Craig L. Martin
Analyst · Credit Suisse
Thank you, John, good morning, everyone. Now we'll start on Slide 7. You've seen this slide over and over again. Nothing about it has changed. I'll talk about the first 4 bullets in a little more detail. On the cost side, we continue to do a good job of controlling our costs, and our cost position remains at a nice advantage for us. Moving on to Slide 8. This is our relationship-based business model. We think this is an important aspect of the way we do business, and in fact, represents a significant difference for us from most of our competitors. We really do focus on long-term customer relationships and repeat business. We think by doing that, we can get repurchase loyalty, and that will drive steady earnings growth, good solid growth for us as a company. It's kind of a virtuous circle, when you think about it in terms of how it works. In the fourth quarter this year, our repeat business was 96%, so I think that's a good measure of what we're accomplishing in terms of making that relationship business model work. Moving on to Slide 9 now. This is sort of how the markets, sort of, it is how the trailing 12 [ph] of the markets looks. You can see that the process business -- share of our business grew just a little bit by about 1%. The public and institutional share declined by about that same percent. Industrial was roughly flat as the share of the business, but mining and minerals grew about 1%, and sort of all other category, power, pulp and paper, et cetera, that dropped about 1% over the previous quarter's results. Moving on now to Slide 10, we'll take a look at each of the individual market areas one by one. So starting with public institutional. We're considerably more upbeat about this market as we look forward than we were a year ago. I think we're doing extremely well as a company across this market in terms of our ability to win work and grow our market share. And we continue to believe that's going to be a positive for us. There's some good news in the market as well. We're starting to see movements in investments. Let me talk about each of those individually. Starting with the national government's business. It is clearly improving. Now that we have a budget that provides some funding certainty, that positions us very well. And the good news is that the money is going where we provide a lot of services. So we're very upbeat on our ability to continue to capture share there, grow our position in the markets, and now we have some stability on which to leverage that. So that's good news. We're also seeing a lot of activity in the U.S. military work, particularly around the Asia Pacific basin. We think there could be as much as $43 billion of new investment there, and that's a positive for us as well. Certainly our SKM acquisition will be a contributor to that. In fact, I'll talk a little bit more about SKM in a minute. We also see a lot of activity in the nuclear cleaning up part of the world. There's more than $1 billion worth of remediation projects here in North America. And of course, the nuclear cleanup in the U.K. is very robust. You might have noticed during the quarter we made a small acquisition in the U.K., a company called Stobbarts. That really helps us position for full EPC services to the nuclear industry in the U.K. So we think that's going to be a nice little addition, one of those niche acquisitions that we talk about a lot. Moving on to infrastructure. That is, in fact, becoming a strong market again. We see lots of prospects in all the geographies we serve. And on a real positive note for us from a legacy Jacobs perspective, both North America and the U.K. are strengthening. A lot of water projects out there, a lot of activity in Asia Pacific, and we see something on the order of $70 billion worth of infrastructure-related projects in the Middle East. So I think there's some real positives there. We also see tremendous opportunity in telecommunications and gas distribution business, another area we made some niche acquisitions, FMHC in the telecom business and MARMAC in the gas distribution business. Both of those are positives as we see it in terms of helping us leverage and grow that business. And then in the Buildings business, there are just a lot of good activity particularly in the technically complex buildings that we favor. So things like scientific facilities, laboratories, healthcare, all very strong. And then of course the high-tech market, data centers, control and operation centers and the like remains very strong. The outlook still is for about $80 billion in investment by the end of the decade. SKM's going to be a significant factor here. Obviously, they didn't contribute much in the 2 weeks around Christmas. But as we look forward, there's a very strong position there, a lot of recent wins in SKM's background. We expect the combination of Jacobs and SKM in this space will materially increase both our global leverage and our local market position across these industries. So a big plus for us as we go forward. You can see backlog is up a little bit quarter-over-quarter and up substantially year-over-year in this public and institutional space. Moving on now to Slide 11. This is our industrial sector. Let me talk about these markets individually. Pharma Bio is getting better. The product pipeline has some mixed results by company, but there is enough good new programs out there to drive investment, especially in the biotech world. That's a strength for Jacobs. We have both the knowhow and the geographic reach to serve our customers wherever in the world they need to make those investments. And increasingly, we're seeing those investments in places like India and Asia. You can see from the note there, an increase from something on the order of $16 billion to something on the order of $50 billion just in the next 5 years. Mining and minerals is growing. It's growing for us and the good news is, we think the industry is seeing the market come back a little bit. Commodity prices are firming. People's expectations about where commodities would go, particularly iron ore and gold, haven't come through. The copper supply situation remains a concern, and so we're starting to see people contemplating real projects again. And so the big projects business, it looks like it may be coming back, probably not a big factor in fiscal '14, but certainly could be a significant factor as we move into '15. What will be a factor in '14 for us, and we're doing quite well, is in this whole area of continuous presence. I told you last quarter about the wind at Calama in Chile. We are now leveraging that into a number of other relationships. And we think this business of being able to do all this small caps, sustaining cap work is going to be a very significant lever for us as we go forward. And then having the capability to provide all of the required infrastructure for our mining and minerals project, both the buildings and infrastructure capability, the materials handling capability and the minerals processing capability is huge. As a result of the SKM acquisition, Jacobs has become the dominant player in the mining and minerals industry in South America and in Australia. And I think it won't be long before we're the dominant player globally. So a real positive aspect of the acquisition. In the Pulp & Paper, power, high-tech, food and consumer markets, it's mixed. Of course, it's a mixed set of markets. There's a lot of alliance work for us. So that's going quite well. There's a fair amount of upgrade in facility kinds of improvements. We think the CapEx could be in the $5 billion range over the next 12 to 24 months, and we are managing to grow a share of the power market. Again, SKM's a real positive for us. It brings some real strengths in geothermal and hydro. So we think we're going to be able to see some leverage in our power business. It still is an area where we would like to be able to find an acquisition for greater growth, and I'll talk about that in a minute. Looking at the backlog numbers, up a bit quarter-over-quarter, mostly as a result of SKM, still down year-over-year. Part of that is just what's happened in the industry in terms of where the projects are. But a part of it's also is we move to more services rather than project events. We're going to see less revenue per dollar of margin, and so the impacts will tend to be lower revenues in backlog, even though we think margins will continue to grow. So that'll be a little bit deceptive until the big project part of the market comes back. Moving on now to Slide 12, the process industries. These are really strong markets today. The business grew, as I mentioned already, 1% share of our overall CapEx. We saw lots of activity in refining, oil and gas and chemicals. Particularly strong this quarter in chemicals, so the outlook is very positive. Look at the individual markets in refining, a lot of activity. The U.S. is likely to become an exporter of refined products. A lot of activity in Europe as a result of upgrades and trying to make those refineries more efficient. And then new CapEx, particularly in Asia and South America, is going to be a big factor. Brazil alone may have something on the order of $90 billion of refining investment. We announced the Guimar acquisition during the quarter. That's about 1,000 people in Brazil, and we think that gives us a very strong position to leverage our relationship with key customers in Brazil and grow that business. We don't want to forget Tier 3 gasoline. There's still something like 85 refineries that require upgrades for Tier 3 gasoline. I think that's going to be a program that spreads out over the next 2 or 3 years. Those projects are ideally suited for us. They tend to be in the $200 million plus or minus size. So that's a plus. Oil and gas, again very strong market. Global spending is up. Again, North American CapEx looks like it's going to be $100 billion. A lot of our key clients are the ones making the investments, so that's a plus. A lot of activity in gas monetization. And while that's not really our focus, it generates a lot of peripheral work. And all of that fits us very well. So we think that the oil and gas business is going to continue to be a strong area for us and an opportunity for us to drive increased growth. Brazil's also talking about becoming a major exporter, and that makes that EMR acquisition fairly key there as well. And then the chemical business, I mentioned already we had several significant awards under the quarter, none that we've been given permission to announce, but it was a good, strong quarter in the chemicals market. There is ongoing expansion pretty much everywhere in the U.S. regarding this. We heard a little bit about some project cancellations of some very big projects, but frankly, there's more work out there than the industry can do. And I anticipate, I think everybody does, that this is going to be a continuing strong growth area. And we continue to see lots of new FEED and pre-FEED work, and we're also starting to see now a few projects go into execute phase. So they are in fact, getting released so that we can do the work. The backlog story here, obviously, is quite good: 17% up year-over-year, 7% up quarter-over-quarter, 38% up over the past 2 years. So clearly, the strength in the process markets is one we've been able to take advantage of, and that's a real positive for us as we go forward. Moving on now to Slide 13, acquisitions. We've talked a lot about the SKM acquisition and its importance. We talked about Guimar. We also -- I mentioned briefly a couple of the niche acquisitions. I think niche acquisitions are going to continue to be important to us. There were several of them this quarter. I think we'll continue to see that. A couple like MARMAC and FMHC are in markets where we think there's going to be very significant growth, so very small acquisitions, we hope, will give us very strong leverage. In terms of looking forward, we're going to continue to look for opportunities to grow the business geographically. Asia Pacific still has lots of opportunity in it. South America has lots of opportunity in it. We also think we're going to work hard again, as we have for some time now, in both oil and gas and power markets, try to find the right kinds of acquisitions. If there are major acquisitions, that's where they're likely to come from. Moving now to Slide 14, this is kind of that commercial that I gave you at the end. We think that we have a great track record as a company. We've got a unique and powerful business model. We're very diversified across geographies, markets and services. We got a great balance sheet and a strong cash position. Our cost position gives us a good competitive advantage. And I think, importantly, the markets are going our way. So for some time now the process business has been strong. It continues to be strong, and we're winning good projects in that market. The public and institutional markets are rebounding nicely, and we see a lot of growth opportunity. And the industrial markets, mostly focused on pharmaceuticals and mining and minerals, are showing some good solid upward movement. In particular, mining and minerals looks like it's on its way back. I think that's a big positive for us in the industrial marketplace. So overall, I think it's a good story. We've got a great outlook and a great set of prospects going forward. With that, Laura, I'll turn it over for questions.