Centuri Holdings, Inc. (CTRI) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for this afternoon's panel. I'm Brian Svoka with Morgan Stanley. I am very, very pleased to be joined today by Chris Brown, President and CEO of Century Holdings, and Kelly Youngblood, EVP, CFO of Century. Before we jump into Q&A here, Chris, you're two years into the seat. you've undergone a pretty incredible and active transformation into an independent business, public company. Can you walk us through the journey over the last couple years and really where strategy stands today?

Thank you, Ryan. It's good to be here, and thank you for inviting Kelly and I. Two years, it feels like 20. It's been a busy two years. I think rolling out the Vision One strategy earlier this year, both internally and externally, has given us a key guiding light to where we are trending. And that strategy focuses on really three key drivers. First of all, protecting and deepening the core of who we are and who our client base is. Secondly, expanding our portfolio into those end markets that bring more margin opportunity for us, but using the same services. And building a sustainable, integrated business model. So Vision One Century, across those three areas, is who we are, is where we're focused, and where our guiding light is. And if I think about what those individual components are, you know protecting and deepening the core is all about getting closer to our base customers in the utility market it's about building capability alongside their needs it's about getting closer to those customers in driving efficiency into into their into their capital needs it's about scaling up around what those customers need so that we can service them more consistently across both gas, electric, we can provide more and more integrated services there and also expand the margins to which we deliver for our shareholders.

Expanding the portfolio, similar.

We took a decision on the strength of our end markets to not deviate and to stick to the knitting. So bringing capability that we deploy across our utility base into adjacent industries is allowing us to capture higher margin work within those adjacent industries that have got high growth profiles, such as renewable gas, data centers, transmission, which is part of our business but has not got as much scale, as well as other areas in midstream services. integrating the business in a sustainable way you know we came from an environment where we were part of a great utility but we were very decentralized and i think for a contractor like ours to be successful you need to bring all of the resource all of the capability all of the balance sheet all of the focus all of the learnings all of the knowledge together into an organization so you can maximize the value for all. So they're the three strands of Vision One Century focused on our core clients, expanding our portfolio, underpinned by an integrated operation. And I guess the output from that, as we communicated, is we believe what we have with our end markets will drive a minimum of 10% organic growth rate each year into our planning horizon of the next five years. We see that working together collectively affords us margin expansion, so we believe our best growth profit will get towards 10%, and I think it gives us a good platform as we learn more about our business as we separate from our former parent into a standalone contractor. gives us a good platform to go even further in the future.

That's helpful. So laying out the strategy and establishing the standalone strategy was a piece, right? There's also building the team, and there's several new faces in the C-suite. Can you walk us through some of the changes, the rationale for those changes?

Yeah. I think before we talk specifics around people, we've got to go back to first principles. You know, two years ago, we were still a subsidiary of a public utility. It's only 12 months ago did we become totally independent. So over that period of time, we've been maturing into where we would like to be, which is a fully integrated service provider. that maximized value for all stakeholders and shareholders. Step one when I came into the business was to do some block and tackling. There were some elements of the business that needed to be strengthened around, go to market, build good backlog into the business at good margins so we could manage utilization, get a presence in the market, get a position in the market that came across as one century and not separate opcos. More recently, you've seen a significant amount of investment, near-term investment needed in our overhead to build the tools, some advisory help, some capability in the near-term. That really takes us to where we are today, which is now adding to our team so that we can drive sustainability, we can drive margin expansion, and implement capital efficiency. So we've brought in three recent additions to the team. Kelly joining us to lead us CFO, and we're pleased and proud. He's joined our business, and he brings everything and many years of experience that we need to get to where we need to be on those two key elements of margin expansion and capital efficiency. um danielle hunters joined us um coming in as general general counsel as well as a general administration officer she she brings years of experience around building back office capability operational support as well as legal support and then uh finally but but but as importantly mike christie who's um got over 25 years in our utility industry has joined us as group development officer, and his role in life will be to drive the deepening and the cross-sell of our organization, which will underpin margin expansion, but also work very diligently in building capabilities so we can achieve our strategic objectives. And I think with those three additions, we've now got an exceptionally strong team that will lead us to success in the future.

Well, Kelly, welcome. And, you know, as you continue your welcome tour, I think it would be helpful just walking through your background a little bit. And also, what attracted you to the opportunity at Century? Where are you going to be focused? And, you know, first 30 days, what are the initial observations?

Yeah, and thanks again for having us here, Ryan. We appreciate it. But, yeah, as Chris kind of alluded, I've kind of been around a while. I've started my career at Halliburton, one of the largest oil field service companies out there. I worked there for over 25 years in various roles. I worked international positions, domestic, corporate, ran their investor relations group for several years. And a big company like that is kind of great because even though you're working for one company, you feel like you have a lot of careers within the same company because they move you around quite a bit. I've physically relocated my family seven times during the career and got a lot of good development from Halliburton. But since Halliburton, over the last 11 years or so, I've held three other CFO positions at Diamond Offshore Drilling, which was a public company. I went over to BJ Services, which was a spinoff from Baker Hughes. that was a private equity owned company I did that for a few years and then most recently over the last six years went to another public company MRC Global which was a distributor which was actually heavily heavy into the gas utility business so that you know this it's not completely new to me electric's a little bit new to me but gas utilities I've been involved with so that's that's briefly my background and as I was trying to my last company actually merged with a major competitor last November. I took some time off, and as I was trying to determine what I was going to do next, this opportunity came up, and I was honestly being very picky about what I wanted to go into next. I wanted a company that had, you know, tremendous growth potential, you know, had a good balance sheet, had a CEO that I thought I could work well with, had a board of directors I thought I could work well with. I was just kind of at that point in my career where I felt I could be pretty picky on what I wanted to do next. And this one, Chris was, you know, kind enough to spend a lot of time with me as I was doing the diligence of the company. And listen, it came down, it was pretty simple. You know, when I look at opportunities, you know, I kind of simplify things into the good, the bad, the ugly. And when I looked at the good of this company, it is, the top line is just, there's a phenomenal growth opportunity for Century. I mean, it's grown first half 33% year on year, and Chris and the team have laid out a strategy to have double-digit growth out through 2029, so that's great. The backlog of the company is incredible. So the top line and the growth potential of this company is just, you just couldn't really ask for more. And then when I got into looking at kind of the cost components, looking at the reputation of the company, and things like that, it's, you know, Chris has kind of touched on it. There's some opportunity that we have that we're already addressing on improving margins. There's some things around capital efficiency that need to be done. But the things, you know, there's really nothing major broken here. It's just some growing pains. You know, when a company grows this quickly, there's just going to be some growing pains or some speed bumps that you have to deal with. And I think there's already a good plan. There's a good foundation in place that Chris and the team have put in place here over the last couple of years. And I think with the team that we've got now, it's just pulling the right leverage to take it to the next level. So I'm really excited to be joining at this time. That's great.

We're glad you're here.

Chris, can we touch a bit on performance through the first half, how you see the second half shaping up?

I want to pull on the margin thread a bit. you've mentioned it a few times clearly a focus and then really just what are you hearing from your customer base on on spend and outlook so it's um yeah the first half we've we've added a couple of slides into the deck which is on the website to provide a little bit of a nuance an explanation rather around the nuances within our first half of the year we had a good H1 this year as Kelly just alluded to, we've demonstrated the ability to find work, win work, and push that to the revenue line. We added over $400 million more revenue compared to the prior year, which was up 33% in the first half of the year. Good quality work, a bit at higher margins. So we're pleased with that. If we look at the focus area, and that is converting that revenue into incremental margin, and you just refer to the bridge we've provided, we believe the underlying incremental margin from that work was at 11.6%. But equally, during the first half of the year, we kind of had three headwinds. The first headwind, which I think was signaled to everybody but probably not understood, was around our change in capital allocation. and that change in capital allocation, when we went public and were spun out of Southwest Gas, we had a net debt to EBITDA of four times. We were spending $100 million a year servicing the debt and we had a fleet program which was fully funded by balance sheet cash and none of that was sustainable to us. We needed to improve, delever the balance sheet, improve liquidity so that we could be sustainable. And the decision we took was to, instead of fully funding the fleet with cash, we went to a 50-50 mix of own versus lease. That has had a positive impact on our ability to generate cash. It's allowed us to invest in new businesses, and I'm sure we'll talk about a couple of those. It's also allowed to build some sustainability into our business and also delever the balance sheet. The short-term trade-off for that was there was an impact on our margins. It wasn't that we'd booked work at a low margin. It was the impact of some of that changing fleet strategy that couldn't be passed on to customers immediately. Where we sit today in the short term is basically the pricing on that fleet, the new fleet structure, has been pushed into all of our bids that we are currently working on over the last few weeks. It's been pushed into the new MSAs. And there are some legacy MSAs that will renew over the next period that have yet to be updated to the new fleet pricing. 30% of those legacy MSAs, most of which sit within the gas business, will be renewed during the course of the year this year, 30% into next year. And by the time we close out 27, there will be a small amount still remaining, but it will be sort of de minimis when it looks at the impact upon our margins. So that $9 million was a big impact in the second quarter. We think most of it is now being wound out of the work we've did with a little bit in the legacy gas business that will take some time to unwind. The second impact was fuel, diesel. You know, we drive 120 million miles around the U.S. and Canada each year, and we pay for that diesel at the pump. The war in Iran has really hurt that, and we had about a $9 million impact, comparable in terms of impact as the fleet in the second quarter. We've fully projected what that needs to be in the second half of the year, and where we have renewed and where we continue to renew contract pricing, we've been pushing that into the cost base and passing that on to our customers. So we think that will become less of an impact as we move forward. And then the third impact on our first half of the year is we built capacity into the business to actually deliver the backlog growth. And that's a good thing. We added 1,700 new people into our business in the first half of this year. 1,200 of them were in the gas business. And yes, there was a three or so million dollar impact in the second quarter. But the real impact is actually the fact it takes time for those 1,200 and the overall 1,700 people to become productive. And where we sit today, two months into the third quarter, the workforce additions are now at a level where productivity is normalized. And I think that will not be an issue for the second half of the year. So all in all, I believe the incremental margins were 11.6%. The near-term headwinds, we believe, will pass through. And if I look to the second half of the year, there's a couple of messages I would give. Clearly, we've only got July and August results. But the 9% commitment in the second half of the year to overall base gross profit still stands. We don't see any downside pressure to that. We see the gas business, which is a fundamental impact on margin dilution, trending very nicely above the 7.5% we committed to. And I think the incremental revenue we anticipate in the second half of the year, we see the base gross profit being 10% plus. And that's included in absorbing the cost of the fleet and also the additional diesel cost in the second half of the year. So we see, really, the second quarter as a little transitional bond out by where we believe we'll be in the second half of the year.

Okay. Back on balance sheet and capital allocation priorities, obviously you've brought down leverage significantly since the time of the IPO, sitting 2.5, 2.6 today. Longer term, where are you comfortable? You've obviously been an inquisitive business in the past. We'll get to that shortly. But what's the right level, steady state, and where are your capital allocation priorities today?

Yeah, listen, I think the team had laid out in the past there's really no change to this guidance. We're trying to get below two times leverage or around two times or so by the end of the year. We're on track to do that. That's a very important priority of the company at the moment. You know, when we look at capital allocation, funding, you know, just the organic growth that we're experiencing, which is, you know, accelerated growth at the moment, is a high priority. That's probably the number one priority. Then, as I said, you know, trying to get to this two times or lower leverage by the end of the year, and that we think that will continue to go down further even in 2027. And then looking at M&A, you know, bolt-on M&A opportunities is something that we're very focused on. There's been two acquisitions done just in the last year. I'm sure Chris will probably cover that here shortly. But there's a lot of other things we're looking at to add additional scale. We would like to have more scale in the business. I think there's some geographic diversity that we would like to achieve. And M&A that would get us access to new customers or underserved customers. That's an important priority for the company right now as well. I think, you know, we got the question in the meeting earlier today about dividends or buybacks. You know, that is not a top priority at the moment. That's further down the road. We've got this, as we mentioned, this significant level of growth we're dealing with at the moment and trying to get, you know, the balance sheet a little bit cleaner. But those things will come in time, I believe, but just not here in the near future.

On the M&A front, between Connect and, more recently, JJ, Okay. Can you touch on, you know, what that really added to the platform, an update on how the integration process has gone? In our view, following the story for a long time, it's really centrally getting back to their DNA. You guys have been an acquirer. That's how you built the platform, a mix of organic and organic growth.

Look, the separation from Southwest Gas, the ability to put our own strategy to work, to operate as an independent business, to essentially de-level the balance sheet, has allowed us to do these transactions. Both of the transactions are totally consistent with the needs of our strategy. Connect gave us a position in Atlantic Canada that we had tried to achieve organically, and it was proving difficult. We had a customer there that many in the organization knew well, and they wanted us to do more work beyond just gas. It needed to be on the electric transmission distribution substation side. So we were able to attract the owners of Connect and the Connect management team into joining Century. I mean, we avoided a competitive process, which is my preference in all cases. We brought a lot of value to them as a business. They needed our scale, our capability, also our client access beyond their Nova Scotia area. So we brought them a lot of BD leads, a lot of balance sheet support, a lot of equipment support, and a big pedigree. And they brought us a business that allows us to diversify in Canada and grow more. Integration has gone really, really well. I think operationally, I would say we are there. There's still some back office stuff that will take some time, but Neil, John and the team in the Canadian business have done a super job bringing us together as one. We've already started to cross-sell. We booked a recent wind farm project in Canada, I think it was three, four months ago, which was about an $80 million Canadian dollar award, and we've got multiple numbers of these of additional wind farms we're positioning for that connect on their own would struggle to bid just purely size and scale but collectively we can capture more opportunity so the driver was our strategy to do to to do more within our core markets we need an electrical business in canada organic was too slow and too difficult and we ended up with a great great business that has integrated well jj white it's again a business we've known for 20 or so years. The New Jersey team probably will tell you longer than that. Again, we were able to get ourselves in a negotiating position with a business that we knew well. We knew some of the customers. It brought us nearly 1,000 people of great talent. It's a well-run legacy business. We're only, I think we closed July 20, so we're only a few weeks in. We've only seen the first levels of performance out of the business, all of which is on track. We are positioning with JJY and our RIGS business to capture more opportunity, both in the midstream as well as in the data center market. And that's allowing us to add new, good, solid backlog with really good margins attached to it. So JJY is so far so good. I think Connect has already proven it was one of the best deals we've done.

Look, top-line growth, very strong. Backlog, pipeline, both up kind of 20% in your latest quarterly announcement. Are you seeing the type of spend, the type of projects you're seeing, and go into backlog, go into your pipeline, are you seeing a shift there? And, look, I don't think I would get invited back to this conference if I didn't ask you about Datacenter and to expand on that a bit, where are your capabilities today and how are you set up?

Look, I mean, first of all, what are the couple of trends we're seeing in our end markets? You know, our pipeline of opportunity is $16 billion, and that $16 billion has been 100% refreshed over the last 12 months. So what that should tell us is that we're able to find opportunity in our end markets, understand it, compete for it, and win it. And we've now took our backlog to $6.5 billion. So I have got no concerns at all in our ability to find high-quality work. I think if you look at the margins that's coming from that high-quality work, we're pushing to stretch ourselves, But, you know, we're targeting sort of the incremental base gross profit to be between 12% and 15%. And I think we shared some of that in the slides today. So not only the volume, but the quality and the return on that market is very robust and very solid. We're seeing no significant pressure across the entire group on competitive forces. Clients still need more capability. so we believe we can continue to grow that and meet the commitments we've made. In specific segments, there's no doubt if you look at our short term, we are about 2.7, 2.75 billion booked already this year. We've got 1.2 billion of MSA renewals that will happen between now and New Year's and a further 2.6 billion of bid work that is currently being tendered. So the near-term activity has actually accelerated, and we still stand behind and feel good about the target of 1.2 times book-to-bill this year. Data centers, you want to talk about, I mean, data centers for us is a part of our business. It sits in the expand the portfolio side of our Vision 1 century. I've said it pretty much every time I get the question, You know, we will be very selective on data center opportunities. We need to understand the customer. We need to make sure the actual scope of work has got capital investment decision. We need to see that the awarder of the contract has got funding in place. And then we need to know, can we win it and we can generate margins? So there's a scrutiny around what we pursue, just like any other, really, but probably with a heightened focus on data centers that we go through before we commit any time, any resource to bidding it, let alone executing it. We've got $3 billion in our pipeline at the moment of data center opportunity, which we believe is close to fitting into that category. There's still some proving out we need to do. So we've got a $3 billion opportunity in the near term. we've currently booked about 400 million of data center work so far some of that's already gone through the revenue and the income line healthy margins we've got about another 150 million or so that we're currently negotiating but I guess the punchline is not just data centers you know we're a service provider to both utilities and adjacent industries and the same work we do for data centers, we do it for our public utilities. They're a very important client, but it's the services that matter, not necessarily the end market. I foresee data center revenue as one of our end markets, probably not eclipsing 10% of our revenue overall. So yes, meaningful, but certainly not the critical mass of what we do. Yeah.

Maybe a little bit further on that one, just the capability set, right? You talk about electric, you talk about gas, but you actually look through your service offering. It's a lot deeper than that. It is. What are you doing on the data center side? What else should we think about the broader capability set beyond T&D on the gas and electric side?

Yeah, thank you for reminding me on that one, Ryan. You know, we don't have a set of special data center skills that we deploy. The capabilities we provide our utility customers, whether that be electrical interconnects, gas interconnects, battery energy storage, behind the meter generation of all forms, fitting out all of the electrical instrumentation within the buildings, all sits within the skill set we have within the business and transfers from our core business into these adjacent end markets. And that's the kind of work we're doing. You know, we bring a lot of value to the data centers because we can manage all the interfaces. We essentially become a one-stop shop for their services. We've added JJ White, which gives us even more scale to do more for the customers. So from a data center standpoint, it's the transfer of the skills and knowledge we've built up over 100 years across the utility market into data centers, coupled with the fact that we've got the competency to go with inside the fence line and do some of the tenant fit-out work to make sure power and utilities services the data center. Thanks, Chris.

Kelly, free cash flow. So talk a little bit about some changes on the fleet side. What else, how should we think about free cash flow targets? What are you doing to continue to drive improvements there?

Yeah, no, great question. Listen, you know, if you look at the company's history, we have not had a great track record with cash flow, you know, especially, you know, prior to last year. I think it was a lot of times negative or break-even type cash flow. But in 2025, the company generated $36 million in cash, which was about a 14% EBITDA conversion. In 2026, we've got it to $75 million plus in free cash flow, which is about a 25% EBITDA conversion. And then I think in the 27 to 29 forecast that we put out there to the street, we're targeting to get to more of a 40% to 50% type metric on EBITDA conversion. So how do we get there? You know, you mentioned one of them, you know, the lease, you know, capital, the change in methodology there is going to be very, very helpful. That's going to, you know, reduce a lot of the capital outlay that we have on an annual basis. The shift, you know, Chris has talked a little bit about, you know, we have the MSA work, but we're doing more bid work. That's going to come at better terms and better, you know, better payment terms and things like that with customers. That's going to help reduce, you know, DSO, which will, you know, help improve our cash flow. And then just overall, I think just looking at working capital management, when we look at DSOs and DPOs, just a few weeks I've been here, I think we've got a lot of levers we can pull to improve our DSOs and DPOs to get better cash collections into the company. And I have no doubt we can make some progress there. It just takes some effort and time to make that happen. But I have no doubt that we're going to make progress there. And then the last thing is we continue to pay down debt. We will have lower interest costs to the company that's going to help free cash flow. So I have no doubt. Going forward, this is going to be a very sustainable, very consistent cash flow machine that we have here with the company. It's going to be good. That's great.

Back on the comment you made, 1,700 people you've hired this year. We are in a labor-constrained environment. The spend is there. The question mark is around can you deliver the labor and get things built and set up. What are you doing to attract labor? How are you standing century up as an employer of choice? And as you scale, how are you keeping up with the training? safety standards that are critical to your relationships with customers and, frankly, employees as well?

I think we, over generations, we've been an employer of choice. I think finding people to join us, our reputation, the benefits we bring, the culture of our organization is really conducive to hiring people just generally. I think we are a great, humane company. organically and inorganically, we come from 9,600 people to, I think this week we're about 12,800 all over a seven, eight-month period. So I think the team's doing a good job. But I think what has to fundamentally shift for any contractor is the following. I'm starting to sound like an old person now, and I feel that way sometimes, But if you look back in history, you'd received an ITB from a customer, you'd analyze it, you'd put a proposal back into that customer on the back of our reputation, you would then win the work and then go find the people. The world's different today. Yes, the world's resource constrained, our country's resource constrained. but the way you deal with that is yes you need to be an employer of choice you've got to be attractive there's all the things you've got to do around retention and tools and around that but I think having a strategy where you get close to your customers you understand their needs in advance of those ITBs coming out linking linking their needs to your funnel of opportunity and your pipeline needs allows you to have a view on what you are what you will need for the future and and i think we've got there now you know we have a very very good predictive tool around how many people we're going to need between now on the end of the year by skill set by union by non-union by management by craft and the more and more you actually get data around that allows you to start planning resource uh resource identification resource mobilization ahead of the need and i use that we use that as an organization as a tool to go to our customers and say look the closer we are to you the closer you share with us means that we can do better planning and we can find people you can't just get them at a moment's notice so there's a big push not just on the being the employer of choice there's a big just push to become more focused and more predictable and more aligned to our customers on their needs so we can start adding strategically ahead of the need without diluting margins and I think that will become our differentiator and as it also the ability to move information lessons learned knowledge capture around that organization to raise the overall bar will will be attractive not just to the employees but will be attractive to to those that employers our customers in terms of all the knowledge we've got and where that resides across the entire organization. So I believe that will become a stronger and stronger differentiator to us in our ability to pre-advance, start positioning, resource supply, delivery, learning, and development ahead of its real need, and ideally get the customers to fund that for us.

That's great. We are at time. I'm thrilled to have you both here today. Thank you for attending this year. And yeah. We appreciate you right on.

Appreciate it. Thank you.