabled, high-value provider of healthcare solutions, and we'll continue to focus on appropriately scaling the business to support growth and better serve our clients and increase returns going forward. We continue to have excellent free cash flow. Our current plan is to deploy this capital to accelerate the reduction of our acquisition-related debt consistent with our past practice. Through 30 September, 13 weeks after the deal, we have reduced the debt down to $56 million. Kathryn will address this further in a moment. Slide 4 shows a snapshot of our growth and performance of the past seven years. We've significantly expanded the top line over this period, which includes the benefit of two strategic acquisitions, while also increasing EBITDA even faster. While these results are among the strongest in our space, I believe we are substantially better positioned to accelerate that growth rate and our results going forward, and that is our primary focus along with our accelerated debt reduction flow. Accordingly, we feel positive about the future given the outlook for our services and agencies that we serve. Please see slide 5. As you can see from this overview, the government services market is stable and growing. While procurement policies in general can be negatively affected by many factors such as continuing resolutions and the like, we have historically had minimal impact on the agencies that we serve. Across the board, customers are looking for more technology-enabled solution, greater use of data analytics, and seamless end-to-end solutions including migration to the cloud and Internet of Things, all of which are now strong components of our offerings. We are well placed across the healthcare space and the agencies we serve and have materially bolstered our position and market share within the public health and life sciences arena. Our recent IDIQ award with the Center for Disease Control will add to our growth prospects here. So, as we are carefully monitoring how the federal budget negotiations play out, we firmly believe that the Health and Human Services Agency, the Veteran Affairs Agency, and the Department of Defense, particularly the Defense Health Agency will continue to enjoy broad bipartisan support on the hill and steady increasing levels of funding going forward. Turning to slide six. I'd like to review our core competencies heading into fiscal 2020. Again, these have bolstered our capabilities from our heritage business and reflects some of the new capabilities from our recent acquisitions. You can see that our experience, skillsets, and credentials align well for the prior slide reviewing the budget priorities for fiscal 2020. We bring a unique approach to solving problems to federal government challenges, covering everything from case management to secure data analytics and complete system modernization. I'm proud of the expertise that we offer our clients across the board, which is helping us to bid on bigger and more complex contracts, as we turn the corner on 2019. Our leadership and management team have been excellent in developing detailed action plans with the joint objectives of growth and solid operating performance for those current customers going forward. We have a healthy new business pipeline of growth opportunities. It is just under $900 million and are optimistic about the prospects for new wins next year and beyond. Of course, this will require careful execution and continuous improvement of our business platform, and we currently utilize substantial KPIs or key performance indicators, dashboards, and progress monitoring with regard to our new business pipeline and business development activities. We look forward to those turning into successful growth -- successful wins and growth opportunities for the company. Everyone in the company plays a part in achieving our strategic objectives, which means we are constantly communicating with our employees, investing and training them as needed, and are aligning ourselves with some new strategic partners to help us accelerate this growth. After all, our staff are essential, our products are key, and it is critical that we're involved, excited, and inspired by leveraging those credentials to the task at hand. And so in closing, I'd like to say that DLH is never been better prepared for the future than we are today. Our business has the breadth, diversity, and unique differentiators to bring to new opportunities to the federal government. Our employees are highly credential, sharp, have demonstrated the ability to drive great quality assurance and excellent customer satisfaction with their expertise. With that, I'd like now to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Kathryn JohnBull. Kathryn?