Mark Sopp
Analyst · Goldman Sachs
Great, Stuart. I will pick it up on the quarter 1 financial highlights. Slide 10. As you can see here the overall financial results as adjusted where appropriate, show ongoing growth and balanced performance in top line earnings and cash flow over last year. As Stuart just said, our core results were in line with our expectations, which we were really pleased to see given the obvious disruptions that we and everyone else had to deal with in the quarter. Revenue was up 15% year-over-year, the mix of top line contribution has continued to evolve with Energy Solutions, or ES, driving the growth this quarter, reflecting several significant cost reimbursable EPC wins last year. For Government Solutions, or GS and Technology Solutions, TS, revenues were effectively flat year-over-year for different reasons, which I'll cover here in a bit. EBITDA was up a healthy 6% year-over-year with solid performances from both GS and TS, reflecting continued strong execution and mix. ES margins were a little light on mix, including quite a bit of pass-through work on the new cost reimbursable EPCs. Consolidated EBITDA margins were in line with our targets, albeit diluted some from last year on higher overall ES mix. Earnings per share was up 8%, reflecting the EBITDA growth and also benefiting from lower interest. Cash flow was really good at $65 million, reflecting good project execution and teamwork in managing working capital. We've been really working hard on that. Given the dramatic impacts of the COVID situation, the only capital deployment made in the quarter besides the regular dividend was the reduction of debt associated with the refinancing in early February. I'll also cover more on deployment here in a bit. Overall book-to-bill was 0.8x, with a strong performance by GS at 1.3x. And not unexpectedly lower for TS and ES due to strong Q4 bookings and the Q1 market conditions. We had some really nice wins in GS like the NASA Ames Research and Development recompete, the new NAVAIR systems engineering work supporting next-gen technologies and seats on 2 large IDIQ contracts. While bookings were light in the other 2 segments. In March, we were really pleased that our technology team landed an important catalyst sale from China, certainly an indication this market has begun to open back up, as Stuart was referencing earlier. Now on to Slide 11, just some additional comments on the first quarter P&L, and I'll move top to bottom here. SG&A was higher this quarter, primarily on timing items, particularly higher bid and proposal and ERP implementation costs in our GS business and also some corporate spending items. We expect SG&A to normalize to $75 million to $80 million per quarter for the rest of the year. Goodwill impairment and restructuring charges encompass the special charge related to the energy turndown. The total pretax charge of these 2 lines was about $180 million, and just a notch above $150 million after-tax and noncontrolling interest. Just a few more points on this charge. First all but about $25 million of the total charge is noncash, thus minimal liquidity impact. Under the definitions of our amended credit agreement, none of this charge will reduce EBITDA and, therefore, it will not have any effect on our borrowing capacity or covenant compliance. No effect. The impairments stemming from the reduction in our ES outlook are associated with goodwill, excess real estate capacity and valuation of certain investments in energy-focused joint ventures. The restructuring element of the charge also stems from the reduced outlook and reflects cost to reduce overhead and a carry cost of excess real estate. As Stuart said, these actions were swift and deliberate in order to better position ES for the future. As for interest expense, the decrease was from the lower debt and lower rate, this should continue to improve a little more in Q2 and in later quarters as Q1 only reflected a partial benefit of the refinancing transaction that we did back in early February of this year. Taxes are distorted due to the restructuring and impairment charge, which includes some nondeductible items. The tax rate, however, on items included in our adjusted EPS was 26%, right in line with our guidance this year. Diluted EPS loss of $0.73 was driven by the special charge in energy, again, mostly noncash. This charge impacted GAAP EPS by $1.08. Excluding the charge and other add backs and deductions, adjusted EPS came in at $0.39 and in line with expectations implied in our original guidance. GAAP operating cash flow was just over $40 million with adjusted cash flow of $65 million after the Aspire burn add back. Now on to Slide 12 for some remarks on the 3 segments. As we discussed here, overall, GS had a really strong performance in the quarter. And as you can see, just in the bar charts there the consistency of EBITDA levels speak volumes for the stability of earnings from this business. Annualized EBITDA for GS is right now about $400 million. Maybe a size of the scale of this business now. Year-over-year revenues were down slightly due to the episodic revenues from the Tyndall Air Force Base contract, which contributed significantly to the first half of last year. Excluding that effect, revenues were up 5% year-over-year in Q1, 5%. We'll see this Tyndall dynamic again next quarter. Q1 EBITDA margins were 11%, benefiting from strong margins from the international portion, which represents about 1/4 of GS total revenues. We also benefited to a lesser extent from a favorable closeout in GS. TS performance was also healthy and as planned for Q1, fueled by great bookings last year. It is notable that this team stayed on track with its project execution plan and attendant earnings amidst the COVID environment where client access was indeed quite difficult. Revenues were slightly down, but margins up from last year on improved mix, more licensed content this quarter, whereas Q1 last year had heavy volume, lower margin equipment mix. Our ES core performance was also generally unexpected with ramp-up of higher volume, lower margin cost reimbursable EPC contracts taking effect. While some of those projects may face uncertainty relative to volume in the current environment, they are reimbursable and are executed with a largely variable workforce. We have no lump sum contracts in-house, which would otherwise impose additional risks in this type of market. Our strategy in being highly selective in which projects we undertake and also being assertive and taking out overhead costs and the restructuring is all intended to keep the business profitable as we position for the future. Now I'm going to shift over to liquidity and capital structure on Slide 13. We are pleased that the capital structure and working capital improvement actions made recently has positioned us well in the current environment. We're generating positive free cash flow, reflecting our low capital intensity business model and sound capital - working capital practices. With the credit amendment and extension completed earlier this year before the market disruptions, our debt maturities are 3, 5 and 7 years out, all staggered nicely. Our $500 million revolver has not been tapped nor it has been touched in the last 3 years. We just have about $25 million of letters of credit against it. And we don't foresee a need to use a revolver given the cash flow we are expecting going forward. We reduced debt by about $140 million when we did the amendment. And with the advent of COVID, we took a conservative posture. And as I said earlier, outside of the regular dividend, we did not deploy other funds in the quarter. We will keep monitoring conditions for a while, but our general set of capital deployment priorities is unchanged. Our cash flow visibility gives us plenty of comfort sticking to our new regular dividend of $0.10 per quarter, which was up 25% from the previous level. With all of this, we were pleased to receive a credit rating upgrade from Moody's last week, certainly not too many of those going around these days, elevating our senior secured debt to Ba1, up several notches from where we started a couple of years ago. The rating agency pointed to our increased competitive scale in the government contracting sector, as well as our bidding discipline demonstrated over the past two years as the key drivers for the upgrade. Now I'll hand it back to Stuart to cover the market outlook and more details regarding Energy Solutions. Stuart?