all right good afternoon everyone uh thanks for sitting in uh pleased to have caci with us uh john mangucci ceo jeff mclaughlin cfo i don't know do you guys need this forward-looking
statement sony we may make a forward looking statement i'd ask you to review our our risk factors as outlined in our sec filings thank you got that out of the way all right uh john i'm
to start you with the zinger uh not really zinger but i think what's kind of top of mind for me um what do you think the investment community might be missing about your portfolio errors kind of not appreciated and who do you as you look at your business today and kind of what it's become what do you see as the right comparables for caci yeah thanks so uh that is the zinger right off the
off the top. But it's a very fair question. Look, we've been a government services company for quite a long time. The folks who have been following us for a long time, they'd probably say since 2019, we stopped being a government services company. We're continually getting compared against companies we have very little in common with. And we can go down the multitude of different paths of how you how you make that change um you know i thought this sector has gone through covid and then doge and government shutdowns and the like in the last seven years while all that was going on we were beating and raising we continue to grow the business it's growing in a very different different manner we made a a um a decision a number of years ago that when LPTA and sequestration those kinds of things came out it was clear the government had a had a bend towards buying services buying labor hours at the cheapest cost price possible and all of us have gone to business school in one one shape way or form and you know that's called a commodity if you only differentiate on price and so beginning in 2019 time frame we started to exit all that type of business we're still in the government services gex code and that might be pertinent to this discussion um but what is uh not easily picked up on is the portfolio work that we do 90 of our revenue are with national security parts of the federal government less than 10 is done with the federal civilian space We like to talk about 60% of our deliveries are in the technology space and 40% are in expertise. We defined technology and expertise in 2019 to actually be how the customer purchased. If we now talked about what it is we deliver, 80% of our revenue is in the area that would be considered an aerospace and defense company. So what you're seeing is this disconnect between having an aerospace and defense slash defense tech company in a government services area. So we continue to get hit with macro sector issues. I'm sure we're talking about AI. We can't talk about impacts of the sector. I'm talking about AI. So how we see all the factors impacting government services are actually positives for our business. That's why we continue to lead the entire sector in free cash flow generation, revenue growth, margin expansion, and the like. So we are continually being called in and averaged in with companies that don't have very much in common with us. So defense tech, delivering things at the pace of the mission, all software-based technology. technology last thing i'll say is we built eight years ago we repositioned this company to be far part 12 and far part 15 which means we can respond to classic cost plus programs through the cost county standard we also have half our business that is uh commercial based far part 12 where we invest ahead of customer need we build the the technology we believe that the customer who needs next, we work with them, we sign OTAs, we get sole source production contracts, and we go out and buy manufacturing services and the like. So all that, what I just said, does not happen at a traditional government services company.
So I'll pause there. So you mentioned defense tech, I mean, you're doing a lot of things at this point, a large part of your portfolio is kind of defense tech-like. I mean, I'd highlight SPACE, EW, C3, and go on, UAS, counter UAS, which made me aware that you guys, I wasn't even aware you were encountering UAS. So, I mean, that's part of the problem. Talk about like those different buckets, how big they are, how you participate in those different areas that are viewed by the market as defense tech, but most people don't realize that you guys do. Yeah, so when you talk about electronic warfare,
we define that as anything in the RF spectrum that you can sense and you can take action on. So if I can find a light switch going on and off and there are zeros and ones coming out of that device all over the globe, our company is probably collected at one time for one need or another. And then where the magic happens is how do you classify every one of those signals so you know exactly what it was connected to? And then in times of conflict, how do you make determination to non-kinetically null that source whether it's a good source or or it's a bad source um so electronic warfare we can throw cyber pay payloads at a number of different uh devices a large part of uw is encounter uas you're all just starting to hear about about that uh marketplace we've been in it for two and a half decades we understand how to provide low no uh Low, no collateral counters to things that are flying overhead that don't have a human pilot in them because they all run in the RF spectrum. They all have electronic signals coming off of them. And yes, even though you've all probably heard about dark drones at one part in their life, one point in their life, they were not dark, they were light. And then they went dark after that. So it's our exquisite technology that allows us to build counter-UAS systems. We've got hundreds of systems and thousands of sensors deployed all over the world. They've been in operation for two and a half decades now, providing non-kinetic protection against drones. So if you think about Golden, Golden Dome, you think about what DHS is going to spend, $350 billion of reconciliation funds to protect the border from drones, to protect all critical infrastructure from drones, Department of War protecting every base that they have in the U.S. from drones, and then building a counter U.S. layer that also finds everything from the small quadcopper. Those are called Group 1 drones all through Group 5 in every way, shape, and form. That's what we do. That's a $2 billion part of our business. We do between a billion and a billion and a half worth of space. We're a merchant supplier for optical communication terminals and for large-scale, very exquisite geo-int sensors that ride on satellites. Stop me when it sounds like a government services company. We have, we do all right around a billion dollars worth of various network modernization work, really delivering software-defined networks across Department of War. And I'll say again, 90% of our revenue is with the intelligence community, the Department of War, and the Department of Homeland Security. We put DHS in that, not in Federal Civilian, because they're a paramilitary-like organization. organization. They traditionally have bipartisan support for their budgets, and that's the other first scan that we did when we made this company back in the early 2010s.
If you bucket all that, I mean, you threw out some numbers there, but if you bucket that whole defense tech-like portfolio, I mean, how big of a piece of the business is
I mean, total, it's probably, right now it's around 60-70% of roughly a $10 billion company,
so six to seven billion dollars okay so i'll remember what you just said about uh stop me when it when when it sounds like a government service is coming in you i also remember from your uh investor day talking about software is a superpower i think we were starting to talk about ai then but not that much so have to bring up ai how you guys are using i mean clearly ai doesn't seem to be a threat to the business but maybe maybe debunk that that view of things and and
how you guys are using AI? Yeah, so I did make that term, that comment, that software is our super superpower. And what we meant by that, we've been driving home for a number of years, is that as the pace of missions quicken in every conflict that our forces have to go fight, the only way to stay ahead of the threats are to have software-based systems out there. It's really tough to bring a ship or a plane or satellite into port and put a hardware-based solution and upgrade on it and then send it back out there. Today's warfighters need systems that can over very dirty comms, which means not highly protected comms. You can send software updates like you send to your phone in a real-time, wartime manner to get those upgrades to the systems that we have put on ships and planes and ground sensors all over the globe. So software-defined technology, when we moved towards investing in that type of tech, it was the demand of me that everything needs to be software-defined. You can write on hardware, obviously, but it has to be software-defined so anyway you're going to make changes quickly. So if you pull that string, we never said that software coding is our superpower. We said it's software-defined. So we understand the mission. 40% of our workforce are veterans. We understand the mission better than most customers do because we're that continuous force out there at the pointy end of the spear. 1,400 people deployed at the majority of the combatant commands out there, so we know every conflict there is before the conflict starts. We know every conflict and everything that the nation has seen during that time. So software defined, yes. Do we have to write all the software for it? In fact, AI is a perfect tool to take what I would say some of the grunt work out of delivering software-based solutions. So if you have a workforce that understands the mission, you have software architects that understand how to architect software in an open architecture manner that allows other people to bring their software and their solutions to build it into ours, that's what the customer set needs. We don't sell in a licensed model. I don't honestly believe there are 43 years in this marketplace that a customer like the Department of War, the intelligence community, really at the end of the day desires a licensed product. Because he who owns a license owns what goes into the next version of that software. How many of you use Windows? Anybody from Windows ever call you and ask you what feature you'd like? But if you owned the source code and you had someone like us continually modify that, now the customer gets to make that call. And believe me, if you're in a joint targeting center, the customer is never going to turn your next build over just to you because they know what features they need next. So we are very much focused on software-based. AI allows us to build software in a much more cost-effective manner. If it's firm fixed price, we can build it faster and it's better margins for us. If it's cost plus, we get the work done sooner, the customers come back and buy even more functionality so the customer wins as well as us win. At the end of the day, software, when we used it, was about delivering the ability to make changes quickly. And the fact that AI can do a lot of the cogeneration, that's a win-win for us. That is a way for us to deliver even more capability faster. It's not revenue dilutive. Okay, government services comment, if you are selling software developers by the labor hour to the federal government and AI comes out and says, I can write the code for you, that would be a perfect example of revenue dilutive. But oddly enough, as long as AI has been around, we've been on a continual terror of beating and raising guidance, even on top of AI, on top of Doge, on top of a number of other things that came out at the market. Anything else?
I think you got it.
I think you hammered it. You've lived through a lot of budget cycles, what we're going through right now with reconciliation and I think something that's still DHS or still shut down or not funded. So what are your, any thoughts on how kind of this year's budget process between big base increase, reconciliation, any thoughts how this might actually play out?
Yeah, you know, what is particularly important to us, which we talk about routinely, is not necessarily the headline budget as much as the segments of the budget. And if you think about the places that we work, and you think about our TAM of about $300 million, and our revenue this year will be about $9.5 billion, that's the middle of our, or at our guidance range. You know, we have a lot of headroom, which is important. But what's also important is the headline budget usually ends up moving by big ticket platform kind of items, rather than the places where we have deliberately positioned ourselves. So if you think about electromagnetic warfare, you think about space, think about the things we've been talking about, the places of the budget where we've positioned ourselves are those that have durable, sustained demand impulse and support. So no one is saying that we don't need a counter UAS strategy. So the important factor for us about the budget is where those resources are being applied. And both in the base budget and the Golden Dome, you know, where Secretary Hegseth recently acknowledged to Congress that, you know, I think he said less than 20% high teens percentage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act had been appropriated and that they expected to, you know, shortly be freeing up the balance of it. So those are really the budget areas that are consequential for us.
Okay. So in relation, maybe talk about your pipeline, your bid pipeline, and then, yeah, it seems like there's a kind of a bit of a disconnect between the bid pipeline and what's actually coming through and actually getting spent. I mean, I would assume at some point we start to see a large pickup in kind of the outlays, right? Because it seems like the budget is way, way ahead of kind of where we are in terms of what's actually getting spent.
Yeah, David, I think that's right. I think if you look at what we said in our last quarterly earnings call, I'm going to kind of go in time here from right to left. So we routinely share the statistic about what we expect to submit in the next 180 days. That's grown now to $22 billion, which is larger than our average for that window. The amount that we have submitted in a waiting decision is about $4 billion. which is unusually small as much as the 22 is unusually large. And then, of course, once the decision is made, then it moves all the way to the award point. So I think you could reasonably expect at this point in the quarter that we've seen that 22 sort of some of that sort of be a bow wave into the amount that's a waiting decision. and that ought to drive some awards tailwind here as well in the future. But that's really an artifact of the thing we've also talked about quite a bit, which is that the acquisition mechanism in the government is sort of returning to normal after the shutdown activities, but is not completely there yet. It's improving, but it's not really back to sort of pre-shutdown levels. And I think the pipeline and award decision metrics, I was just sharing, are evidence of that.
I'd also put in there, too, back to your earlier question, David, if you take the dynamics that Jeff mentioned, if you look at the last three quarters of the company's book-to-build numbers, they've been below one. At the same time, we're beating and raising guidance. We're crushing the free cash flow estimate we had for over a three-year period. We're hitting the already at the end of year two, hitting the revenue growth numbers and the margin growth numbers that we believe it would take us three years to go ahead. So it's another indicator that regardless of awards are coming out in a regular manner, awards are lumpy. And a lot of our awards, the average duration of a contract we put in a backlog over the last few quarters has been six years. So that is not the makeup of a traditional government services company who's selling labor in a three-year, at best, period of performance. Because right now, those companies are starting to talk about if the turnaround and awards don't happen, here's the bad things that are going to happen going forward. We've lived through three quarters of beat and raise. Eventually, awards are lumpy. Awards catch up. So we're not living hand-to-mouth. We have much larger production-type programs that we're out there delivering on today. And multiple billion-dollar jobs we won two years ago, they're just starting to ramp up now because we're getting through milestone C. We're getting to low-rate initial production. So it's a very different build-out model as to how you look at our backlog and what revenue growth that can throw off versus other more traditional government services companies.
And that backlog dynamic that John just expanded on really gives us a great deal of high-confidence sort of four to six quarter horizon, you know, visibility into what the near and medium term
looks like. So in keeping with that, you've won a number of multi-billion dollar programs over the last several years. Maybe refresh us on what those are and where they are kind of in their, you know, in terms of the ramp up period for those various different programs. Yeah, so there are
several. ITAS is probably one of the one of the earlier ones, where the first phase of the program involved designing the balance of the program. So we're actually in the beginning of that second acceleration period. Spectral, which was a really important win for us, for the SIGINT collection suite on the Navy's surface combatants recently achieved their milestone C, which let us move out of development into low rate initial production. And as we've defined the ship classes and the areas that it's been deployed, that it's ready to be deployed, we can now start that deployment. NASA NCAPS, which I think we won four or five quarters ago, is in a situation similar to ITAS, where we're consolidating all the application systems for NASA's 11 centers, and we're through the design phase now of that program and beginning to deploy it as well. JTMS is another significant transcom logistic system where we recently emerged from protest. test, that's also ramping up and accelerating into the year end. So for those of you that are sort of doing the algebra on what our fourth quarter must look like to make the annual guidance make sense, a lot of that growth is in those areas that I just mentioned as we move into the fourth quarter or complete the fourth quarter at this point.
Yeah. I wanted to pivot to margins. You know, John, I think you said relative to your investor day, I think you're kind of already there, you know, maybe even past at this point in terms of the margin progression you had talked about. I think some of it's driven by, been driven by just the change in the portfolio towards more tech, more fixed price, but also layered in some acquisitions that came kind of a creative margin. So just talk about the, you know, the margin improvement you've seen and kind of the roadmap from here, because, I mean, you're obviously generating margins well above your government service. I won't say peers, government services. And in a lot of cases, you're ahead of your defense peers.
Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about margin, and I'm going to ask Jeff to sort of talk about how we look at margin and revenue growth, because to us, we're a free cash flow growth company, period. That's how we manage the company. that's how we bonus all the leadership in our company it's all around free cash flow and there's a number of altitude of knobs there as David mentioned we're also a highly acquisitive company so we're in seven markets we do market strategies we're myopically focused on doing market strategies we're doing them twice a year looking for gaps to where we think the future of the markets are going to go and if there's a capability we need and we don't have the time to created ourselves, we're pretty darn good at doing small to mid-size acquisitions. We just did a rather large one, so we proved to everybody we know how to do a large one, so we can probably check that box with a green checkmark. We figured out how to take 1,100 people and $700 million of revenue annually and 20 or so percent margins and actually fold them into the company. But the message and how we've been doing our M&A program is around the kind of companies we've been looking for. For nine straight years, we've looked at technology-based companies that could drive national security features in a more agile manner, because I firmly believe that at some point, the aerospace and defense, GIX code, or the companies within there are going to eventually bifurcate. There's going to be primes who do eye-watering, phenomenal things at a mission platform layer. I used to work at one. They're phenomenal companies. They provide a plethora of national security assets for this country. period, exclamation point, bar none. But where the mission gets trickier and it's going to change every four hours, you're not going to change the outer mode line of the seventh generation fighter in four hours. What you will change are mission packages that are on all of those assets. So we in our company, when we put the next course forward, looked at our acquisitions are going to be very much technology-based. It's always going to be software-defying tech. We're not going to make any exceptions to that rule whatsoever. We're going to go fill gaps in the markets that we're in. That alone says for a long number of years we've been eyeing the technology side of what national security needs and less about the labor hour support of that. Operational support, 1,400 people out across the five or six combatant commands, that's rich for us. That is rich. You can call it whatever you want. You can call that labor hour work, but that is rich because we're one of the only companies that are sitting in every single combatant command. So the investments that we make ahead of customer need by spending our own money, our own R&D to deliver products that we can commercially sell from a price list, we have the best class seat there is in watching every conflict around the globe because we're right there. the glasses right here we're looking at dots and triangles moving all over the place so we know better just about every other company out there it's unfair advantage but it's legal you just have to win that business to make sure you know where we're going to invest so from a from an M&A program that's where we've done and a lot of those have been the technology areas a lot of those have been far part 12 where we can put priceless out to the government and we don't have this debate back and forth should I give you 8% for your 10 it's a here's an item does 90% of what you need today, not three years from now, and that should come at a premium, and the government's more than willing to go by that. And that's what has been really responsible for driving a lot of the margin. So let me talk a little bit about margin
and expand on John's comment. Let me first say John was not updating our ARCA annual revenue guidance of 650 when you said 700. Look, margin is an artifact for us of solving for free cash flow. That's the way we run the business. That's the way we make decisions. So we're modulating each time we have one of these strategy reviews that John talked about, or we go through and decide where we're going to apply resources, where we're going to divert them from one place to another, All those are free cash flow decisions. So we're modulating investment, driving top line growth and margin to solve for cash flow. So if we can hold the margins and grow a little bit more quickly, generate more cash that way, that's the choice. in periods where we have circumstances where we may not have the investment opportunities that we want for the next quarter or two, we'll let the margin drift up. So free cash flow is the byword. That's the way we decide. Now, having said that, we've also talked about the fact that in our current situation, our current view of the environment and our opportunities and circumstances give us some confidence to say that it's reasonable to expect some continued modest margin improvement in all that as we go through the process that I just described.
I think, John, you made a comment that 50% of your business is eligible for FAR 12, so commercial-based terms. Is that right? And how much of your business today is on commercial-based terms?
Yeah, so I would say probably half of our technology business is based on FAR 12 terms. Okay. And that ebbs and flows in sort of the mix. It's not every exact quarter, but over a three-year period. We continue to grow that part of our business, clearly, because what else has helped us is the customer has changed their buying manner, right? Our customer is saying, why is it that we, the government, can't buy with commercial-like terms? By the way, they never said, can they buy just commercial goods? That's sort of been an extrapolation beyond with how they actually think about it. But buying more commercially, what they mean by that is, do we really need to take seven years to write the requirements, three years to get the bids, the next three years to change the requirements because the world changed, and never really get something out there that we can use in a quick kind of turn manner? The government sees commercial as being able to deliver things on a very quick cycle. Like, I'm sure all of you in the last 18 months have spent $1,499 for the latest iPhone. not because you needed it, because you wanted it, because the next version was out there. I don't think we'll get to that kind of speed across all of the defense items, but the customers have the sensational need to say, when are you going to invest? Why is every dollar of IRAD, you companies who want to do business in government, you bill us for it. It's built into your rates. And I would contend it's built into your rates no matter what. Whether it's in your billing rate or whether it's in your cost or goods sold, they're going to recoup that cost. But they want to buy in a more commercial-like manner, and that's when we put this type of business in place.
I think in many ways the circumstance that John outlines is a really important proof point around this industry segmentation also. Because one of the reasons that the traditional primes have done that work the way they've done it is that the government actually ends up deciding very precisely what they want. So if you're buying an early Burke-class destroyer or you're buying the next lot of F-35s, you don't necessarily want the contractors to be deciding what that looks like. You've got a well-established requirements process. It's clumsy and cumbersome. It's not very fast, but it gets a reasonable outcome, and it's a proven one. the issue is that this next strata of the industrial base that we're starting to see separate can't work at that pace. And so to be able to participate constructively in the business at that level, we have to be doing this in parallel, which is one of the reasons that the market has sort of surfaced OTAs as such a great way to do this, because it gives us an opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder and sort of solve these problems with a speed and a cost benefit analysis
that the traditional process would not permit so i i'm not going to update my model for for arco today but i guess maybe jeff if you could review kind of the the expectations around a couple accretion um i guess that you had some transaction costs that you threw that was kind of in the cake uh that i don't think people fully kind of realized or you know because you took down your eps guide partially on that and i think people kind of didn't quite understand all that but um yeah those couple things and uh there's something else on that oh synergies uh synergies and then I think you got a tax benefit that came along with the deal.
Yeah, we did. Let me first, if I can, in the time we have left, let me start with the accretion dilution analysis.
I've got one more so.
Okay, I'll be as fast as I can be. First of all, when we made the announcement, we said, look, in the first full year, which would be our FY27, this will be neutral to earnings, neither accretive nor dilutive. In the second full year, it will be solidly accretive. And we'll have more to say about that as we get to our FY27 guidance and our new three-year targets and beyond. What I think in retrospect we were not as clear about as I wish we had been was the impact on the remaining four months or so of FY26. Clearly, you can't acquire a business of this size and scale with $2.6 billion and all the associated financing costs and have that be anything but dilutive in the first four months. So in retrospect, we may not have been quite as clear about that. We didn't say anything about it, but we probably should have, in retrospect, probably should have said something about it. The other thing that I think got lost in the call, and we say this from time to time, but I'm not sure it completely sinks in, we don't use adjusted EBITDA. Our EBITDA is our EBITDA. And as a result of that, we absorbed about $22 million of transaction costs this year, 17 million of it I think was the number in the quarter, which we talked about and we disclosed, but we actually delivered the strongest margins that we have in quite a while after absorbing those transaction costs. And in fact, the business was running at about 13% without those. We also absorbed $40 million of cash flow impacts related to the transaction and didn't change our cash flow forecast, which is tantamount to saying the core business was actually operating actually $50 million better, $40 million for transaction costs, and $10 million for increased CapEx investment. So I could say more, but I'll stop in the spirit of you having one more question.
Because I thought of one more, too, so we'll tag team. So, one, you mentioned the three-year targets where they seem pretty stale, even though we're in year two. So do you revise those targets early, or do you wait to revise those until we get to the end of the three-year period, even though you're kind of there? I guess that's question one, and then sorry to do this to you. The second question, obviously, you've levered up the balance sheet to do this deal. You know, in the past, you've gotten to the same kind of leverage levels, and you've pretty quickly, you know, you focus on de-levering and de-lever quickly. But how do you think about de-levering, the decision to de-lever today versus share repo, given what seems like a disconnect in your stock price relative to the numbers that you guys are putting up?
Yeah. So let me first talk about the three-year targets. We did not, and we were clear about this, I think, never undertook to maintain or update the three-year target the way we would a guidance number. We said, here's our view of what the next three years look like. You know, we'll keep you posted. When we give our FY27 guidance here on August the 6th, it will be pretty clear to everyone where we ended up or where we expect to end up relative to those targets. We will likely have another investor day sometime late this year or early next. And I would expect at that time when we announced that and the format for it, we'll have, I would expect at that point, we'd have a new set of targets. I'm sorry, what was the second part of the question?
The second one is share repo.
Share repurchase.
Given where the stock, you know.
So I think given where we are, as you said, our focus is on delevering. Interest rates probably have some upward pressure. um we we remain flexible and opportunistic and i think if we saw the if we saw a really compelling opportunity uh we would we would consider share repurchases uh sooner rather than later um i'd really like us to get back down into the low threes again i would remind everyone that we bought $150 million worth of shares at $344 a share average over 10 days or so in the middle of the Doge storm. So I think it depends a little bit on how volatile we see the market reaction being. And, you know, at some point the shares are, they're a compelling value now, but at some point it becomes so obvious you know that you can't can't ignore it you have to make a leverage trade that you might not otherwise like to all right so we're definitely out of time john jeff
thank you very much thank you thanks thanks everybody