Craig L. Martin
Analyst · Barclays
Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. Take a minute here just to run through our growth strategy, pretty much the same slide we always show you. We've got a really solid relationship-based business model, I'll talk more about that. Our geographic and market diversity, I think, is a strength, I'll also talk more about that. I want to chat briefly about acquisitions, but with respect to this slide, I want to just take a minute to talk about keeping costs down. We continue to be in an environment where low-cost capability produces an advantage and we're certainly in a position to take advantage of that. We had excellent cost control in the second quarter and that cost advantage tends to, and continues to be a strength, frankly, especially in the public markets, where we're seeing more emphasis on cost in the selection process. So we see that as a positive going forward, as well as the other 4 key parts of our strategy. Moving on now to Slide 8, our relationship-based business model. We've shown this to you dozens of times, I suspect, by now. But the model continues to work for us. We continue to have this virtuous circle of building our relationships with our clients and their trust in us, getting high repurchase loyalty as a result, which then drives our business growth and allows us to reinvest to continue that virtuous cycle. This last quarter, we had 94% repeat business from our clients, which we think is pretty spectacular if you think about it. Moving on now briefly to Slide 9, you can kind of see how the market are performing for us in terms of the percentage of our revenues. We've broken those into 3 parts: Public & Institutional, Industrial and process and I'll talk more about each one of those independently. Let me start first with Public & Institutional and then I'll go with counterclockwise around the pie. Public & Institutional business is made up of 3 main parts for us: The work we do for national governments, the work we do in infrastructure, and the work we do in buildings. Let me talk about each one of those individually. The National Governments business is still, for us, at least, stable. We're dealing with the impacts of sequestration quite well and this whole business of multiple award task order contracts continues to be favorable to us and our cost model. So that's another positive. We've been successful in delivering these large Government Owned/Contractor Operated programs both here and in the U.K. and that continues to be an area of strength for the company, a couple of major wins in the first quarter in the U.S. or second quarter, sorry, in the U.S. both Johnson and Michoud, as well as good strength in the U.K. as we go forward. And then of course the nuclear cleanup business in the U.K. remains very strong. The clients are releasing pretty significant opportunities and we see that as a positive going forward as well. So we think, in spite of the negative view of the National Governments markets, we're going to continue to do pretty well and our business will be able to continue to grow, although perhaps, not as big a clip as we might like. On the Infrastructure side, we see that as a strong market. There's a lot of money that needs to be spent in that market. Our long-term prospects for that market are extraordinary and we see some momentum building. A lot of that is coming from user-driven projects in terms of where user fees are funding the work and from bond programs. We've seen almost $30 billion from bond programs approved just in the U.S. recently. And we're also seeing major investments in pipeline and in gas infrastructure as part of our business. That's a multibillion market, we see about $6 billion in programs and projects just in pipeline safety alone. So we think infrastructure market as we define it, is going to be a good positive market going forward. The Buildings business continues to improve. That's a technical buildings business for us. So we're not building high-rise office buildings or multi-family housing, we're doing technically complex buildings, and those markets are quite strong. I told you last quarter that I was really proud of our repositioning of our business away from the government sector. We continue to do extremely well. We're very strong in mission-critical markets, these are data centers and operation centers, strategic facilities for our customers. Our healthcare business remains quite strong and we see a lot of opportunity in healthcare and then K-12 and higher ed continues to also be an opportunity area. In the institutional marketplace, we've got 8 programs that we're managing and 9 others in assessment, all of those, I think, will contribute well to our business. And you can see, in spite of the apparent headwinds, we got really nice backlog growth both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year in that business. On the Industrial side of our business, the PharmaBio business first, it is improving. It's continues to improve. The product pipeline has improved for a number of our customers; that's driving new capital investment. Our core clients have taken advantage of our geographic positioning and our strengths to improve their posture and ours with them and there's a lot of investment in secondary manufacturing around the world as the customers try to put their facilities where the future users of their drugs will be. So we see that as a good, solid market and continuing to improve. Mining & Minerals, we've characterized this as strong. I guess, that's probably not a fair characterization of the market overall, but it is a fair characterization of the market for us. While Australia has been weak, we continue to have a strong position in the Mining & Minerals market in the Americas and we're doing quite well. We're also repositioning a number of our capabilities around what our traditional strength is, which is that business of small cap and mid-cap investments that's where a lot of the big Mining & Minerals companies tell me they're going to put the bulk of their capital as they go forward. Our relationship model continues to be strong and resonate with the Mining & Minerals customers. And of course, we bring buildings and infrastructure capabilities to these projects that many of our competitors do not. Also as a part of the Mining & Minerals business, we have a strong position in phosphates and a growing position in potash; both of those markets are quite strong and we think they represent significant opportunities for us as we go forward. The last part of that is sort of our other categories. So it's Power, Pulp & Paper, High Tech, Food & Consumer Products. We've characterized that market as mixed because it is such a diverse group of customers. We've got a lot of alliances with our clients; those alliances are continuing to be good factor. We're getting more and more both greenfield and brownfield opportunities with those customers where we have an alliance. Capital facility spending is pretty good, actually. Some of which is being driven by environmental considerations in places like the U.S.; the EPA estimates that about $5.4 billion in upgrades to industrial facilities in the U.S. over the next few years. And of course, while we're a small player in Power, we happened to be well positioned in the U.K. and Europe and there's a significant opportunity there for us to continue to grow. You can see the backlog's down quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year but I do think there are some significant potential adds to the backlog out there in both Mining & Minerals and Pharma and so that downturn doesn't concern me at this point in time in the Industrial part of our business. Moving onto the Process part of our business, clearly the strongest part. We've characterized the 3 businesses here, Refining, Chemicals and Oil & Gas, as either strong or very strong. Refining, we've actually raised the rating from improving to strong. We're seeing a lot of activity in Refining right now. Our relationship-based model and our focus on traditional and mid-cap work, which we really think of as our sweet spot, is getting a lot of focus and energy from our customers. Their margins are good, at least in North America right now, and somewhat better in other places. And so cash flow tends to drive investments in the refining business. We're seeing some additional investments. We're also seeing an uptick in capital spending as a result of the EPA again, the Ultra-Low Sulfur gasoline, the standards are stringent and the deadline, at least at the moment, is sooner than anyone expected. As a result, we think that's going to fuel a sort of newer and shorter timeframe on releasing these projects. We're also seeing some of the advantaged crudes that are coming out, unconventional oil, as driving investments as well. So the Refining business is picking up for us and we're pleased with what we see. Oil & Gas is very strong. E&P spending continues to increase, something north of $5 billion with a 6% increase expected in '13. Of that, we think the amendable spend work that Jacobs could do is around $160 billion. So we've got a lot of opportunity for growth there. The unconventional gas market, where we think our greatest opportunity for penetration, is pretty significant. We're seeing average annual spends per client in the $2 billion plus range. We're also continuing to see good investment in the heavy oils, particularly oil sands. The majors continue to invest and most of them are telling me they've got steady programs of 45,000-barrel a day projects as expansions, just one right after the other. And then we're also seeing modular construction as an increasingly important aspect. There's clearly going to be significant shortfall of labor, craft labor, to support all of these programs and projects in the Refining, Oil & Gas and Chemicals area and modular construction is going to be a major factor in moving some of that labor off-site. We're very well-positioned to take advantage of that. And then finally, the Chemicals business, very strong as well. We have a long history of being a significant player in the secondary chemicals part of the chemicals marketplace, in dealing with very technically complex facilities with very complex engineering requirements and that low-cost feedstock is just driving unprecedented growth in North America and the Middle East. So we're seeing lots of opportunity for the business there. In fact, opportunities continue at a very robust pace. You can see that backlog's up 14% year-over-year and 24% over 2 years ago. So we see that market as one where that will sector, I guess, I'd call it, as one that's a real positive for us as we go forward. Moving to geographic diversity. I'm going to spend just a little bit more time on Slide 13, talking about how the individual geographies are doing. The North American markets are, frankly, very strong. We just talked about chemicals and natural gas, Mining & Minerals, all those things are real positives in the North American marketplace. But we're also seeing lots of activity in Infrastructure and Buildings as well and all of that combined together says North America's going to be a very, very good business for Jacobs in the next few years. South America's also strong. Mostly the focus on Mining & Minerals and us and -- our position with key customers in Chile and Peru. But we think there's lots of additional opportunities for growth in places like Brazil and in the oil and gas business as we go forward, both oil and gas in a sense of upstream but also in terms of the downstream part of the business. Europe, probably not so good. I'd characterize it as stable. There are projects and activities for us and I think we'll be able to eke out some growth, but the European market probably won't be the strongest market we're in. We do see, as I said earlier, some opportunities in power. There's some big increases in fundings for highways and local authority schemes in the U.K., we participate actively in those. Water and utility is also going to be a strong market in Europe and we think we're going to be able to take advantage of that. So it isn't going to be an awful any sense, but I don't think Europe is going to be the strongest market we face. Middle East and Africa continues to be very strong for us. We continue to get dramatic growth. We have a terrific relationship with OCP in Morocco and the tremendous backlog of projects in our joint venture. We're up something north of 600 employees just supporting that customer and those projects. Lots of prospects -- process activity as people try to monetize gas and deliver higher value products from the feedstocks that are available in the region, plus major investments in buildings and infrastructure across the Middle East that we're now being able to take advantage of our position to win. Moving on to India, very strong market for us. We're doing very well both in the process side of the Indian market as well as the infrastructure side of the market. And it's a great leverage point for us, not only for the work in India, but for work around the world as we back office our high-value engineering work in India both in infrastructure and in process. China and Southeast Asia, strong markets for us, growing position in China. We're able to leverage a lot of our customers' investments there, such as the PharmaBio and specialty chemical businesses. And we think that's going to continue to be good. So we see that area as a strong market. Australia, maybe not so much. I'd characterize that market right now as mixed. Mining & Metals is under pressure and continues to be challenged, but there is heavy process activity in oil & gas work and we're doing well there. We had a couple of nice announcements in the quarter. And we're continuing to grow our business and infrastructure with national governments. So some parts of Australia are going to do quite well, the Mining & Minerals part of it, maybe not quite as well. Overall, when you go through all of these geographic markets the conclusion you reach is that the markets, overall, are pretty good geographically and we're doing a good job of taking advantage of those things and be in where the growth opportunities are. I'm now on Slide 14, Growth through Acquisition. As you know, we continue to plan for and attempt to get about 5%, about 1/3 of our growth from acquisitions, plus or minus. There's lots of opportunity out there right now. We continue to focus on China, Australia and South America from a geographic point of view. The markets that we're chasing haven't changed much, Oil & Gas, Mining, Infrastructure and other kind of niche additions to our business. And of course, any time we can add a core client, that's important. It's a particularly active area for us as we look forward over the next couple of quarters. We expect that the due diligence costs maybe at least a factor in our SG&A over the next couple of quarters as there is an awful lot going on. That brings me to Slide 15. We've got a history of very, very good steady and substantial growth, that track continues. Our business model works. It really does drive client loyalty and finds increasing opportunities for us and, hopefully, we could put the results on the bottom line for you to see. Our diversification in terms of markets, geographies and services both fuels our growth and helps minimize our exposures. We're coming into the new quarter here with the highest backlog we've had in the history of the company with the exception of 1 quarter in Q3 of 2008. So the backlog story is a good one. We got a great balance sheet, so these acquisition opportunities that are out there, we can and take advantage of those and do them. And of course, our cost position continues to put us in a great competitive position. So we think the outlook for the company is, in fact, quite good. With that, I will turn it over for questions.