Rich Montoni
Analyst · CJS Securities. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you Rick and good morning. Another quarter of solid operational and financial results under our belt, we remain on the growth path we set for the remainder of the fiscal year and beyond. Since our last call, we’ve had several positive developments in both segments that bring meaningful contributions to the achievement of our long term growth strategy. This includes the Acentia and Remploy acquisitions as well as the expanded scope of work in Australia. These developments coupled with the organic growth from new and existing programs represent the basis for our continued growth into the next year that being fiscal 2016. Although we normally provide preliminary guidance as early, it’s useful to offer new insight to the investment community on how we are thinking about next year as investors consider these multiple developments. So let’s start with the Human Services segment, where our recently bid win in our strong historical performance helped us further expand our footprint in Australia. We are very pleased to secure the five year $940 million rebid for the new jobactive program. It will start on July 1st. As we mentioned in our recent press release, jobactive is the new meaning for the Job Services Australia or JSA program. The rebid increases are scope of working two different ways, the first is our market share. Under JSA, we serve 12.5% of the total allocated caseloads. Under the new jobactive contract, we gain a net pick up in expected volumes which increases our market share of caseload allocations to approximately 15%. The Australian Government also consolidated and restructured the number of employment service areas for jobactive, there are now 51 areas and MAXIMUS will support job seekers in 29 of them. The second increasing scope is related to the national rollout of the Work for the Dole program. Since 2014, MAXIMUS provided services in four of the pilot employment service areas where we arrange activities with community base and not for profit organizations. The Australian Government has now taken the program nationwide and MAXIMUS will serve as a coordinator for 14 of the 51 areas. In this performance based environment, our expendables confirmation of our proven ability to deliver the outcomes that matter to our government clients. In this case, successfully helping jobs secretes of paying sustainable employment, it certainly an important component of our longer term growth strategy and I congratulate our Australian team on a job well done. Now turning to our UK operations, where we complete the acquisition at Remploy in April. We are very excited to welcome this highly regarded organization in MAXIMUS through 70%-30% partnership. Remploy is well-known for successfully assisting people with complex barriers into employment and complements our existing portfolio, they are one of the primary providers for Work Choice, which is the governments employment program for people with disabilities and health conditions. Remploy has a 70-year history of delivering disability employment services throughout the United Kingdom. Following the second world war the government established or Remploy to provide training and employment for injured and disabled ex-military and miners since then Remploy has evolved into an organization that it’s dedicated to supporting people of disabilities in health conditions into mainstream employment. And MAXIMUS is firmly committed to continuing this mission. Remploy increases our global presence as a world leading provider of disability employment services. This will enhance our business development efforts for emerging opportunities. Our experience running similar services in other geographies, most notably Australia, compliments Remploy’s expertise in the United Kingdom. MAXIMUS and Remploy share similar cultures and values and our integration efforts are going well. We’re excited to grow together in transform the lives of even more people through sustainable, long-term employment. Let’s move on to the Health Services segment. Here, we introduced a new growth platform for our U.S. Federal Services business with the acquisition of Acentia. Most notably, the acquisition provides us with additional contract vehicles in access with federal government agencies that are core to the MAXIMUS business model. In federal contracting market, government agencies typically seek support from vendors through three different channels contract vehicles, full and open procurements and set a size for entity like small businesses. Contract vehicles allow agencies to pre-qualified a selective set of vendors to support their needs. Only these pre-rated companies have the exclusive opportunity to bid on contracts and task orders. In the surveillance services space which is the sweet spots for MAXIMUS, the majority is support work is issue through contract vehicles. Acentia brings numerous contract vehicles which now allow MAXIMUS to be able as a primary contract for both IT support and business process management opportunities. In the past, we can only access these bids by relaying on teaming arrangements. Now even with the acquisition opens up and entirely new set of opportunities for us. Acentia also allow us MAXIMUS to be a full service provider to the federal government and our integrated business development team is already hard at work on opportunities. As a provider of technology and management solutions, Acentia has calculated positive relationships with the number of federal health and civilian agencies, these include the internal revenue service, the U.S. Defense Health Agency and the U.S. Department of Labor. We have planned to build upon the success and over the time introduce additional core services to this new set of agencies. It’s important to remember that federal business development efforts often have a long run rate due to the federal procurement process. We are optimistic that the acquisition will serve as an important step in our long-term strategy to continue to grow our U.S. federal book of business and drive shareholder value. During the second quarter, the Health Services segment also ramped up activities for the Affordable Care Act second open enrollment period or OE2. As we mentioned last quarter, we continue to provide value to our clients as they address additional ACA requirements such as new tax forms and special enrollment periods. Overall, it was another successful open enrollment period and we believe that we are getting closure to a steady state as we look ahead to OE3. We’re pleased that ACA revenue has come on stronger than our initial expectations at the beginning of the year, this is due in part to better than expected repeat work as well as providing states with additional support services tied to meeting requirements under the act. It’s important to remember that we operate a portfolio of ACA-related work that goes beyond call center operations, this broader scope includes the training and certification of community assister and brokers, premium in cross sharing collections, eligibility appeals in some states and social media management. We presently expect that ACA-related revenue for the full year of fiscal 2015 will be up about 10% compared to last year. At this point, we think the annual revenues from ACA have largely stabilized and to more of a study state. But it’s also important to put it in perspective; we estimate that ACA-related revenue will be about 15% of consolidated revenue for fiscal 2015. Moving now onto our international health operations where MAXIMUS successfully launched the Health Assessment Advisory Service in the UK on March 1st. This is the contract where MAXIMUS is conducting assessments for individual seeking certain disability benefits according to the rule set down by the United Kingdom Parliament. Our start-up of operations are progressing well. We are working hard to achieve the program’s goal related to improved service to UK citizens, including increase in the overall number of healthcare professional to support the program. This allows us to meet our assessment volume requirements and lower the backlog, so people can be assessed in the timely manner. Nearly all of the employees transferred over from the previous provider and early indications are that we are meeting our recruitment targets for healthcare professions. This is key in helping us to bring about positive change and although it’s early days, we’re also on track to meet our requirements or assessment volumes. As a result, our longer term goals for the program include reducing the long lead times and proving the quality of the assessment and making the assessment process less intimidating. We remain actively engaged with different stakeholder groups in the United Kingdom as the top priority for this highly visible program, it’s part of our stakeholder outreach, who have established the customer representative group that covers more than 20 national disability organizations. Together, we are identifying areas where we can make meaningful improvements such as clinical training, the assessment interview, accessibility of the sites and customer communications. In fact, we’ve already received positive feedback from some of the member organizations about our efforts to improve the accessibility of the clinical sites. All-in-all, it was great quarter for both segments, we are executing the work we’ve recently own, securing our base book of business with key bid wins and launching new opportunities for future growth. Moving on to new awards in the pipeline: MAXIMUS posted sales at March 31st year-to-date signed contract awards $1.58 billion. At March 31st, we also had an additional $1.05 billion and new awarded unsigned contracts including the jobactive rebid contract in Australia. With these two larger wins now sign we are at a record level of annual sign contract amounts. Our sales pipeline was strong at 2.6 billion at March 31st, this is an 18% increase over our pipeline for the same period last year. On a sequential basis, the pipeline was lower compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2015; this is very much expected as we’ve had larger opportunities such as the Australian rebid with out of the pipeline to convert into new awards. As a reminder, our reported pipeline only reflects opportunities where we believe in the RFP use expected to be release within the next six months. Overall, our pipeline calls a broad mix at rebids and new work representing multiple geographies in all segments. In conclusion, we are pleased to have introduced several new initiatives and post of our existing platforms for long-term growth. We are equally excited about our preliminary guidance for fiscal 2016, which represents another year of expected solid revenue in earnings growth, much of which is organic. But it’s important to recognize as our people with the hard of our ability to continue to deliver on our commitments to our clients. They are what drive our success on a daily basis. So let me take a moment to welcome our new colleagues from Acentia and Remploy. On behalf of the management team, I thank our operations team and healthcare professionals in the United Kingdom. We did a tremendous job as we successfully launched the new Health Assessment Advisory Service. And finally, I reiterate our appreciation for our Australian team whose consistently high performance play the key role in the latest rebid award. With that, let’s open it up for questions. Operator?