Orion Group Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:ORN) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Orion Group Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:ORN) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 29, 2024
Orion Group Holdings, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good morning and welcome to Orion Group Holdings Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. All participants will be in a listen only mode. [Operator Instructions] On today’s call, management will provide prepared remarks and then we will open the call for your questions. [Operator Instructions] Please also note today’s event is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the floor over to Margaret Boyce, Investor Relations for Orion. Please go ahead ma’am.
Margaret Boyce: Thank you operator and thank you all for joining us today to discuss Orion Group Holdings’ fourth quarter and full-year 2023 financial results. We issued our earnings release after market last night. It is available in the Investor Relations section of our website at oriongroupholdingsinc.com. I’m here today with Travis Boone, Chief Executive Officer; and Scott Thanisch, Chief Financial Officer. On today’s call, management will provide prepared remarks, and then we will open up the call for your questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today’s comments will include forward-looking statements under the federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements are identified by words such as will, be, intend, believe, expect, anticipate or other comparable words and phrases.
Statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Our actual financial condition and results of operations may vary materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are contained in our SEC filings, including our reports on Form 10-Q and 10-K. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Travis. Travis, please go ahead.
Travis Boone: Thank you, Margaret, and welcome everyone to our fourth quarter and year-end 2023 call. Good morning. I will start by saying that I’m pleased with our progress on transforming the business throughout 2023. We did what we said we would do and the business is much healthier. To summarize our fourth quarter and full year results, we made the profitability of our business a priority over revenue. Our Q4 revenues grew 3% to $202 million and year-end revenues declined slightly to $712 million versus $748 million in 2022. On the surface, that is not impressive. But as I communicated to you throughout the year, driving the top line for the sake of revenue growth was not our objective. In construction, if you don’t have discipline, you can win bids to grow revenue without making money until you put yourself out of business.
That was the situation when Scott and I joined Orion in late 2022. And our top priority was to transform the business into a company that can deliver profitable and sustainable growth. We now have strong backlog to support revenue growth in 2024 and be profitable at the same time. A year-ago, we laid out a three point strategic plan to work toward long-term sustainable growth, which included improving the profitability of the concrete business, strengthening business development to drive growth, and investment and resources to realize Orion’s full potential. We worked that plan throughout 2023 and accomplished our goals for the year. Concrete is now profitable, but we will continue to drive higher margins in that business. We have invested in strategic growth and have vastly improved our business development team and processes which is driving growth.
Lastly, we significantly improved our balance sheet and liquidity. We made significant progress optimizing our business and we strategically invested in our fleet to better prepare for the future. We still have work to do, but today our business is much healthier as measured by a significant improvement in profitability metrics. Gross profit margin increased 620 basis points to 11.4% versus 5.2% fourth quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $14.8 million or a 7.3 adjusted EBITDA margin, a significant improvement over $3.2 million or 1.6% percent adjusted EBITDA margin in Q4 2022. As we communicated from the beginning, reversing the margin decline in our concrete business was a top priority and in March it turned the corner. On an adjusted EBITDA margin basis, concrete delivered 5.3% versus a negative 1.8% year-over-year.
Don’t get me wrong, growing the top line is important. In 2023, we made significant progress in strengthening our business development efforts, which I will cover more later. What is important is winning the right projects for Orion, high value long-term projects like Pearl Harbor and the Grand Bahamas dry dock. Awards like these demonstrate our ability to win large complex projects that are reputation builders in our markets. And while we are pursuing large projects, we are also applying a disciplined approach to projects of all sizes. The go forward story is how Orion is now set up to unlock its full potential. First, winning projects with the right pricing is critical to driving profitability. That required us to implement guardrails such as minimum bid margins and pursuing work where we have strong value proposition that differentiates Orion from competition, as well as bolstering our management oversight with experienced leaders.
However, you can’t just establish and enforce new rules. The organization must understand and embrace them and that required us to reset Orion’s culture. While having a strong and engaging culture is always an ongoing process, in 2023, we accomplished a great deal to strengthen our organization and its identity in the marketplace. We put disciplines, processes and procedures in place, so expectations are crystal clear. And everyone is focused on the same mission, delivering predictable excellence through outstanding execution. To achieve this, we tore down the silos that had existed for far too many years throughout the business. With the classic case of what happens when acquisitions are not fully integrated, there are duplicate platforms, business unit autonomy, friction over resources, overlooked talent and other challenges.
And since these disciplines are all interrelated, we were missing many opportunities to collaborate and cross-sell. Fast forward one year later; Orion is now one company pulling in the same direction. We rebranded all of our operations under the Orion banner, including the rebranding of TAS Concrete Construction as Orion. We are also rebuilding an IT infrastructure that will give us a better line of sight across the entire business, as well as the capability of scale. Scott will give more detail in his remarks. Above all, I’m especially thrilled with the caliber of leaders that we attracted to Orion this year. Alan Eckman, formerly with AECOM, joined us as a Senior Vice President of Strategy and Growth. This was a new role that we critically needed to drive strategy, business development, sales training and future M&A.
We also hired Chip Earle as our new in-house counsel. Chip has an impressive legal, compliance and risk management background. Louisiana is an important market for Orion and we now have a new office in New Orleans to expand our presence in the state where we began working in 1906. Since Scott and I came on board, our culture and our senior leadership is strikingly different than a year-ago. We are fostering a winning mindset, celebrating our achievements, and pushing ourselves to higher performance. By unifying under the Orion brand, we will develop a more recognizable presence in the national market, unlock new potential for growth, leverage collaboration across teams, and support our mission to deliver high quality solutions with predictable excellence.
To reflect our one Orion brand, we are launching our new website on March 4th and would be happy for you to go check it out when it goes live next week. With these critical building blocks in place, we are turning our full attention to building momentum in the business. In 2024, we expect our performance to improve with a gradual build throughout the year. However, we believe 2025 will be the year when our transformation starts to really kick in for several key reasons. In a little over a year, we almost quadrupled our pipeline of opportunity from $3 billion to over $11 billion. This reflects not only the measures we have taken to transform Orion, but also an improving market outlook. We are expecting to see increased RFP activity from our marine clients this year in the public and private sector.
The Corps is undertaking a number of capital construction projects that we are preparing to bid on including the pent up demand for maintenance dredging of waterways which would benefit Orion. Based on our Pearl Harbor work, Marine is also well positioned to participate from naval defense spending in the Pacific. Add to that $10 billion that is earmarked for coaster restoration in Louisiana in the coming years, as well as the port expansion capital projects necessary to accommodate larger ships and more warehousing capacity. Orion Concrete might also benefit from public funding for infrastructure projects. This would be a new opportunity for Orion since our work in Dallas and Houston core markets is mostly in the private sector. With any interest rate relief, we believe several private sector construction projects would be green lighted to support the outsized growth in these two markets.
We also see an opportunity to expand our concrete business presence in Florida. Bottom line, there are strong tailwinds and a ton of opportunity in our space that requires the special skills and experience that limits competition. We have the best people in the industry who are laser focused on execution, growing revenues and driving margins. I’m very optimistic that Orion is set up for success in 2024, 2025 and beyond. Now, I will turn this call over to Scott to discuss our operations and financials.
Scott Thanisch: Thanks, Travis, and good morning, everyone. During 2023, we were hard at work implementing changes to position Orion for future success. As Travis outlined, we invested in critical areas of the business to prepare for the growth opportunities in front of us. A big focus this year was investing in technology replacing the outdated infrastructure that we inherited. We redesigned and rebuilt our IT infrastructure moving from housing our servers in our offices to hosting our IT systems in state-of-the-art data centers in Austin and Las Vegas. With this move, our systems are now more secure and reliable with greater flexibility and adaptability. We completed the implementation of a CRM system to improve our business development capabilities.
We have also implemented the first phase of a project management system and a P2P tool that will improve our overall project and expense capabilities. In 2024, we will continue to enhance our IT systems, migrating the concrete business over to the same financial platform as the Marine segment, which will deliver efficiencies and greatly improve the line of sight across our entire business. With these changes, we can deliver our projects with improved financial performance. As mentioned previously, we need to consistently invest in modernizing and refurbishing our fleet to better service our customers and prepare for growth. In 2023, our maintenance capital expenditures were lower than historical averages. This year, we expect maintenance CapEx to return to historical levels.
Additionally, we will be investing in growth capital to be ready to execute more work for our customers. To expand our fleet in a cost effective way, we recently purchased a dredge under construction and will be investing over the next two-years to build it out. We expect it to be fully operational in 2025. We were successful in strengthening the balance sheet and monetizing our noncore real estate assets in 2023. Securing our ABL credit facility was key to strengthening our financial flexibility. We closed over $25 million in equipment and real estate sale leaseback transactions last year. And lastly, we announced that we entered into a $34 million land sale contract for our East West Jones property with an expected closing date in June. With the completion of this transaction, we will have unlocked almost $60 million of value from our balance sheet to reduce debt and invest in growing our business in 2024.
To wrap up on the balance sheet, as of December 31st, we had $30.9 million cash and total debt outstanding of $37.2 million. At the end of the quarter, we had no outstanding borrowings under our revolving credit facility. Moving on to our financial results, fourth quarter revenue increased 2.8% to $201.6 million primarily due to an increase in marine revenue related to the Pearl Harbor dry dock project, partially offset by lower concrete revenue following our decision to exit the unprofitable Central Texas Concrete Business. Fourth quarter gross profit increased to $23 million or 11.4% of revenue compared to $10.2 million or 5.2% last year. This 620 basis point increase was primarily driven by margin improvements in both sections reflecting higher quality projects and improved execution, partially offset by a lower margin and mix of dredging revenue.
SG&A expenses for the fourth quarter were $17.2 million or 8.5% of revenue, up from $13.7 million or 7% of revenue in the fourth quarter of last year. SG&A expenses grew due to increased IT and business development spending and higher legal costs related to some lingering project claims. Adjusted net income for the quarter was $2.6 million or an adjusted net income of $0.08 per diluted share, compared to an adjusted net loss of $3.7 million or an adjusted loss of $0.12 per diluted share in the prior year period. This result excludes $7 million or $0.21 of diluted earnings per share of nonrecurring items. Our GAAP net loss for the fourth quarter of 2023 was $4.4 million or $0.13 loss per diluted share. EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $6.5 million and adjusted EBITDA was $14.8 million.
Adjusted EBITDA margin was 7.3% up from 1.6% in the prior year period. Turning to bidding metrics, in the fourth quarter we bid on approximately $1.1 billion worth of opportunities winning $86.3 million. This resulted in a contract value weighted win rate of 7.6% and a book to bill ratio of 0.43 times for the quarter. As of December 31st, our backlog was $762.2 million compared with $448.8 million at December 31st last year. Breaking out our fourth quarter backlog, $602.5 million was in our Marine segment with $159.7 million in our concrete segment. In addition, we have been awarded over $120 million of new marine segment project work that was not included in our backlog at the end of the fourth quarter. As Travis mentioned, we are delivering on our promise to improve profitability by implementing discipline in our bidding process and winning quality work at attractive pricing.
During the fourth quarter, our adjusted EBITDA margins moved closer to our target of low double-digit adjusted EBITDA margins for marine and high single digit adjusted EBITDA margins for the concrete segment. Adjusted EBITDA margin in our Marine segment increased to 8.4% up from 5.1% last year. And our concrete segment adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 5.3% up from negative 1.8% adjusted EBITDA margin last year. Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, we are excited about our outlook. Our business development efforts are producing an expanding pipeline of attractive projects. We anticipate growing the top line substantially over 2023 and we expect revenue to ramp up throughout the year. Of course, as with any project based business, there may be lumpiness quarter-to-quarter based on project milestones.
In Hawaii, our Pearl Harbor project is not ramping as fast as we anticipated in the first quarter due to shipping delays of equipment and supplies related to drought in the Panama Canal as well as unforeseen delays on the project out of control. We expect revenue from Hawaii to ramp throughout 2024 and build through the year being stronger in the second half. We are increasing our CapEx spend over 2023 to upgrade our fleet, so that we are prepared for the industry tailwinds that are expected to accelerate through 2025 and beyond. As we grow the top line, we plan to continuously improve margins by managing our business more efficiently and productively. We are confident in our ability to continue to improve returns on capital and deliver increasing value to our shareholders.
And with that, we will open up the call for questions.
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