David King
Analyst · CJS Securities. Please proceed with your question
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter results. I could summarize our second quarter results by saying that we completed the Willbros acquisition and the ACP project that did not start as quickly as we had hoped. But that summary does not give credit to the hard work and positive results from the rest of the Primoris team. So, as I begin my remarks, I wanted to first congratulate all of our employees and stakeholders for a great first 10 years as a publicly traded company. It is only fitting that we celebrate our 10th year anniversary on NASDAQ with the Opening Bell Ceremony last Friday. Since its inception dating back to the 1960s, our organization has completed 26 acquisitions, started up three new business units and with our latest acquisition has reached a new record backlog backed by solid MSA foundation. Since going public, Primoris’ revenues have achieved an impressive growth rate. I want to say thank you to our shareholders, clients, financial partners and employees in helping Primoris continue to set and achieve our strategic goals of becoming the best-in-class in all of our business segments. Well, we are off to a good start in the second quarter with our power job delivering strong results, our engineering work picking up, and our gas and utility electric work continuing to show steady growth. Our pipeline work was down significantly as we not only had a tough comparison with last year’s second quarter, but the delay in the ACP project revving up this quarter. We view the delay as a timing issue for the ACP project and remain confident in the strength of both the large and smaller diameter pipeline market in the future. The newly acquired Willbros businesses are running as planned and the electrical T&D Group saw good margins for the month of June. The addition of this Group has pushed our MSA backlog to its highest ever level at $1.1 billion and we are confident that our MSA work will continue to provide a solid and growing revenue base for Primoris in the years to come. I am very pleased with the amount of overhead and other related cost reductions since we finalized our acquisition of Willbros. We are right in line with where I expected us to be as we continue implementing our cost reduction plans. We continue to see additional opportunities to cut costs ranging across real estate, insurance, bonding and equipment. These are not just ideas. These are real areas of cost reduction. Additionally, we are very excited about the opportunity to grow revenue at the acquired business units. We are working with some great operations personnel brought over in the acquisition like Johnny Priest, Adam Campbell, Scott Porter, Jeremy Kinch and Sheridon Taylor. Our balance sheet remains strong with a very solid cash position and while the acquisition of Willbros clearly increased our debt level, it is at a manageable level and we experience to bring -- expect to bring it closer to our historical range of 50% debt to equity over the next few years. I will start my discussion this morning of the segment results with the Civil segment. While the financial results have improved year-over-year, we are disappointed in the second quarter negative margins for the segment. Our Heavy Civil management team led by Mark Buchanan is showing improved performance on newly awarded work and to-date they are having good success with Louisiana design-build work. However, we are still cleaning up some older projects, in this quarter that include recognizing some higher cost on Houston Airport project that clearly was not ready to be built and so we terminated our work on that project. As we said before, Heavy Civil work is like a slow moving battleship and though we started the work of pointing the ship in the right direction is not quite there yet. I would also like to add that Mark and his team have been making a tremendous effort on completing the remaining legacy projects within their forecasted cost, while also implementing very effective commercial management to recover time impact cost. Jonas Beatty’s Primoris I&M Group, the other half of the Civil segment has been slowed to gain additional work after they have come off the large petrochemical project. The number of prospects and bids they have seen has not been lacking, just the time on some of the industrial projects along the Gulf Coast has been slow in developing. They are working hard with their sister companies to find replacement work and there are some interesting prospects for them in the methanol refining and LNG markets, but until those projects move forward, growing their backlog will be a challenge. The timing of the Gulf project -- Gulf Coast project is also affecting our Primoris Industrial Constructors Group in the Power, Industrial and Engineering segment. While work has ramped up on the MEG plant, we are still running underutilized in this Group. We are encouraged by the recent work -- recent awards for work at the new petrochemical facility in Southern Louisiana, and we have been able to add additional scope for several of our other business units to this project. Conrad Bourg Group is seeing good opportunity for pump station work, ocean litigation, air separations and PVC plant expansions just to name a few. Conrad’s team has also begun to see work ramping up in our recently announced work -- awards for work on ethane crackers and ethylene facilities. Our renewables teams continue to work at the largest solar installation project to date in Texas. It’s an impressive site covering well over 1,500 acres. The heat in West Texas has been a safety challenge for our crew, but they are managing to keep on schedule. The Group is also pursuing additional work including projects near our current solar project and for clients with whom we have a strong history. Tim Healy’s ARB Industrial team has seen excellent performance to date on their large power job and they are hoping to first fire the last unit at the end of this month. NRG has recognized this Group both for safety and performance on this project. Tim’s Group continues to pursue additional power project and while the permitting process for gas-fired projects in California remains tediously slow, we believe there is a strong likelihood of another award by year end. As we predicted with the passage of California’s SB 54, ARB Industrial is busy with both capital and maintenance refinery work, as we just recently announced additional work on a large refinery integration project. We believe there could be additional scope for us on this site that would carry the team well into 2019. We added the Canadian operations from the Willbros acquisition into this segment and for the month of June, Jeremy Kinch and his team made a positive contribution to the gross margin. They are working to make sure that we manage our expense levels while ensuring that we can take advantage of the record production rates in the Canadian oil sands market. We are also putting into place business development efforts to baseload our fabrication facilities in Edmonton. Both of our engineering groups also had good second quarter results. OnQuest, led by Randy Kessler, is close to completing its engineering design work for an LNG project in the Northeast, its largest LNG installation to-date. The Group is seeing more micro LNG opportunities than a year ago. They are also expanding their target markets to include the biogas market and they have grown into the market for larger heater reformers as they are now being asked to bid on projects in the tens of millions of dollars, whereas a few years ago, they were limited to projects half that size. They are also seeing a lot more downstream ethylene and propylene expansion projects in Canada. They are facing a potential challenge in the current tariff environment, a challenge faced by everyone in the industry as has caused some pricing uncertainty for our clients. Primoris Design & Construction has entered its second year of operations in a solid position, having recently picked up additional front-end engineering and design work for alkylation, green diesel, sulfur recovery and fractionation units at several refining locations across the United States. Kevin Maloney’s team continues to focus on their strength, the refining and syngas markets, and they have several good prospects for new awards in the second half of this year. Our Utilities and Distribution segment, business units continue to deliver steady growth. Q3C is seeing lots of work in the Midwest region and Ohio area, and they have opened a new office in Baltimore after a client requested them to expand operations into Maryland. The weather caused a late start for them to the spring work for this Group, but they have hit the ground running now. We are setting up a new training department in our Midwest region for Q3C in Minnesota to be proactive in making sure we have qualified skilled gas distribution workers to meet the market demand. Our Q3C Rocky Mountain region out of Denver had an excellent second quarter also. We are pleased to announce that Primoris Distribution Services acquired just over a year ago in Florida had a great second quarter and made their earn-out goal. Congratulations to David Runyan, and their entire team in Florida. They have been steady building their backlog in the Florida market and with our Willbros acquisition they are seeing opportunities along the Southeast coast. ARB Underground performed as planned as Scott Summers’ team is not only working on their traditional natural gas work, but they continue to pick up some electrical work including the recently announced transmission conversion project in Southern California. We expect them to have their traditional strong second half of the year as utility work continues to ramp up. As I mentioned our Pipeline and Underground segment face significant headwinds and comparing to a great second quarter last year with project delays for both Primoris Pipeline and Rockford. While we were unable to formally announce any large new award for Patrick McRae’s Primoris Pipeline Group during the second quarter, we know that there are abundant opportunities in the Permian Basin for this Group. As part of the Willbros acquisition, we added facilities work to Jeff Bridges’ Primoris Field Services business unit, which also benefits from the activity level in the Permian. This morning’s announcement of $145 million of work for these two groups is a really good start to capitalizing on our opportunities. The Rockford Group was pleased to be released late in the quarter on 10 miles of one of the ACP’s spreads. The timing is uncertain as to when they will be released on the remaining miles we hope to start this year. Our conversation with the owner are encouraging and we are being paid for equipment that we have already moved in the yards and for the over $20 million in MAXX that we have already purchased. Josh Ramsey’s team has a challenge ahead for the rest of the year, but when we receive the full notice to proceed on these three spreads schedule for this year, we are ready to go. The sales teams for both Rockford and Primoris Pipeline are attracting multiple large and small diameter pipeline projects and we remain extremely excited about this Group’s prospects over the next few years. Finally, our Vadnais Trenchless Group led by Paul Vadnais is continuing to execute well on the large Dual Force Main project in Marina Del Rey, California. I would like to end my comments with our newest segment, the Transmission and Distribution segment. We are pleased with the first month performance for this Group, but it’s only one month. From a management viewpoint, Johnny Priest is continuing to run Primoris T&D and the amount of work out there right now outpaces anything he has seen in his 40-plus years in the business. With Primoris as its parent company, the T&D Group has been able to sign new awards with customers that have been hesitant because of previous concerns about their financial viability. Within the first two months, they have been awarded work from some of the largest electrical utilities in the country. While bad storms do create a challenge for most of our other segments, the T&D Group can see an increase in work after bad weather. For example, after a recent storm in Texas caused transmission towers to fall until 22 miles of overhead lines were down, our T&D team mobilized over 100 repair technicians within the first six hours. We look forward to seeing great things from this new T&D business. With just one month of T&D work, our one year estimated MSA revenue is now $1.1 million. We expect our annual MSA rate revenues to continue to grow over the coming years in line with our strategic goal of providing a solid and profitable revenue base for Primoris. Combined with the strength of the pipeline market and the anticipated strong finish on our major power projects, we remain confident that 2018 will be a record year for Primoris and as we start to look further out, 2019 is already shaping up to be another banner year. As I mentioned in an interview last week in New York, I am very proud of the manner in which all the Primoris employees worked to be the best in the industry, from safety, to quality, to relationships, by implementing one of our company principles of always do the right thing. I will pass it over to Pete now to walk you through some of the numbers for this quarter. Pete?