TRC Companies, Inc. (TRR) Q Earnings Conference Call Transcript May 6, 2015

Transcription

1 Operator TRC Companies, Inc. (TRR) Q Earnings Conference Call Transcript May 6, 2015 Good Morning and welcome to the TRC Companies Third-Quarter Fiscal 2015 Financial Results Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Martin Dodd, General Counsel for TRC. Please go ahead, sir. Martin Dodd Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Secretary Thanks Adam. Welcome, everyone. We are happy you could join us today. With me here in Lowell, Massachusetts, are Chris Vincze, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Tom Bennet, our Chief Financial Officer. As you know, the primary purpose of today's call is to review our third quarter financial performance, but also, in the course of today's presentation, we ll be giving you some thoughts on where we think our company and our markets are going. To the extent we talk about future events, those remarks constitute what are called forwardlooking statements as defined under the federal securities laws. We believe it is important to be able to talk about where we see things headed; nevertheless, forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and there may be events in the future over which we have no control, which can cause actual results to differ materially from what we think today. For a more complete consideration of factors to keep in mind with respect to forward-looking statements, please refer to our public SEC filings, including the 10-Q, we filed this morning, our press release and the presentation slides we are using for today's call, which are posted on the Investor Center of our website. With respect to those slides, they are intended as a visual supplement to our discussion today. We hope you find them helpful, but please consider them in the full context of our 10-Q, our press release and our commentary today on the call. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Chris. Chris Vincze TRC Companies, Inc. Chairman, CEO Thank you, Martin. Welcome, again, to TRC's third quarter fiscal 2015 financial results call. Yes it truly is springtime in Boston, and virtually all the snow has melted. As far as our agenda for today s call, I will provide a brief financial and operational overview and business outlook, Tom 1

2 will provide a more rigorous review of the third quarter and fiscal 2015 year to date results, and we will conclude the call with any questions you might have. Typically our third quarter is the weakest in our fiscal year, primarily due to weather impacts and holidays. Well, as you can see on slide 3, TRC had quite a nice quarter, despite the record snowfall here in Boston. While we are proud and pleased with our results, we still need to put things into perspective. First, we had a tough quarter a year ago and our comparatives based on it are clearly strong, due to our low basis of last year. Second, TRC signed a number of change orders in the quarter, boosting the current period. Importantly however, we still had a very strong quarter and our year to date results really show our continued improvement from a year over year perspective. More specifically, all our key metrics on the slide as you can see have had a material improvement on a year over year basis. Clearly when our bottom line grows from 100%, 261% we cannot be upset about any of those results. Importantly from a quarterly perspective, two highlights: our NSR growth of 15 percent year over year, continues to show our profitable growth initiatives are working. On the last bullet point our NSR backlog increasing 18% year over year, really highlights two issues: one, our investments in our sales and marketing activities continue to work, and secondly, TRC s markets are solid and our next couple of slides and discussion will illustrate that point further. On slide 4, we speak of our Environmental segment, continues to be our largest segment. A very nice quarter on all fronts, which has been consistent for our full fiscal year, all three metrics improved materially, primarily driven by solid performance across the total portfolio of services in our Environmental businesses, in particular our pipeline permitting services and our oil and gas clients. It was also bolstered by two acquisitions that occurred in A quick update on our oil and gas markets, if you recall last quarter I provided a slide in the impact of the price of oil per barrel and its impact in TRC s business. From our perspective, nothing has changed related to that. The primary impact of the price of oil impacts the upstream work, we have now seen the production of oil in this country reduced, the price of oil is actually coming back. Most of TRC s business is in the midstream area and we continue to feel that the midstream markets, the refining assets will continue to receive significant amounts of capital over the next few years. Especially as coal and nuclear are less attractive energy sources and the potential of exporting oil and gas becomes a reality. Moving on to our next segment, our second largest segment, the energy business, also a very nice quarter. Consistent growth in the past few years. A few highlights with the other metrics: our improving margins are due to the emphasis of stronger project management execution. Importantly our backlog growth which illustrates both our expanding utility client base across the country as well as strong capital spending programs on transmission, distribution and renewable energy projects. And we re especially seeing this on the two coasts, as it relates to renewable energy projects. Third key highlight as it relates to this market and business, TRC is pursuing a number of EPC projects at higher levels than we have in the past few years, further 2

3 indicating the level of work in the industry and the capital that will be spent at areas of business that we participate in. Moving on to our third segment, Infrastructure, had a very nice turnaround from a timing perspective, if you recall our Infrastructure segment last quarter had a number of change orders mired in bureaucracy. Many of those were solved in Q3, supporting an already strong quarter. Of particular note, backlog grew 56% year over year, clearly providing our Infrastructure segment a growth environment and I ll highlight one of the key projects in our backlog discussions as to that growth specifically. Importantly a similar trend we are seeing in Infrastructure that we are seeing in Energy are large scale projects, PPP or design-build, continued again to gain popularity as procurement approaches for large transportation projects. And again I ll highlight another example of that in a moment. Moving on to slide 7, as I stated earlier backlog grew 18% year over year, on a sequential basis it grew 14%, and even better news, all three segments grew. As I noted on other calls, I ll provide a couple of examples of projects in each one of our segments that speak to some of the trends we are seeing in our businesses. In the Environmental area we were awarded recently a project related to Sandy from the New York Governor s office of storm recovery. Here TRC was retained and continues to be retained to perform hazardous materials assessments associated with housing repairs or buyouts of homes, currently the program has 16 thousand homes in applicants. The contract value to TRC is estimated to be $3 million over a period of a year and potential for growth as well. Our second example project is typical of what we re seeing in the midstream markets our client Enbridge Energy Company is expanding a 36 inch diameter pipeline from Flanagan terminal near Pontiac, IL, to a terminal Griffith, IN, again bringing natural gas to a major area of the country in the Chicago area and supporting their growth and issues. And again we provided the permitting program first, this particular project provides for environmental compliance inspection during construction of the project, again a very typical project that we are seeing throughout our portfolio. Moving on to the Energy segment, I highlighted two different types of projects. The first one is a small EPC project, we re basically rebuilding a substation and procuring equipment for that substation and replacing it next to an older substation providing the client with state-of-the-art equipment and improving system reliability which is driving many of these capital projects. The value to TRC is approximately $2.5 to $3 million over the course of the next year and a half. The overall contract is significantly more than that. Another area of business that has been growing for TRC over the last number of years is our energy efficiency businesses. Most recently we were awarded two master services agreements with PG&E in Southern Cal Edison in the west coast to support their energy efficiency programs. Both of these contracts, combined, add to approximately $3 million of estimated value over the next couple of years, and much of it includes development of California codes and standards and other engineering and consulting support services. We are certainly anticipating quite a bit of energy growth opportunities across the country as again energy efficiency takes hold as a different way of source of energy. And finally on and Infrastructure area, two examples of PPP projects. The first is a project with Bizzack Construction in West Virginia. TRC will serve as the prime design consultant for the 3

4 project which involves the grating and drainage of approximately a 2 mile section of the Coalfields expressway, a project that we have been doing a number of other consulting and engineering services for. We will lead the alignment design, the geotech work, the geotech drilling, cultural resources and many other services over the course of the project, which is estimated to last until Again the value for TRC is somewhere north of $3 million. Finally, I listed a project that I listed last time as well, only because of the magnitude it has on our backlog and the opportunity and again continues to speak to the trend of PPP. We were awarded through PennDOT, the Rapid Bridge Replacement Project, which is about a $1 billion project, the first of its kind, within Pennsylvania we re going to be dealing with over 300 bridges that will be replaced or retrofitted over the course of 3 years, and we will be serving as the construction quality acceptance firm engaged by the team Plenary Walsh-Keystone Partners. Again we anticipate this to occur over the next 3 years, our value of the contract is north of $25 million and importantly there is another phase to the project that may happen our way and that could be an additional $10+ million over a couple of years beyond this one. Again, very excited about our backlog growth and again, the continued opportunities that we see in the markets that we serve. Moving on to our growth strategies, slide 8, TRC continues to invest in a balanced growth strategy. As you can see in this slide, in this quarter we grew approximately 75% organically and about 25% via acquisition, as this quarter played out. We continued to invest in high growth margin growth opportunities, which I ll speak to in a moment, and just as a reminder as it relates to our strategic acquisitions, we are continually focused solely in the North American markets. On the right side of the slide you can see the most recent transactions, two that occurred in the course of the last 12 months. Covino Environmental Associates which happened in July of last year. Nova which occurred in September, and a newly announced transaction as of last week, X- Line which I ll speak to in a second. Shifting on to slide 9, our X-Line transaction, which is an growing and innovative distributive engineering services, also supporting the power and telecommunication clients in the Southeast. It s based in Atlanta, certainly we view this as a bolt on acquisition, which was introduced to us by our USS colleagues, a company that we acquired just over a year ago. Major clients include some of our current clients AT&T, but also some newer clients Georgia Power and a few other of the large electrical cooperatives in the southeast. The markets are clearly in the south which is an area of focus for us these days, also supporting our growth in the Florida markets. Up to 37 employees, revenues based on last year s financials were $2-$3 million and growing rapidly. As historically to all of our transactions, we do view this as immediately accretive to TRC and it was also financed through our cash flow. In conclusion on page 10, we really had a nice quarter. Very strong financially bolstered by things I had mentioned within the context of a year. We consistently are improving our financials, our objective, as we ve stated many times is to be a 10% EBITDA business, while achieving material growth levels. We continue to invest in our growth opportunities primarily through key people, as we announced just recently, we hired a new CMO, Todd Williams, a former CEO and executive in our space for a couple of decades, and also a number of other operational leaders throughout our business. We continue to focus on our repositioned markets 4

5 over the last few years: oil & gas, utility & power, and transportation, which we continually view as high growth markets with significant capital spend over the course of the next decade, and continually positioning ourselves across the US geography in doing so. And then finally our acquisition strategy, which we continue to see on a quarter to quarter, year to year basis, continually perform well, obviously our growth rates both organically and through acquisition indicates that we are successfully integrating these businesses and continually expanding our client base due to our new service lines or geographies. With that said, I d like to turn it over to Tom for our financial review. Thanks Chris, good morning everyone. Let s move to slide 11, I ll review some of the financial details for our fiscal third quarter which ended March 27, compared with the same quarter in the prior fiscal year. As Chris highlighted, our Net Service Revenue of $101 million for the quarter was up $12.9 million or 15% compared with the same quarter last year. As mentioned 74% of the NSR growth in the quarter was organic, while the nine month year to date growth is 68% organic. Operating Income was $7.1 million for the quarter, up $4.6 million or 185%, compared with the same quarter of the prior year. Beyond the impact of the NSR growth and project performance in the quarter, the increase in operating income was also aided by two prior year comparative factors, in that last year s third quarter results were dampened by the combined impact of adverse winter weather, as well as a spike in health benefits costs. Each of the three segments had a double-digit increase in profit to the quarter. The Infrastructure segment finalized a number of change orders, as Chris mentioned. This tendency had hindered results for the prior two quarters and thus increased our profit by 99%. Our Environmental segment profit was up 28% and the Energy segment was up 10%. The top right chart on page 11, shows that EBITDA, a non-gaap financial measure, was $9.4 million in the quarter, and driven by the same factors as operating income, was up $4.7 million or 100%, compared with the same quarter of the prior year. Let s move to slide 12 now for some further details on the income statement. Cost of services were $83.5 million in the quarter, up $3.4 million or 4% compared with the prior-year period. Labor-related costs associated with the increased headcount supporting the revenue growth was the primary factor in the increase, which was offset in part by lower medical benefit costs and a lower level of exit strategy, project cost reserves, compared to the prior year period. The ratio of cost of services to NSR declined nicely to 82.7% for the quarter, compared with 91.1% in the prior-year period. Our G&A expenses increased by $0.6 million or 7% in the quarter. Looking at the lower right chart on slide 12, the corresponding G&A expense-to-nsr ratio was 8.8% in the quarter, a decrease of 0.7% from the third quarter of the prior year. Our G&A to NSR ratio for the ninemonth year to date period is now 8.6%, compared with 9.5% in the prior year nine-month period, 5

6 indicating continued control over our legal and administrative support costs as we also grow the top line. The EBITDA-to-NSR-margin ratio improved to 9.3% in the quarter, compared with the 5.3% margin in the prior-year quarter, and is now 9.2% for the nine-month YTD period, up 2.1 percentage points from the last year s 7.1%. As Chris said overall we continue to make progress towards our 10% margin goal. Continuing down near the bottom of slide 12, Net Income for the quarter was $5.2 million, up $3.7 million or 261%. The growth in net income occurred despite the $0.9 million, or 81%, year over year increase in income tax expense, which was buffered by a lower overall effective rate in the current third quarter. Earnings per diluted share was 17 cents for the quarter, up 240% compared with 5 cents per share in the prior year. Moving to slide 14, the lower right chart shows that our EPS is now 41 cents per diluted share for the 9 month year to date period, up 18 cents or 78% compared with 23 cents per share in the same period of the prior year. Let s move to slide 15 where I have some final comments with respect to DSO and cash flow. Our DSO, or Days Sales Outstanding metric that I mention on every call, was at 90 days at the end of the third quarter, down 2 days compared with the same quarter of the prior year but up 5 days sequentially compared with the immediately prior second quarter. We continue to target achieving a DSO of 80 days or less, with DSO typically higher in our fiscal first quarter and hitting a low point in the last quarter of the fiscal year. We call that each day of DSO is worth about $1.25 million of cash flow. Free cash flow, or operating cash flow of $11.4 million less our $1 million of capital expenditures, was $10.5 million in the quarter, compared with free cash flow of $7.7 million in the prior-year period. On the far right column of the data table on slide 15, you can see that our year-to-date 9-month free cash flow of $7.6 million is $8.2 million better than the YTD free cash flow in the prior-year 9-month period. Accordingly, we ended the quarter with $21.3 million of cash, compared with $11.4 million in the prior year. We have no outstanding borrowings on our $75 million revolving credit facility. We do not have any activity report on our $10 million, three-year stock repurchase program that had been authorized by our board last quarter. Much like our approach to investments in organic growth and acquisitions, we continue to monitor the price of our stock and we intend to manage the repurchase program on an opportunistic basis and within the requirements of the applicable regulations. Please note that on slide 16 we provide a reconciliation of our GAAP to non-gaap measures. That concludes my remarks today. We ll now go back to the operator to open up the call for Q&A. Question and Answer Session 6

7 Operator Thank you, we will now be conducting a Q&A session. [Operator s instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Walter Riebenack. Yes, Tom, Chris, how are you today? Good Walter, how are you? Oh I m hanging in there. I just have several questions. If I understood you right Tom, the repurchase of share authorization was not done by you, you guys didn t buy any shares, did you? That s correct Walter. Ok, second question I ve got here, on the acquisitions of course you just stated and you have in y our press releases, that each acquisition becomes accretive. And I know just from the documents that you send out, how would you demonstrate that on a per share basis, because the shares outstanding keep going up and up and up each quarter? Walter I think the key statistic, if I m reading your question correctly this is Tom is EPS, I think that s the final measure of how much of our results are going to shareholder. Which Chris and I are in those ranks. My point on the year to date results with eps at 41 cents per share compared to 18 cents in the prior year, I say it s ah, kind of a heavy word, but the definitive statistic on that, it s up 70%, so all of that along with the statistics on organic versus acquisitive proportions, that s the final measure. Is that where you were headed with your question? Well, sort of, I guess what I m looking for is a little bit more refinement on that per acquisition. In other words, let s take X-Line as an example, since it s your latest one. Was that an all cash purchase? Yes 7

8 Ok, so the increase in shares, what is accounting for that? The increase in shares Walter that you see in our reports, are typically represents the vast majority of it is the shares issued under our long term incentive plan to our employees as part of our overall incentive plan to reward results, much like we re talking about for EPS here Chris Vincze TRC Companies, Inc. Chairman, CEO And Walter just as a refinement of that, on some of our transactions, we ve had minor components of stock as part of those transactions, very similar to our own internal long term incentive program, we would like to have our principles coming over from those acquisitions engaged as owners of this company as well, so we typically do use some stock as currency, but a minor portion, primarily cash and notes And Walter that s the reason why when we report EPS we always use the diluted measure. That shows the full impact of the dilution that happens when shares are issued. That s fine, I can understand that. On the EBITDA front, using that as an example, what would engineering companies be selling for nowadays as a multiple of EBITDA? Chris: Your public comps these days are trading at the 8 to 9 range, and again there s different reasons for premiums or less than premiums but that has been your historical public comps over the course of the last year to two years. Ok, thank you guys, you did have a pretty good quarter, I congratulate you on that. Chris Vincze TRC Companies, Inc. Chairman, CEO Thank you Walter Thanks Walter Operator Thank you, one more moment as we poll for more questions. [Pause]. Ladies and gentlemen at this point there are no further questions. At this time we have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the conference back over to Mr. Chris Vincze for any closing or additional remarks. Chris Vincze TRC Companies, Inc. Chairman, CEO 8

9 Thank you Adam, just want to continue to thank our investors and shareholders for their continued support and interest in TRC. And certainly my colleagues for executing a great third quarter, and hopefully a very strong fourth quarter to come here as we finish up a good year. And look forward to having a summer and reconvening with all of you again sometime in the early fall. With that thanks everybody very much. Operator Thank you ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference call for today. Thank you for joining us and have a great day. 9