Sudhakar Kesavan
Analyst · Stifel, Nicolaus
Thank you, Doug, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us to review our third quarter 9 months results and discuss our preliminary outlook for next year. Our focus at ICF has always been on being a growth company. So rather than maximizing profits by reducing investments, we've allocated substantial resources to support future growth. One of the areas of investment has been in business development activities. The sustained growth of our commercial business has been a result of these investments and a major differentiator for ICF. For almost 3 years now, commercial revenue growth has outpaced that of our federal government business, a trend that continued in this year's third quarter. Revenues from commercial clients increased 7.7%, while our federal business remained flat on a year-over-year basis. In fact, if you exclude the large transmission project, that as expected was in a slower construction phase this quarter as compared to last year, commercial revenue growth would be 12.8%. In this year's fourth quarter, we will be comparing against exceptionally strong performance in our commercial business in 2012. But for full year 2013, we expect revenues from commercial clients to be well ahead of last year. As in previous quarters, the primary driver of our commercial growth was our energy efficiency business, which increased 18% year-on-year and accounted for 38% of our commercial revenues for the period. In the third quarter, we supported 40 individual utilities with the design and implementation of the energy efficiency program. These included several commercial and industrial energy efficiency programs, which is a market that we are successfully developing. We also saw growth from our digital interactive business, as well as a modest pick-up in our energy management consulting work. Our international government business is another growth area for ICF, with revenues up 33.8% year-on-year, thanks to our greater scale in Europe, which enabled us to win contracts like our GHK acquisition, nor ICF could have successfully competed for on their own. Revenue from federal government plans remain mostly flat on a year-over-year basis, but there were a number of bright spots for us in the energy, health, education and veterans affairs markets, areas where ICF leads with deep domain expertise and has the IT capabilities to fully implement large projects. Our state and local business was off slightly this quarter, reflecting the uneven work schedules associated with large infrastructure projects. Operating profitability increased in the third quarter but at a somewhat slower rate than revenues due to ongoing investments in business development and as a result of some items that our CFO, James Morgan, will comment on a little later. Business development has been a fast return on investment for ICF. In the third quarter, the value of our contract increased 33% to $480 million and was up 18% for the first 9 months of the year to $943 million. Additionally, the flexibility that we have built into our business development program can be seen by the fact that a significant portion of our year-to-date 2013 revenues came from opportunities that were not in our pipeline in November of last year. This reflects our ability to move quickly to win business surrounding emerging issues and projects in markets in which we have proven expertise. As you know, our key markets, energy and health, are very dynamic and provide us with substantial opportunities for business capture. In today's earnings release, we estimated what we expect the cost of the 16-day government shutdown will be to ICF in terms of lost revenues and earnings in the fourth quarter, and consequently, lowered our guidance for full year 2013. At this point, we are not still certain as to how much of the lost revenues may be made up later in the fourth quarter or early next year, but this is our best estimate of the impact. As we look ahead to 2014, we are positive in our outlook for solid growth in revenues and even better performance in operating income. The reason for this optimism is based on 5 factors. First, based on our current visibility, we expect to enter 2014 with a total contract backlog that is higher than levels at the beginning of 2013. Second, we're looking for continue growth in our commercial business. We have a robust pipeline of energy efficiency programs, and we plan to build on our initial success in penetrating the commercial and industrial subsegment of that market. We see significant growth opportunities to roll out digital interactive business on ICF's key markets, now that we have the full life-cycle of solutions from design through transactions. We are already working together at 3 of ICF's utility plants and we intend to continue to capitalize on that cross-selling success. And our energy and aviation management consultant work is also positioned to grow significantly next year. Third, our international government business is expected to continue to benefit from the ramp-up in certain contracts won this year, rate of scale and access to our business development platform. We believe that the aggregate of ICF's commercial and international businesses could represent 35% of our total 2014 revenues, up from 32% at the end of this year's first 9 months. Fourth, we are mobilizing to take advantage of opportunities with commercial and government clients within our culminated [ph] domain expertise that we expect to materialize in 2014 and 2015, in areas such as health care, energy, infrastructure and disaster recovery. And fifth, we have a solid pipeline of potentially accretive acquisitions that we are exploring, and I anticipate that we will complete 1 or 2 in the next 6 to 12 months. With that, I would like to ask John Wasson to comment on our third quarter and 9-month operating highlights.