William Utt
Analyst · UBS.
Well, we are -- we still continue to generate underlying backlog growth on scope expansions. And I think, in the past, we've commented in prior years maybe 2/3 of our growth came from scope expansions. We do believe that in time and then we do have a lot of lumpy issues we're chasing as evidenced by my comments on the LNG projects, on the Lobito refinery and also on the continuation of Ras Tanura as that project moves into execution, where we're doing some of the FEEDs on specific technologies as well as the PMC work. Yes, I feel that if you took a rolling average of our backlog, we will be there. Now I can't comment specifically on what we'll see next quarter. And we do look at our backlog on a reasonably conservative basis and we talked about that in the past. Certainly, the $3.8 billion CENTCOM contract, we didn't add any backlog except for the task order that we were definitively awarded. Another example is certainly in Oil & Gas. We showed a flat backlog last quarter or actually a declining backlog. But again, with the discipline that we put on our backlog, we made in addition in the first quarter on the West of Shetlands project, the customer came back during the second quarter and asked us to consider changing the schedule. And we had some discussions with the customer on the schedule of that delivery. But because of our practice, we reduced the backlog about $60 million in Oil & Gas, during the second quarter. Those questions have been resolved, and regrettably, we're putting it right back in the third quarter. So that explains, a little bit, some of the timing issues in Oil & Gas. But overall, I think, we'll -- we may see backlog go down in the third quarter. A lot of it depends on what the underlying scope expansions are on the existing work until such time as we get some of the big awards into our backlog. And another wildcard we have, Steve, is certainly what's going to happen in Iraq, with the status of forces agreement. We had a good $500 million of backlog added in the quarter. If that business were to remain consistent, we could see some more backlog than we're currently anticipating in the second half of the year. But it's -- on a rolling basis, I think, we'll be okay. We may have a little bit of dip in the third quarter compared to what we would expect to see in the fourth quarter, when some of the larger projects begin hitting our backlog.