Travis Boone
Analyst · Sidoti & Company. Please proceed
Thank you, Margaret. And thank you all for joining our fourth quarter and year-end 2022 conference call. Here with me today is Scott Thanisch, our Chief Financial Officer. We have a lot of ground to cover today, so let's get started. I'll begin with our strategic plan to put Orion on the right course for improved performance and then Scott will discuss operations and financials. In the six months since Scott and I joined Orion, we formed a great partnership and have been busy dividing and conquering our workload. We both continue to be impressed by the talent and energy of our team and are excited about the enormous opportunity ahead of us. Today, we have a much deeper understanding of our company's strengths and our opportunities for improvement. We believe our recent financial results barely scratched the surface of Orion's potential and we are confident our business will continue to improve in 2023. In fact, 2023 is off to a great start. We are building great momentum. Since the beginning of the year, we announced contract wins totaling over $582 million including on Friday afternoon when we were awarded a $448 million contract with the United States Navy to build a dry dock at Pearl Harbor as part of the joint venture. The overall contract for the JV is $2.8 billion. We've secured concrete lands in our Dallas and Houston market of around $100 million and won our largest diving services contract in our history, a $20 million project. Our year-end backlog combined with our recent wins comprises almost $1 billion of work to complete in the next few years. You may recall on our November earnings call, I mentioned that we were bidding on our largest projects ever in both concrete and marine. And with the win on Friday, we won both of those projects. We are very proud of the focus of our teams to secure higher margin wins over the past few months. Since assuming the role of CEO, I've been able to validate the potential to first stream to Orion. We're a vital provider of services to mission critical infrastructure projects within the marine and building sectors in some of our nation's fastest growing areas. We have long tenured relationships with blue chip clients across the government and private sectors in both our Marine and Concrete segments including the U.S. Navy and Army Corps of Engineers, many of the largest ports in the U. S. and the Caribbean, Metro Petrochem owners and in our concrete division significant general contractors in the Dallas and Houston markets. The talent pool we have is especially impressive to Scott and me. And the willingness of our people to adapt and learn to achieve greater growth and success both for Orion and professionally is essential to executing our strategy. Lastly, we have a highly engaged and supported Board of Independent Directors with diverse backgrounds and complementary expertise to guide us. We are confident that Orion has all the elements for success and the right team to unlock the value of our assets and deliver improved financial performance. That said, we have a big shift to turn around. It won't happen overnight, but we know what needs to be done to maximize the profitability and potential of this business. As announced in yesterday's press release, we have a three point strategic plan, which we believe will unlock Orion's potential for long term sustainable growth to the benefit of all of our stakeholders. Now, I'll take a few minutes to break it down for you. The first step of our plan is to improve the profitability of the concrete business. We have appointed new leadership for our Concrete segment chopping one of our senior leadership marine business with many years of experience successfully and profitably delivering complex projects. We are refocusing on our core markets of Dallas and Houston where we have robust markets and track records of success and a runway to improve profitability. And finally, we are investing in additional experienced project managers and giving our project teams the training and tools to drive efficiency and improve business outcomes. The second point of our plan is to strengthen business development to drive growth. We will build on our successful sales efforts and capitalize on industry dynamics such as the $1.2 trillion infrastructure build, the U.S. Navy investments in the Pacific, port expansions and maintenance resulting in the expansion of the Panama Canal and strong construction demand in both private and public sector of the rapidly growing Texas market. We are continuing to sharpen our business development focus, putting our efforts into pursuing those opportunities where our capabilities and expertise differentiate us. Our aim is to win quality projects with improved margins. Our marine business has been very successful working on both public and private projects. By leveraging our experience elsewhere in the business in the public infrastructure construction market, we'll be able to penetrate this more predictably funded sector with our Concrete segment as well. We are building and deepening our client relationships to gain actionable insight into their future pursuits by investing in additional business development resources. And the third step in our strategic plans, investment and resources to realize Orion's potential. We're strengthening the balance sheet and improving liquidity to fund future growth. We are working to complete the refinancing of our credit facility to extend our debt maturities and provide us with the capital to take advantage of our market opportunities. We're optimizing to improve our return on assets. With the completion of our Central Texas concrete jobs in 2023, we can dispose of some underutilized equipment and we will continue our efforts to monetize non-core real estate assets this year. We're investing in our dredging fleet to better service our growth, supporting our commitment to the environment, Orion's fleet upgrade will also include investing in more efficient engines to achieve lower carbon emissions. We're fostering collaboration between our concrete and marine operations. We have the opportunity to drive synergies, leverage best practices and cross sell work. Finally, we will continue to enhance and build our target zero safety culture practices and systems. While we believe it's premature to provide annual guidance, there's a number of ways to measure our progress, including additional project wins in Dallas and Houston, new project wins with public sector concrete clients in our concrete business. In marine, we expect to see larger sized projects. This very recent win in Hawaii is a good example. And in both segments, we'll begin to see incremental margin as we execute our business improvement strategy and deliver our projects successfully. Turning to the market, we've seen a bit of slowing due to the macroeconomic environment. Capital is more expensive, which can lead to project delays and cancellations where we are working for private sector clients. With the passing of the infrastructure bill, agencies have been focusing on securing these funds rather than advancing near term projects in their development pipeline. While we finished the year with lower backlog, we have started the year with a strong number of wins and expect to see improved performance as the year continues. The funds related to the infrastructure bill will take some time to begin flowing. We may see a few projects funded from the IIJA in 2023 but expect to see higher volumes of projects in 2024 and 2025. In our Marine segment, we will leverage Orion's highly respected reputation and additional BD resources to identify new opportunities in the public sector at the federal, state and local levels, including port expansion projects, navy facilities, and environmental and coastal resiliency projects. The infrastructure investment in JOBS Act will provide a multiyear catalyst for public sector projects such as transportation funding, ports, waterways, water infrastructure and bridges among other things. While it will take some time for these projects to start flowing, we expect to see a few in the back half of 2023. We expect to see a steep ramp up in volume in 2024 and 2025 and the investments we are making to improve fleet efficiencies, our systems and our teams will give us a competitive advantage. In our Concrete business, we are seeing an increased volume of bid opportunities in our Houston market. Projects continue to come in from a variety of end markets such as tech, e-commerce and large retail distribution. Demographic trends will continue to provide project opportunities in our Texas market, one of the fastest growing states. We see a long runway ahead in the public sector and we're accelerating our focus and we'll be bidding on projects such as airports, whose outdated aviation infrastructure cannot keep pace with growing demand. We enter 2023 with solid backlog, increased quota work outstanding and a strong bid pipeline and long-term tailwinds driving our markets. Now I'll turn this call over to Scott to discuss our operational initiatives and financial results. Then I'll return with some close remarks.