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Tetra Tech, Inc. (TTEK)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 12, 2015

$31.44

-0.35%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and thank you for joining the Tetra Tech Earnings Call. By now, you should have received a copy of the press release. If you have not, please contact the company's corporate office at 626-351-4664. With us today from management are Dan Batrack, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Steve Burdick, Chief Financial Officer. They will provide a brief overview of the results and will then open up the call for questions. During the course of the conference call, Tetra Tech management may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These include statements concerning future events and Tetra Tech's future financial performance. These statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results. Tetra Tech's Forms 10-K and 10-Q reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission identify certain risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. Tetra Tech undertakes no duty to update forward-looking statements. In addition, since management will be presenting some non-GAAP financial measures as references, the appropriate GAAP financial reconciliations are posted in the Investor Relations section of Tetra Tech's website. At this time, I would like to inform you that all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the request of the company, we will open the conference up for questions and answers after the presentation. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Dan Batrack. Please go ahead, Mr. Batrack. Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Great. Thank you very much, Ginger. And good morning, and welcome to our fiscal year 2015 year-end and fourth quarter earnings conference call. While Steve Burdick, our Chief Financial Officer, will present the specifics of our financials, I'll start today's presentation with…

Operator

Operator

The question-and-answer session will begin now. The first question comes from Tahira Afzal from KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Hi, guys. This is Sean (31:01) on for Tahira today. Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, Sean (31:03).

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Good morning. So, I guess, fiscal year 2016 guidance looks pretty good, but I was hoping you guys could give us a little more color on the end market outlooks embedded in that guidance? If we could start with oil and gas in particular, what's embedded in there on the midstream side, and any granularity we can get on what you're seeing in the U.S. versus Canada would be very helpful? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: I'll start with oil and gas. We've actually seen a bit of reduction in 2015 overall in oil and gas, but that slight reduction was almost completely attributed to the upstream reduction in upstream oil and gas in oil sands in Canada. Our midstream was actually up in 2015 as I had mentioned in the prepared remarks and we see with both the backlog we have now and the new opportunities, we expect it to continue to grow into 2016. So, our guidance was based on a slight increase in our oil and gas work. We expect that increase to be all associated with midstream, both in the Canada and U.S. with a flat to continued soft, maybe even slightly declining in the upstream. I say only slightly declining because we saw significant reduction in 2015 and we expect it to be working off at a low point. So, oil and gas should be flat to up slightly for the year. Our U.S. commercial work is actually one of the strongest areas along with our U.S. state and local, both of those will be up quite materially year-over-year. Our U.S. federal, that was really one of the big headwind areas for us in 2015. Our assumption that our guidance is based on is a flat federal business from 2016 – from 2015. I will say that I didn't speak about contract capacity in my prepared remarks, but we do feel a bit more encouraged there, so I'd like to say that our guidance is a bit conservative. Some things that could drive us to the top end of our range would be a pickup in federal. We did add almost $1 billion in federal contract capacity in 2015 (33:18), particularly late in the year. And so I think it positions us quite well and I think as I mentioned just briefly in my prepared remarks that includes the Department of Defense work for really all three branches and the Corps of Engineers, so, Army, Navy, Air Force and the Corps. So we do – our guidance is based on flat federal, but I think we have some good opportunity there.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Okay. Thanks. And I mean in terms of the next level of detail, what are you guys expecting from the California water infrastructure opportunity? Has there been any change on the timing or scope of those growth opportunities? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, it's typical of these types of projects. It has increased – revenue has increased, but it's been slow and most of it's associated with studies and permits in the upfront work. Typical work to detail design and even construction oversight or owners' engineer work typically trails by anywhere between one year to two years, so four quarters to eight quarters, but the number of projects has picked up significantly. But I will say that the upfront feasibility studies alternative work is relatively small dollars. And generally speaking, about half of the dollars have been set aside for the funding from the bond issuance or set aside for stormwater or capturing water that comes down during storm event. So, that's a lot of work, but where can you put recharge basin, how can you capture it, how can you divert it into retention base? And so there is a lot of geospatial work, which is fancy name for a lot of mapping and planning and flood plains. It's a lot of tapping work, but the big dollars become later when it moves to design work and actually implementation.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Okay. So, basically, it's a pretty modest contribution in terms of growth into 2016 on California water infrastructure? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Right. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Okay. And then, last one for me and then I'll get back in queue. What would you guys anticipate Coffey would do to your guidance in this fiscal year? I mean, would it be accretive in the year or how are you thinking about that? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, we're going to provide details when we close Coffey. We expect that to happen in the early part of Q2 for us. We do expect that it will be accretive on a GAAP basis in the first year, but we'll provide specifics both on the revenue and income and EPS contributions when we close and I'd expect that will be in our next conference call.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Okay. Thanks a lot, guys. Appreciate it. Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you, Sean (36:04).

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Andy Wittmann from Robert W. Baird. Andrew John Wittmann - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Great. I wanted to talk a little bit about the margins. Dan, can you just talk about maybe a couple different aspects of this? Can you talk, one, about the mix of business, how that's shifting in 2016? Can you talk about – where was I going with this – yeah, the mix as well as just basically the comparison that you have versus last year's margins and any opportunities you see to improve them? I guess would be the big core questions there. Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. Let me work to answer that with your second aspect first, and then I'll address the business mix. First is the comparable to our past margins. I know that if you take a look at our business and say that we have 13% EBITDA on the fourth quarter, that's quite a higher – high mark for us. I commented that that was the highest in several years for us – in, I believe, 15 quarters consecutively, but I'll tell you that that's what we expect. Now the first part, when you take a look at the two operating business groups, you look at 17% from WEI, a one aspect you look and think that that's quite high, but in 2014, the fourth quarter, we were at 16.5%. So, essentially the same number. Now it's both excellent performance on existing work we have, but when we finish work and close our projects, we quite often will have pickups in the event that we finished the projects ahead of schedule or below budget and those would contribute typically that's done in the fourth quarter, that's…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Mike Shlisky from Seaport Global.

Michael David Shlisky - Seaport Global Securities LLC

Analyst

Good morning, guys. Steven M. Burdick - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Executive Vice President: Good morning, Mike.

Michael David Shlisky - Seaport Global Securities LLC

Analyst

First a quick one. In fiscal 2016 and going forward, does any overhead come out of your costs by not having a standalone mining business? Steven M. Burdick - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Executive Vice President: It does, Mike, a little bit, a little bit. We actually had a – we called it GMP internally, Global Mining Practice. We consolidated the units. We tracked the goodwill, which you saw this last quarter take place. So what we did is by reassigning the resources into other operating divisions where they can actually utilize and work on backlog we have, we were able to take out the overarching management. But I will say we've been pretty aggressive on that over this past year and the costs have been – of downsizing that were incurred incrementally through the quarters. And so you probably see only about $1 million or $2 million of overhead, which is generally in our overhead, not our G&A, that was in the Global Mining Practice. So, yes, we'll see a reduction in our indirect cost reduction. But on an annual basis, it's only like $1 million or $2 million.

Michael David Shlisky - Seaport Global Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. Great. I also want to touch on your infrastructure type business. We are coming closer to a potential highway bill that could open up some funding for some federal dollars for some roads and bridges. I was wondering if some of the road builders out there that we've talked with thinking 2017 might be when they start seeing actual work, because your fiscal 2016 might be seeing some elevated traffic study work or design work. And maybe secondarily, is there any high margin work in there when you get into things like crossing water, drainage, and stuff like that? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Mike, the work that we do is primarily around the environmental permitting. So it's clearance of right-of-way; in the case of transportation, an extension of highways for the interstate systems; some bridge work with respect to monitoring and evaluation of settlements through the waterways. But generally speaking, and I have had a few questions on what's the impact of the highway bill either passing or not passing, it's relatively de minimis for us. So we do not have a significant transportation practice here in the U.S. Now, we do do very early work that was relatively – I hate to use the word immune, but not affected by passing most of the big dollars on the highway bills don't cause the environmental studies to go forward or not, because they still want to get these projects in a position to go forward. They have a big impact on the detail designers and the constructors. And that's not really our marketplace. So passing or not passing the highway bill is relatively irrelevant to us. We sometimes get a bit more monitoring work for stormwater pollution prevention while they're doing excavations and field QA/QC work of our engineers. But overall, let's say, it's a very minimal impact to our business.

Michael David Shlisky - Seaport Global Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. Great. And then I'll just throw in one quick Coffey-related question here. In the past, Dan, you've said that in the U.S., the environment politically on aid funding is generally not a huge deal, whether it's one party or the other in charge; most of these programs generally stay stable through time. Is that different? Are there major swings in the funding in either Australia or the UK, to the best of your knowledge? Is there anything we should expect as far as things being a little more volatile in that business versus the U.S.? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, actually the UK has – the UK has actually become more stable than even the U.S. So the United Kingdom has actually targeted 0.7% of the GDP. And so they had to go from a very low level, and you saw sequentially quite a few projects ramp up there as they committed – as their commitment to this funding has increased actually hit that percentage. So, I guess, you can say that number could move with respect to volatility of the overall GDP. In the case of the UK, things have actually looked quite good and things have actually been growing. And so there's been sort of this double positive impact, one, they've been moving up to 0.7%, they're getting quite close to that now. But then it's also compounded with the growth of the GDP, so you've had this multiplicative increase in the funding and opportunities. And so we feel pretty good about that. Tetra Tech itself does very little work. We're a subcontractor to some of the UK AID agency there, they call it DFID, but I'll refer to it as the UK AID. But Coffey is the top 10 player…

Michael David Shlisky - Seaport Global Securities LLC

Analyst

Nice thanks. I will hop back in queue. I appreciate it. Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Great. Thanks, Mike.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from John Rogers from D.A. Davidson. John Bergstrom Rogers - D. A. Davidson & Co.: Hi, good morning. Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, John. John Bergstrom Rogers - D. A. Davidson & Co.: Just one follow-up on Coffey and I know you're going to give us more update when you close, but in terms of the way they report their business, the Geoservices, Project Management, is that almost or primarily what you would consider WEI work? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yes and no. I would say about half. So the work that they do for transportation and for infrastructure for cities would clearly be water environment, and I – the infrastructure work. So the one thing that's – if you're in this business, I know those listening that are actually in the engineering consulting field would be insulted for me to spend a moment on this, but geo tech work or geoservices work is required on every infrastructure project, whether it's a building, a bridge, a road, a water treatment plant, none of those can be put in place without a foundation. And the more complicated the geology and the foundation, more extensive the geotechnical or geoservices work. And so, yes, it would be on the infrastructure side for cities in municipal work for roads, for water treatments, for buildings, and again, Coffey is a world leader in this. But they also do that work and where the biggest revenues have historically been is on the commodity side, which is for resources, natural resources, so Resource Management. And that is, you don't do mining work unless you know a lot about slope stability, how hard is it to dig out, what type of…

Operator

Operator

Our final question comes from David Rose from Wedbush Securities.

David L. Rose - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Thank you for squeezing me in. Just try to do it real quickly. The Coffey acquisition, I know you don't want to go into detail just yet until it's done, but is there a potential for it to be dilutive in fiscal 2016 given seasonality in the business or some aspect of the business? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Great question, great question. I don't think so. Our plan is for it to close in the second quarter and we believe that based on that would give us two and a half quarters roughly, so you would have all of Q4, all of Q3, and a good portion of Q2, and based on our evaluation of that, it should be accretive on a GAAP basis. Now if something unforeseen happened and we closed that, last week of the fiscal year, there may be different perturbations there, but that's why we will report what we anticipate at the time we close. But, no, that's not actually in our – within our forecast at this time. We don't think that's going to happen.

David L. Rose - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. And then just one other aspect on Coffey. Given the deceleration in this business and we've discussed the closures and how they've been managing the downsizing their business but the revenue trajectory still is downward. How do you get comfortable that you start to turn that business around? I think you've outlined what you plan to do in terms of cross-selling, but on a standalone basis, can that business recover? Or do you think there's still another leg down in that business? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: I'll try to give you a perspective that we have on this. I think that the reduction in the revenue is the best thing that I've seen that I could have possibly seen coming out of Coffey, and what actually made myself and Tetra Tech as a company interested in them. And let me run a quick parallel for you on this. A year ago, a year and three months ago, I met with our board, and I proposed to our board that we close down our Remediation and Construction Management Division. We were sitting at about $2.7 billion, and I said, we had a division of our RCM at about $600 million and my prospect to the board was, I'd like to close this down, I'd like to bring the Tetra Tech's revenue down by $200 million, $300 million, $400 million, and as a result of that, our income will go up, our margin will go up, our risk will go down, and so those that have looked at (60:25) I'll go back to today's presentation, if you take a look at, I'll tell you just the first page of the presentation, revenue for Tetra Tech, year-over-year down, operations down 3%, income up 30% – 29.5%,…

David L. Rose - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. That's very helpful, Dan. I appreciate it. And then if we can kind of think about the guidance again – the issues with DoD and then the first quarter guidance, which I think is wider than the consensus in ours as well. And I think we're all pretty aware of FX. But was the DoD business – the dropdown in the DoD business, the acceleration in that decline also impacting your Q1 view? Is that maybe, I guess one of the biggest headwinds that you have in Q1 aside from oil and gas, because I think we all have that pretty clear. So that's I guess part A of the question. And part B, is there any commonality in this slow release of products in DoD? Is there some read-through in what makes you feel that ultimately gets better, because you've got this great contract capacity? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, it is. We have – well, we think for the year, our federal is going to be flat. We're not overly optimistic on the Department of Defense. So, we are a bit more pessimistic on that, we're a little bit more optimistic on some of the civilian programs out there. So, on a net basis, it's flat, but I will tell you, you've got it right that we are less optimistic in the first quarter for U.S. Department of Defense. And I will say that when you convert the revenue though and I mentioned this earlier, the FX in the first quarter, if you back out the FX, the midpoint of our guidance, and I know I'm repeating myself from earlier on the prepared remarks, but our organic growth is about 3% in the first quarter. I do know it's lighter than…

David L. Rose - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Great. And I don't want to extend this, but I just want to get to the heart of the DoD question is, what is it about the spending, in your view, that you've got this dichotomy (65:53), you've got the awards, but you're just not getting the task orders? Why is that? Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I think it's been – I actually think it's been pretty clear to our project staff that they're informing, that the clients at the government haven't had clarity as to whether or not their budgets and funding are coming through. And so, I think 10 days ago, 10 working days ago, having the U.S. government agree for the next two years on an overall budget is the first time we've heard that for many, many years. So, that's number one. Now, on December 11, they have between now and December 11, to actually work out how they're going to divide up the pie. So, they know how big the pie is now for the first time. So, sequestration has been set aside. We have a total dollar amount, which we haven't seen in a few years now. They didn't fight as much last year, but they never actually had an agreement. Now, we actually have an agreement on the overall budget. Now, they just have to divide it up into appropriations. So, we're a few weeks out on that. So, I think that once there's certainty on your clients that you actually have a budget, you can start spending. And that hasn't existed before, so that's one reason we feel much more confident, and I hate to use the word confident, we feel less concerned than we had in the past year or two. We'll see how that plays out between now and the end of the calendar year, but it does look better from that standpoint. The clients don't want to spend money on contract capacity and convert it to task orders if they haven't actually had the appropriation that they can go spend. And this time, they should actually have that here before the end of the calendar year and then they can give it out. We would look for much more even, regular task orders throughout the year, not as fits and starts, it makes a huge difference. And a lot of the work that DoD is spending now is actually overseas. They refer to it OCONUS, so Outside the Continental United States. And, we actually have a pretty significant support infrastructure for work that they're doing outside the U.S. that includes NATO in Europe, includes Middle East and other Asia-Pacific regions where they're building up. And so, they've got the projects, they've got the contract capacity and now hopefully in the next 30 days they'll actually have the money appropriated to them. So, I think that combination is what's making us feel a little bit better going into 2016.

David L. Rose - Wedbush Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. That's great color. I appreciate it, Dan. Thank you very much. Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Okay. Thank you very much, David. Dan L. Batrack - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: And thank you all very much for your questions and interest in Tetra Tech. I'll tell you we have exciting new opportunities in water and environment. And, I think that Tetra Tech in this area with a very concentrated focus in these areas has reinforced our reputation as a leader in these areas with our clients, not just with the numbers we're producing. And the announcement or at least our announcement of intent to acquire Coffey, we're in the marketplace buying the shares now. Again, I mention I expect that to close likely in the second quarter, continues to advance our strategy and gives us a very positive outlook to support the existing type of work we do and actually move us in the number one position. So, we feel quite good about that. And I look forward to speaking with all of you again next quarter and giving you an update on all these items, both the federal budgets in Coffey and actually how it performs in the first quarter. So, thank you very much and I'll talk to you next quarter. Bye.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our conference for today. Thank you all for participating and have a nice day. All parties may disconnect now.