Sudhakar Kesavan
Analyst · ICF. Please go ahead, sir
Thank you, Doug, and thank you all for participating this afternoon to go over our first quarter results and our expectations for the remainder of 2015. Our first quarter started slowly, but we have seen a pickup in business across several of our key markets, which gives us confidence that we will rebound strongly in the remainder of the year. There were two main reasons why first quarter performance came in below our expectation. The first reason was that our smaller commercial advisory businesses faced issues surrounding the timing of projects and contract postponements. This was true of aviation, commercial health, as well as part of our energy advisory business that serves the oil and gas industry. What was unusual this quarter was that all three of these markets had a slow start. Based on our past experience, if one market was slow, the impact was offset by a strength in other markets. This time, there was unexpected slowness in all three markets. Trends in March and April improved from earlier in the first quarter and we expect continued improvement in the second quarter and sustained performance thereafter. The second reason for our lower first quarter results was a shortfall in international government revenues that was closely linked to the timing of the European Commission directives on communications. These were delayed because of 2014's European Commission elections to establish a new cabinet, which occur every five years. We expect to recapture a portion of the lost revenues and margin in the second half of this year. From a strategic perspective, our growth plan remains on course and is expected to drive better performance for the rest of the year. We had a strong showing in digital services, both from our legacy business and the contribution from our Olson acquisition, which is now integrated into one operating group. A key strategic initiative that we discussed when we acquired Olson was to build a business development program around ICF's comprehensive digital services capabilities, where we can use our scale and proven success in consumer engagement as a competitive differentiator. We have combined our legacy commercial digital services business with Olson to form the digital services group, with a staff of almost 1,000 employees. John Partilla, the incoming CEO of Olson, is leading the group. He is actively involved in bringing the full complement of digital technology and marketing services to our combined client base. We have recently hired some staff -- senior staff in the account management and sales functions, as I had stated we would do when we announced Olson acquisition, to provide additional resources for growth. I'm also pleased to report that we've already achieved some early successes from this integration process in the first quarter. For example, we were able to cross-sell communication strategy work to an existing commercial client. In addition, Olson's momentum platform, which has the ability to deliver SMS or text messaging across telecom carriers, is now providing that service to one of ICF's federal government clients. Also, there's joint collaboration underway with respect to proposals, to utilities, healthcare providers, airports, and certain state agencies. This reflects close collaboration across several of ICF's disciplines and illustrates the ways in which digital services expertise will further shape our commercial and government growth profile in the near future. In addition to successful cross-selling, the digital services group had a strong sales quarter and added new clients in the areas of consumer and financial, health, technology, and professional services. We also saw steady performance in our federal government business in the first quarter, and an expansion of our backlog to $1.8 billion from $1.6 billion year ago as well as a significant increase in funded backlog to 46% from 42% of total backlog. These results were aligned with our expectations and reflected growth in revenues in those areas where we are known for our domain expertise in scale, such as energy, environment, health, and IT services. Based in our current visibility, we believe that our federal government business will be slightly up this year compared to the expectation for flat or slightly lower revenue that we had three months ago. State and local revenues increased 9.3% and accounted for 10% of revenues. We had expected comparisons to reflect a fall-off in Superstorm Sandy work -- related work beginning in this year's second quarter, but now believe we will only see this in the third quarter. And on another positive note, we now believe that state and local revenues will be flat to slightly higher for full year 2015. We see ICF diversified mix between commercial and government clients across key subject matter areas as providing significant potential for future revenue growth and margin expansion. We accelerated the development of our commercial business three years ago in the face of federal government spending headwinds that we expected would continue to cause contraction among service providers. However, we remain committed to our government business, representing an important part of our portfolio, as it is comprised of long-term contracts that bring visibility and revenue and earnings along with reliable cash flow. Additionally, we are well positioned to benefit from any upturn in this market, given our existing contract mix across a broad range of civilian agencies. To sum up, the first quarter was a period of mixed results. Lower-than-expected revenues led to low utilization and consequently, a decline in profitability. For the remainder of this year, we are confident we can achieve the EBITDA margin expansion that we guided to and lower double-digit revenue growth. At this point, I would like to turn the call over to John Wasson, who will provide additional details on our first quarter results, sales wins, and business development pipeline. John?