Good morning. My name is Maisha and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the EMCOR Group Third Quarter 2018 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Ms. Jamie Baird, you may begin your – Ms. Jamie Baird with FTI Consulting, you may begin.

Thank you, Maisha and good morning everyone. Welcome to the EMCOR Group conference call. We are here today to discuss the company’s 2018 third quarter results which were reported earlier this morning. I would like to turn the call over to Kevin Matz, Executive Vice President of Shared Services who will introduce management. Kevin, please go ahead.

Thank you, Jamie and good morning everyone. Welcome to EMCOR’s earnings conference call for the third quarter of 2018. For those of you, who are accessing our call via the Internet and our website, welcome to as well and we hope you have arrived at the beginning of our slide presentation that will accompany our remarks today. Please advance to Slide 2. This presentation and discussion contains certain forward-looking statements and certain non-GAAP financial information. Page 2 describes in detail the forward-looking statements and the non-GAAP financial information disclosures. I encourage everyone to review both statements in conjunction with our discussion and the accompanying slides. Slide 3, has the executives who are with me to discuss the quarter and nine month results. They are Tony Guzzi our Chairman, President and CEO; Mark Pompa, our Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer; Maxine Mauricio, our Senior Vice President and General Counsel; and our Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Mava Heffler. For call participants not accessing the conference call via the Internet, this presentation including the slides will be archived in the Investor Relations section of our website under Presentations. You can find it at emcorgroup.com. With that said, please let me turn the call over to Tony. Tony?

Thanks, Kevin and good morning. And I’ll be covering Pages 4 to 6 upfront here. We had another terrific quarter. We set quarterly records for revenue, operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share from continuing operations. We had 7.5% organic growth – revenue growth in the quarter, which was aided not only by the recovery in our industrial services segment for the Harvey impact in the year ago period, but also a strong organic growth in our building services, electrical construction and UK segments. We are winning new work and executing that new work well across all segments. We continue to perform well in our mechanical and electrical construction segments. Our building services segment and the UK. We are now finally experiencing a recovery that is still gaining momentum in our industrial services segment as more normal demand patterns and activity return with our refining and petrochemical customers post Harvey. We continue to attract some of the best skilled trades’ people. However, labor markets are tight and we will drive productivity solutions to reduce our field labor needs and we always are recruiting and training new entrants into our skill trades workforce. Overall, we had a really good quarter and we have very good performance year-to-date. In our mechanical and electrical construction segments, we continue to perform well. On a combined basis, we performed at 7.4% operating income margins and as I’ve said many, many, many times you cannot look at operating income margins in these segments on a quarter-to-quarter basis. But to understand the trends, it is better to look at a four to five quarter rolling average and we’ve used in the current quarter or through that lens of this rolling average our operating income margins are strong and we are executing well. Most of the…

Thank you, Tony and good morning to everyone participating on the call today. For those accessing this presentation via the webcast, we are now on Slide 7. Over the next several slides, I will augment Tony’s opening commentary and of course third quarter performance as well as provide a summary of our year-to-date results through September 30. All financial information referenced is derived from our consolidated financial statements included in both of our earnings release announcement and form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this morning. So let’s revisit our third quarter performance. Consolidated revenues of $2.05 5 million or up 8.5% over quarter three of 2017. Our third quarter results includes $19.3 million of revenues attributable to businesses acquired, pertaining to the period of time that such businesses we’re not owned by EMCOR in last year’s third quarter. Acquisition revenues positively impacted our U.S. mechanical construction and U.S. building services segments. Excluding the impact of businesses acquired third quarter consolidated revenues increased $141 million or 7.5% organically. All of EMCOR’s reportable segments generated revenue growth during the third quarter. U.S. electrical construction revenues of $486 million increased $28.1 million or 6.1% from quarter three of 2017. Quarter-over-quarter revenue gains within the commercial, hospitality and manufacturing market sectors were partially offset by revenue declines within the transportation and institutional market sectors due to the completion or substantial completion of several large infrastructure projects during 2017. U.S. mechanical construction revenues of $772.3 million increased $12.2 million or 1.6%. Excluding acquisition revenues of $10.7 million, the segments revenues increased $1.5 million or 0.2% organically. As I mentioned during my second quarter earnings call commentary, our mechanical constructing segment completed a number of large scale projects in 2017. As a result and as we begin pre-project planning and mobilization on…

Thanks, Mark, and I’m on Page 12. Remaining performance obligations for RPO by segment and market sector. As we have communicated over the last several quarters, at the beginning of 2018 EMCOR adopted FASB’s new revenue recognition standard, which requires a disclosure of remaining unsatisfied performance obligations. We call those RPOs. Prior to the adoption of new standards, the company had reported backlog on a quarterly basis. Backlog is not a term recognized under United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. So instead of reporting two figures, we have chosen to move slowly to RPO. The most significance difference between remaining performance obligations and backlog relates to the contract term of the company service contracts. A detailed description of that difference between backlog and RPO can be found in the MD&A within the company’s first quarter 10-Q. Looking at the graphs, total RPOs at the end of the third quarter was $3.97 billion or up 8.1% from the June 30 level of $3.67 billion or up $365 million or 10.1% from March 31, 2018, when we initially change over to our RPO reporting from backlog. RPO increases this year have mainly been driven by our domestic construction segments. However, our other two domestic segments, Building Services and Industrial Services have also experienced RPO growth for the year. RPO in our UK segment is down a bit thus far this year. Looking at RPO by market sector, our growth is being led by increases in commercial and industrial sector projects. We like that, where we have leading positions. For instance, in data center and food processing projects. We believe that total non-residential activity remains buoyant and around the mid-single-digit growth for the year and as we move into the final quarter of 2018, there is nothing that we currently see that will…

[Operator Instructions] And at this time, your first question does come from Tahira [BMO Capital Markets]. Tahira, your line is open.

All right. Thank you and congratulations on another strong quarter, guys. Tony, given the trend of the third quarter and I don’t know, you might have low balled fourth quarter again on the revenue side. But just given your commentary, Mechanical seems like you are getting a lot of backlog again and again. Industrial, it’s recovering. Is it conceivable potentially for you guys to see mid to high single-digit revenue growth into next year?

I think a lot of that will depend on where we end the year, T. We had a lot of project accelerations at the end of last year. That could happen again this year. We’re not going to comment on 2019, but we think that mid-single-digit growth in the non-res market would bode well for us. We’ve got to understand more about the turnaround schedule, which right now looks pretty good. And then all the things that go around – but right now, with remaining performance obligations up 8.1% sequentially and we continue to see strengthen that going into fourth quarter. I expect us to have decent guidance going into next year.

Got it, okay. And just taking the commentary, you had on really making the industrial margins already pushing those further and you’re not happy with where they are right now. And hopefully these glitches and transportation projects go away. Could you also see margin expansion next year?

I think a lot of it will have to do with mix T. Clearly, our Industrial Services people expect better margins and to do better. It’s not – we need more volume and we’re starting to see volume return. We did make some nice investments in that business. So we’ll have some startup as we startup a couple new areas, product lines, both at midstream and also some other services in a refinery. But we do expect to do better in Industrial. Now, we also have very strong construction margins right now. And we’re going to fight like heck to keep them. But in some ways, construction world, we like our margins, where they are in somewhere around there is okay, we need to grow margin dollars there as the works available and the right mix of works available. And Building Services, we continue to get to the right mix. We don’t see any slowing in the kind of work we’re doing there to help our customers, improve their assets. And the UK, continued to be pretty strong. But I always think about it. We’re around 5% right now. The mix of how we get to that 5% or high-4% to mid-5%s may change. But that’s a pretty good place for us to be. We’d like some margin expansion. But we don’t want to sacrifice that next project for margin expansion. Mark, I mean, you may have a view on that too.

Yes, I think, just with regard to Tony’s comment on Industrial, obviously, there is still some headwind within the third quarter and their margin performance is because of their higher fixed overhead structure. And they did ramp up the activity, but the activity ramped up towards the latter half of quarter three. So there definitely was some under absorption or overhead. The company is performing well across the whole portfolio as we speak. As you could appreciate, there’s a tremendous amount of moving parts. We’re remaining disciplined in our project selection and obviously we’re requiring our field labor to continue to execute at a very high level and I think we’re going to carry that strength into 2019, but stay tuned for more that when we get there on the timeline.

As far as the transportation projects, I think when you look at it as a portfolio over the last three years, we’ve actually done quite well, absent the one project in New York City, which had a lot of anomalies with it. This was more of a routine run of mill issue. It’s the scope got away from us. We have a lot of other things where the scope moves with us. We feel really good about the transportation market and it’s one of the things we can really add value to our long-term.

Got it, okay. Tony, actually that’s pretty helpful. Thank you both.

At this time, your next question comes from Adam Thalhimer. He is from Thompson Davis. Adam, your line is open at this time.

Hey, good morning guys. Nice quarter. Tony, are you seeing much variability in demand by city or region at this point?

For sure, I mean, there’s parts with our companies, right? We have companies that are more capable in certain markets, so therefore they’re able to do more things. So I can’t tell you whether it’s demand, but yes, I mean there are some pockets around the country that are stronger and someone has to do with us, right. I would say, broad-based, there’s a general uplift, there’s markets we don’t participate in a large way. So I don’t have a view on those, but on both coasts are pretty good. I do think the residential high rise market is slowing in some cities, not a big part of what we did. And quite frankly, that could be good because of a lot more manpower to do come to our projects and allow us to grab some more manpower and you can move out our marginal manpower. But right now, the market is pretty strong and with the return of the upstream market in the Permian, the return of the downstream market in the Gulf Coast, we’re all figuring out how to deal with SB54 in California. And the resuming normal activity downstream there in California. I think if you look at that in general. There’s a demand for our labor. There’s the demand for manpower. I think long term, we continue to see really good bidding opportunities for the companies that we have to have the most capabilities.

Okay. And then Tony, can you remind us what margins within industrial are you happy with? You said, you’re a little unhappy with the margins.

I think depending on mix and Mark will have a view too. I mean, I think, if we’re heavily mixed towards the field in a different – in a quarter, it may go more towards the mid-sixes to high-sixes. If we have a little more shop work, it may get into mid-sevens, Mark is that…

Yes, I would say, Adam, 6.5% to 8% would be what I would consider acceptable performance range and that could vary quarter-to-quarter depending on what – where you are relative to turnaround, right?

And Mark, stock in operating income margins, right. I mean realize that’s our segment with the heaviest DNA load.

Okay. And then in electrical, you referenced some large jobs that were starting up. Can you give us some additional color on kind of magnitude and timing of how that progresses?

Yes. They’re large. We don’t give specifics. But these are jobs mid-$40 million, $50 million type jobs or more starting up. They’re commercial, they’re industrial. And we don’t have a [indiscernible] somewhere between 9 months and 18 months, we think, right now.

Okay. And then lastly from me, Mark, can you give us any color on cash flow expectations for Q4?

Yes. I think, both Tony and I mentioned in our commentary that we’re expecting Q4 to be stronger than Q3, so realistically, it’s going to be something north of $100 million in the fourth quarter. And we’ll see where we are. I mean if we continue to have the same level of strong organic revenue growth in the fourth quarter, my estimate might be a little bit on the high side but that will be a good position to be in right, because we’re going to carry over that monetization of activity into 2019. We have a lot of TNM work in progress right now, obviously, with our field-based businesses, both within the Industrial segment and within our Electrical Construction segment. And unfortunately, the way those contracts are structured, we bill in arrears. And we’ve got a lot of craft mobilized in the daily basis, and we’re billing when we’re supposed to, that money may not come until quarter one 2019.

Are days are still pretty good?

Yes.

And are net billings are in pretty good shape.

In our IR aging at 9/30 looks no different as of December 31 of 2017 or as of 9/30 of 2017, so.

The good news is we always say we like to invest in our business for growth. We’re investing our business for organic growth right now and we have the ability to take advantage of investing our business for acquisition growth too.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

At this time, your next question comes from Noelle Dilts from Stifel. Noelle, your line is open.

Hi and congratulations on a good quarter.

Good morning.

I just wanted – Tony, you mentioned labor a bit in your comments, and I just wanted to dig into that a little bit further. First, I think the question is are the labor markets becoming so tight that they could potentially constraining growth. I know you mentioned some productivity initiative. So if you could kind of expand upon what you’re doing there? And then could you give us a sense of what you’re seeing in terms of wage rate changes and how to think about the productivity of your workforce right now as you bring on new people?

Right. I mean clearly, right, we’re beyond our core workforce right now, and have been for the last 24 months. And of course, as we grow, more people get added to our core workforce. And I think you have to take a nuanced view of this, Noelle, the way we think about it. The businesses that peak the fastest, which would be our industrial turnaround businesses and oil and gas businesses, find short-term labor constraints the most challenging. And with that we’d likely lead to is an extension of time on a given turnaround or an extension of hours to someone will work to get the work done. And there’s a lot of things driving out, one is a resumption of demand and it’s coming now after a slow period. So out of some people have left and gone to the construction trades out of that core workgroup. The other part of it is the demand can be pretty broad based, so you’re strong in Texas and Louisiana right now and work’s returning in California with wages are little higher, you may find it more difficult to staff a turnaround in Ohio or in Indiana. So you have to really think about it in nuanced way. And then when you get to the construction trades where your planning can be a lot more systematic, you start thinking about what the mix of overtime and other leverage you would use and you have thought about that in your estimate, that you will use to drive performance on that, so that you can keep your most productive labor working as much as you can. But also at the same time, realizing you can’t fatigue workforce to the point whether there are no longer productive. And so a lot of planning goes into…

Thanks. That’s great color. For my second question, I wanted to stick into refinery services a bit more. As you think about this kind of catch up from the delays associated with Harvey and I understand you’re limited in what you can say about 2019. But is there a way you could give us a sense of how you’re thinking about sort of just base growth in that market and then how much this kind of potential catch up or deferral of work could add to the opportunity as we look out over the next 12 to 18 months?

Yes. A lot of deferral work, you have to be careful why think about it because the way you’ll see that is in scope increased once you’re into the turnaround. I mean, so we probably won’t have a lot of visibility on deferrals and tore into it. As one of our most seasoned operators thoughtfully told me last year when I was thinking about all that and asked somebody that’s actually on the front lines of it every day. He said, Tony, so when you miss a oil change in your car, do you then decide to do two back to back? And of course, the answer to that’s no. Okay, by missing the oil change, did you create damage, and the answer to that maybe. And so we’ll learn a lot about that in the fourth quarter and the first quarter as we get into these turnarounds to see what happens with scope. All that being said, one of the things that – there’s a lot of things going on in that market right now. And one of the things you say on the negative side, you can say all these consolidations happen. As a large contractor that could be a positive for us because we have the ability to serve those large refiners in a substantial way. And then on the other side, you could say the crude mix is different than what these folks had planned eight to 10 years ago when there was the big CapEx cycle to get these refineries, especially on the Gulf Coast and some of the Midwest one’s prepared for either sour, Canadian or North Dakota crude or Venezuelan crude and Canadian crude when you looked at the Gulf Coast. And now they’re running more Permian crudes, which is a sweet crude. As we put all that together and say, what does that mean for maintenance? And so the consolidation is being good, scope increases could happen from the referrals, but then the life may be extended in some of these assets because of the crude mix going through. We think net-net-net of all that we’re in a pretty good position and we have to continue to look for services to add and we are doing that. And by adding those services we can keep ourselves more relevant to our customers.

Thank you. Very helpful.

At this time your next question comes from Brent Thielman from D.A. Davidson.

Great. Thanks. Great quarter.

Thank you.

Tony in industrial services, we’ve all been waiting for the lift for some time. And it sort of feels like you’re seeing kind of an abrupt comeback in the business. You mentioned what you’ve done to hire and retain people and things were slower. Is any of or all of that plane into more favorable contract terms with these customers right now? Is there might be scrambling to get your services?

No. These are very tough negotiators. You deal with the supply management and purchasing group now. You deal with the operational scope and you have to be pretty thoughtful and how you do contracts with them. But what is happening is people realize to get the right mix of work on it, did they have to get down to and understand who’s going to be coming on the job. So you’re seeing a return to that. But these are tough negotiators that know what they’re doing. And the good news is, they value what we do and we have large scale relationships with some of the biggest downstream chemical and petrochemical refining companies.

Okay. And you offered some good things in terms of the different factors playing into – kind of what’s in back into refining customers in the Gulf and so forth. I didn’t hear, you mentioned Imo 2020. Could you talk about what that might mean for your business over the next few years?

Sure. MARPOL is a good thing for us. It’s going to lead to a lot of small capital projects, which we happen to do on the mechanical side. It’s going to lead to increase in diesel type production or right below diesel, which is something that U.S. refiners are structurally advantaged at, which should increase demand. The better our customers do, the better we do. And it should lead to a higher utilization long-term. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the refining sector 30 years from now, but here’s how we think about the next five to 10 years. We see steady demand we think, improvement and a MARPOL is helping that. And the other thing we see is the Gulf Coast refiners especially really becoming more and more strategically advantage one because of their size, two, because of the mixture crews they can put in, their input costs, especially natural gas are very favorable. And who’s likely to be the losers and we have an export market we can now serve. Who’s likely to be the losers long-term in the refining space? It is Northern Europe and the East Coast of the U.S.

Okay. And I guess, all of an oversight we are trying to think about next year, assuming it looks like this construction market momentum is going to carry on. Would there be any reasons why electrical or mechanical reads in a core organic basis should grow a lot faster than the other?

I think it’s been on project mixed and timing. No reason I think structurally, no, especially with industrial continuing to applied back to our regional reasonable volume levels. No.

Okay. Okay. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thank you.

At this time your next question comes from Adam Thalhimer from Thompson Davis.

Adam is doubleheader.

I’m back me. Can you just provide some brief comments on the buyback the $200 million?

Yes. I mean, look, it’s a sign of confidence, right? We’ve had a thoughtful buyback program over a period of time. The way we think about is a return the cash to shareholders. We’re not speculators in our own stock. We’ve executed well over a long period of doing it. We have no specific goals in any given quarter or any given time, but one thing we are committed to long-term is to keep no dilution from happening, which is not that hard considering we only to lose somewhere between 250,000 shares a year. Not a lot. And so look, obviously our board said, we had $79 million remaining, we’re going to do another $200 million. I would guess, we think our socks obviously a value right now over the last couple of weeks, it’s been a bit of crazy correction, but the whole market has to. But again, go back to my earlier point, we’re not speculators in the stock. We balance it against other opportunities for organic growth, acquisitions. We prioritize share repurchase over expanding the dividend.

Perfect. Okay. Thanks.

That it Maisha?

[Operator Instructions]

Okay. I think that’s it.

At this time we do have – I apologize, I don’t mean to interrupt. However, we do have a question from Noelle Dilts from Stifel.

Go ahead, Noelle.

Along the capital allocation line of questioning. Could you just give us an update on kind of what you’re seeing in terms of potential M&A targets in the market and any changes in how you’re thinking about multiples evaluation?

We really haven’t changed how we think about it for a long period of time. I mean, these two deals we executed so far this year I think are emblematic in the kind of things what we do. There may be one a little bit larger or two a little bit larger over the next couple of years. But nothing that we see right now that I don’t think we’re going to be making a transformative deal anytime soon. That typically doesn’t work out well in our space. We’re not going to go out and spend a couple of billion dollars on something. We’re very comfortable doing acquisitions, $200 million to $600 million. There’s really nothing out there like that right now. But collection of them together it start to look like one of those. Evaluations for anything more than $25 million of EBITDA is still crazy. I mean, there’s been no cooling of that with interest rates going up a little bit for the private equity people. I think that’s more of a terms game than it is a interest rate game. The banks will give them great terms and they’ll execute the deals. We’ll feel good about what we’re doing. We have a good pipeline of the kind of bills that could really add value. And we’ll continue to balance that against our organic growth and return cash to shareholders.

Thanks.

Thank you.

And at this time, if that is all the questions – that will be our last question at this time.

Okay. Thank you to everybody. And we look forward to talking to you collectively, I guess, again, in February. And everybody have a happy end of the year and everybody stays safe. Good bye.

This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect. Thank you for joining.