Tony Guzzi
Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Your line is now live. Go ahead, please
Thanks, Mark. And that’s what happens when we are in the third quarter, right? Thank you. And I am going to be on page 12, remaining performance obligations by segment and market sector. Total RPOs at the end of the third quarter were a little over $4.5 billion, up $495 million or 12.3% when compared to the September 2019 level of $4 billion. RPOs likewise increased the same amount $494 million for the first nine months of 2020, with all of this growth being organic except for approximately $86 million relating to two acquisitions in the current 12-month period. Taken together, our Mechanical and Electrical Construction segment RPOs have increased $409 million or 12.4% since the year ago period, 7% of this growth is organic with the balance being RPOs that came with our November ‘19 acquisition of BKI, a full service mechanical contractor headquartered in the Atlanta area. I should note here that thus far in 2020, BKI has more than doubled its RPOs total in the first nine months of this year, as they continue to win work, including projects in the data center, manufacturing and healthcare markets. The integration of BKI has gone very well due to the exceptional team they have. They really are a terrific team so we are thrilled to have them on our team. Building Services segment RPOs increased in the quarter as this segment’s small project, repair service work also continues to regain its footing. Remember the small project work in this segment was the first to feel the effect of the pandemic, as building operations simply shutdown. We are getting in there now as facilities open up and more and more building owners and tenants are looking for ways to increase their indoor air quality in their facilities and I will go a little deeper into IAQ on the next slide. Project bookings are nearly flat on a year-to-date basis, which is a pretty good recovery, considering the deep drop in bookings we had in April and May. On the right side of this page, we show RPOs by market sector. Similar to a quarter ago, all eight market sectors listed had year-over-year RPO increases, except for manufacturing/industrial, where we have just completed some major projects and are looking at reloading for additional work and we feel pretty good about that as we are in the midst of developing some good prospects in the manufacturing sector as supply chains change and we also are very strong in high tech manufacturing. Many of these projects come in pieces versus all at once into our backlog. Commercial project RPOs comprised our largest market sector at over 42% of total. This is almost a 20% increase from the year-end and it’s really spurred by two things, really high-tech and data center projects. It bears repeating our industry has safe -- has adapted the safety and work protocols to keep projects progressing with the larger goal of keeping workers safe. Our protocols are working. The industry keeps working and bidding opportunities continue in pretty much all sectors and geographic markets. So I am going to take the next two page and cover on pages 13 and 14. What I am going to discuss is some markets and opportunities where -- as we move forward, we believe have some resiliency for us to operate in. And I am now going to turn to page 13. It says future effects on markets. We believe we have multiple pockets of resistance despite wider non-residential uncertainty. Let’s go to first the data centers. This has only gotten stronger through the pandemic. It was strong already and our electrical, mechanical and fire protection demand across Mid-Atlantic, Pacific Northwest, Midwest and Southeast. We have done a good job here and we are one of the leaders and we have also made some strategic acquisitions, especially in the last 15 months, not only in fire protection assets, but also key electrical contractors like we did in the Midwest and also in the Southeast, which is emblematic of our BKI acquisition. And of course, we build organic capability here and build off long-term success in data center markets and we are able to build these hyperscale on time, on budget and with speed. It’s important to note here that there’s always changes in the data center market. Projects get redesigned. They get moved. They get delayed as they get redesigned. Other ones get accelerated. That was routine course of business outside of the pandemic and really had little to do with the pandemic, in our case. On the warehouse side, we continue to build out e-commerce supply chain and we continue to see a very strong demand and not only regular warehouses, we continue to see demand across cold storage. This is especially true for our fire protection and sprinkler work. In industrial/manufacturing, we believe we are well-positioned for electrical, mechanical opportunities and millwright opportunities, driven by the re-shoring of supply chains to the Southeast and relocation from higher cost states and sites. We do believe also that we will have additional food processing opportunities. Anecdotally, we won at least three jobs in the last four months, which would have been headed either to Mexico or overseas, that are now being built in the Southeast. On the healthcare side, we continue to see demand for our sys -- our work, electrical, mechanical, fire protection and then eventually service. Hospitals are looking to retrofit. They are looking to build new facilities and they are looking to have more flexibility in their existing facilities and build new facilities. We have grown backlog here. We expect to continue to grow and look this can be episodic, things come in and out on the big projects side. But the flip side of that is we are not doing as much service work as we have typically done in hospitals, as they deal with the impacts of COVID, long-term we expect to do more retrofit work as people will think to be more flexible we will think about it. We did a lot of work to create negative pressure environment through the pandemic in these hospitals. We expect to continue to do that. But -- and any -- and if you have a bigger casualty event, accidents, terrorist situations, if they want to be able to do positive pressure. So facilities are going to have to move between the two and that’s all about airflow and the kinds of work we do. And then you are going to have to have enhanced electrical systems and communication wiring in those facilities and we are uniquely positioned to help with those and we have great relationships with some of the biggest hospital systems in the country and we have helped them through the pandemic, we have helped them build some of their new facilities in the past and we expect to do both in the future and I think you are starting to see the impact of that in our backlog. On the water and wastewater side, this we think is a good long-term market for us, especially in Florida and really there they are looking for comprehensive construction services. And in water and wastewater, many times we serve as a prime contractor, bringing all trades and activities together. Mechanical services, we believe has been a good market for us for a long, long time. We have a terrific business. Most of it rests in Building Services. Some of our service operations rest in our Mechanical Construction segment and you can see that in our 10-Q. We see growing demand stepping from maintenance deferrals. We think there’s going to be a lot of retrofit opportunities, I want to cover both that and indoor air quality as we switch to page 14. EMCOR has been a leader for a long time, as you look at block one, of HVAC capabilities. HVAC is a big part of our business and it can be up to a third or more of what we do in any given year. If you look at it, we do new construction, of course, we can, we can do big work. We talked about that on some of those resilient markets on the page before, core, tenant fit-out. We are a great retrofit company. We know how to do the energy retrofit work. We know how to engineer that energy retrofit work and we know how to support and help all the ESCOs that are doing that energy retrofit work. That’s equipment replacement, energy retrofit, lighting upgrade, building control systems. One of the things maybe we don’t brag about enough is a capability that we have in that aftermarket of HVAC. We are the leader there and we are the largest independent controller’s contractor on top of everything else. And really what we seek to get to is building wellness, have the most efficient building a place that’s healthy. Now, as you move to block two, indoor air quality, let’s think about this at a high level. Really the goal over the last 20 years, and I have seen this from an OEM, I have seen it from a service perspective. I have seen it from a new construction perspective. Has been to take outside air out of the building, outside air is inefficient, right, in the summer with humidity, it causes efficiency problem. In the winter, it causes the same, for obvious reasons. And so we have worked real hard to take outside air out. That all went by the wayside in the middle of March. Now we are opening up air dampers that haven’t been open in a long time and actually buildings are going back to 25 CFM per person and that’s cubic feet per minute, and we had got that down to 15 CFM. And we have safe and productive ways to do that like demand control ventilation. So what are we doing now on indoor air quality? Well, a lot of it is, hey, you got to give people peace of mind and you as an owner have to do everything possible to increase the wellness and indoor air quality of your building. So, how do you do that? You do that through enhanced filtration. We take things from merc 10 or 12 up to merc 14 or 15. You do that through UV lamp technology that gets better and better and this stuff actually works. It reduces surface decontamination and it increases airborne inactivation, right? So, things pass through the coil, pass across the air handler media and as a result you make it cleaner. Needlepoint bipolar ionization, we are one of the leaders in the implementation of that technology. And as I talked about earlier, we spend a lot of time training on this all the way down through our technicians during the lockdown and the pandemic and we were ready to go. This is a recent case study here. This is somewhat has 240 buildings mainly a small packaged equipment. So here you have to attack it by getting into the mixing box. And how do you do that? You do that through UV because what you are trying to do is get the surface contamination gone through UV lights. We will do this across 240 we do this 90 sites. The goal is to demonstrate to the employees and actually have it happen and the indoor air quality gets better. This was a large multi-state corporation with lots of sites, and I’d given a number that we thought it would be like a good medium-sized project. This is actually much better than we thought it was going to be. It’s hard to quantify exactly what it will be. But it’s something we can get in front of our customers with and help them drive productivity in their buildings by giving them a better workspace. Now one of the things you have to think about is indoor air quality and efficiency work across purposes with each other. I personally believe we have already had a good retrofit market. That retrofit market is going to gain strength as we move through 2021 on the HVAC side. And again, EMCOR being the largest independent air conditioning contractor, with a great retrofit capability will clearly be in a position to help our customers balance indoor air quality against efficiency. With that, I am going to turn to the last two pages 15 and 16, and I am going to close out here. Clearly, we have done much better than we expected when we withdrew guidance in April and then when we reinstated guidance with our second quarter earnings announcement, both of which we believe were the right thing to do. Today we are raising our guidance for earnings per share from continuing operations. We will move to $5.90 to $6.10 non-GAAP adjusted earnings per share and revenues of around $8.7 billion. In providing this revised guidance, we have assumed the following operating environment. First, we remain an essential service in most cases; second, we continue to execute productively in this environment; third, there are no significant shutdowns like we saw in March and April and for us that means our sites, our projects, our crafts; four, we expect to have continued strong performance from our Electrical and Mechanical Construction segments, Building Services in the U.K. We still see pretty good opportunities that we are estimating in bidding and to-date, we have seen no significant project deferrals outside of oil and gas, as Mark described it. And all-in-all, non-residential market may move downward in the fourth quarter or continue to sort of be mixed, we do expect that decline to be in the mid-single-digits as we move into 2021. This is still a big market and if you refer back to page 13, we have a lot of operating space in what we believe are resilient markets. For Industrial Services, which is downstream, refining and petrochemical for the most part, we do expect sequential improvement as we go from Q3 to Q4, but nothing significant for the balance of the year. And as of today, we do expect the first quarter of 2021 to be better than the fourth quarter of 2020. We have some visibility, not as much as we would typically have at this time. However, we do not expect any significant contribution from this segment for the balance of the year. Where we end up in this range now is largely a factor of job timing, completion and service demand. As far as capital allocation, we will continue to return cash to shareholders through dividends and then we do expect to return to some level of share repurchase activity in the next few quarters. We expect to continue to be a balanced capital allocator. What I am really excited about is we are rebuilding our pipeline of potential acquisitions and expect to start executing that pipeline in early 2021. We expect those acquisitions to be similar to the acquisitions that we executed from 2018 to 2020, which really was a terrific period for us to grow our company through acquisition. We certainly have the balance sheet to support such growth in our company and we again expect to remain balanced capital allocators. Lara, with that, I will turn it over to you and take questions.