Mark W. Sopp
Analyst · Wells Fargo
Thanks, Stu. I'll again call your attention to the supplemental earnings presentation on our website, which provides additional color on our results and also our outlook. John did cover the revenue story pretty fully, so I'll focus on profitability, cash and forward guidance. On the profitability side, as previously mentioned, we are in a transition year where we are incurring substantial costs and undertaking various actions to prepare for the future. Reported operating margins for Q2 was 3%. And separation-related costs totaled $35 million in the second quarter, which diluted operating margins by 1.4%. We also had other preparatory costs related to the separation, mostly IT-focused, of $14 million, impacting margins by 0.6%. Assuming actual separation occurs soon, these separation-related costs should peak in Q3 and then wind down completely in Q4. As John mentioned, we took a $30 million impairment charge on the Reveal Imaging acquisition, reducing the overall margins by 1.2%. While Reveal and the engineering products business are our most profitable, we did not ship nor expect to ship enough units near term of Reveal units to produce the financial results necessary to support the purchase valuation a couple of years ago. Finally, the net contract write-downs of $32 million, impacting margins by 1.3%. Those write-downs were concentrated on the 4 fixed-price contracts that Stu mentioned earlier. Total net contract adjustments were $44 million on these 4 programs, offset by various write-ups elsewhere. Putting these write-downs into context: Without the adjustments on the 2 foreign development programs, net contract adjustments would've been 0 in the quarter. Operating margins did benefit by favorable cost variances related to the significant cost reductions we've been making all year hoping to offset some of this impact. These discrete items collectively diluted operating margins by 4.5%, without which, profitability would've been at a more normative level. We are very focused on the performance issues and will build on Stu's remarks about how we'll operate going forward in next week's investor conferences, with a solid quarter for operating cash flow, which exceeded $200 million in Q2. In light of this and given the nature and timing of some of the items impacting our profits this year, we are keeping our existing guidance of operating cash flow at $450 million-plus for the year. As to major takeaways for our operating segments, starting with Health and Engineering. Revenues increased 8% on a total basis year-over-year but were down 8% on an internal basis. Sector performance was driven by commercial health where revenues declined against a very difficult comparison, where it increased 35% in the prior year period. We saw a slowdown in hospital IT spending, which we believe was attributed to lower government Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements to hospitals arising out of sequestration cuts and also the 1-year delay of implementation of the revision to International Classification of Disease code referred to as ICD-10. While it's hard to predict how long this will last, we are indeed confident in the growth prospects for our solutions in the electronic health records market with respect to digitization, integration and exploitation needs over the coming years. This all results from legislation requirements and customer demands for more efficient and effective health care which is enabled by IT modernization. The profitability, the Health and Engineering operating income decline was dominated by the impairment charge on Reveal. Moving on to our National Security Solutions segment. Revenues were down 15% year-over-year. The JLI contract ramp-down alone reduced revenues this quarter by about $65 million year-over-year or more than 1/3 of the percentage decline. We also saw declines concentrated in reduced spending in Middle East operation support and also reductions in scope across the space related to federal budget cuts. Operating margins were just under 8%, adversely impacted by the 2 foreign customer fixed-price write-downs. On a normalized basis, excluding contract write-ups and write-downs, operating margins would have been roughly 9% for this segment. Higher net fees across-the-board helped minimize the effect of the write-downs enabled by cost reductions and solid performance in our core intelligence programs. For the Technical Services and Information Technology segment, which will become the new SAIC, third quarter revenues were down about 16% compared to the prior year. The loss of the DGS contract accounted for almost half of the decline, with the ramp-down in war efforts and sequestration-related cuts accounting for the remaining amount. Operating margin was 6.7%, fairly normative given the current portfolio of contracts in the sector and reflecting the ramp-down in the higher-margin DGS program. That covers a review of the operating segments. The non-operating items were as expected, so the EPS shortfall was entirely attributed to the discrete operating items I just discussed. As a reminder, our effective tax rate is expected to be in the 31% to 32% range this fiscal year, which is about 4 to 5 percentage points lower than our normative rate, reflecting the deductibility of part of the special dividend we paid earlier this year and also some other tax adjustments. I mentioned free cash flow was strong at $200 million. DSOs ended at 72 days and crept up a bit since last year due to the termination of the federal accelerated payment program and also some effect of slower payments stemming from recent government furloughs. Now let me move on to guidance. With respect to forward guidance, let me first remind you that our guidance assumes SAIC operates for full fiscal year '14 as one company, the one company as you know it today. Once our board formally approves the separation, we expect to issue standalone guidance for the 2 separate companies thereafter. Guidance is always on a continuing operations GAAP basis and fully includes the nonrecurring costs to prepare for and execute the separation transaction. For revenues, we are reducing estimates in the second half due to concerns that government spending will be worse than our original estimates. We entered the fiscal year with known reductions like JLI and DGS but with a strong pipeline of outstanding bids. The environment we are now seeing is with less confidence, but enough outstanding bids will be awarded and/or get through protest to generate meaningful revenue this year, making the known declines like JLI and other OCO-funded efforts most likely unrecoverable in the short term. Our fiscal '14 revenue guidance is now expected to be in the range of $9.7 billion to $10.2 billion. We expect operating margins to be off our previous expectations by about 80 basis points. This is driven by the write-downs we saw in Q2, about $18 million more in separation and related transition costs above our previous $140 million estimate, and volume reduction in our higher-margin commercial health area. Those changes adversely impact our EPS from continuing operations estimate by about $0.20. Accordingly, our guidance estimate for fiscal '14 is reduced to a range of $0.95 to $1.03 per share. Operating margins, excluding separation and transition costs, are expected to run in the 7% to 8% range in aggregate in the second half of fiscal '14, barring any unforeseen items. And finally, as earlier stated, our cash flow guidance remains unchanged at $450 million-plus. Wrapping up. We did have some select performance issues in Q2, which we are indeed addressing, but the vast majority of the business executed reasonably well given the headwinds we had entering the year and the overall challenging market conditions. We have made good progress on cost-reduction efforts in core operations and are now seeing margin benefits which will be amplified when we complete the separation and put the transition costs we are incurring today behind us. There are a number of actions you'll hear about in next week's Investor Day that will better clarify how both companies will exit this transition period and embark on a focused path for predictable profits, cash generation and cash deployment. With that, I'll turn it back over to John.