CACI International Inc (CACI) Q2 2008 Earnings Call Transcript
Published at 2008-02-04 11:11:50
David Dragics – Senior Vice President of Investor Relations Paul M. Cofoni – President, Chief Executive Officer & Director Thomas A. Mutryn – Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice-President & Treasurer William M. Fairl – President US Operations CACI Randall C. Fuerst – Chief Operating Officer US Operations Gregory R. Bradford – Chief Executive of CACI Limited – President-UK
Brian Gesuale – Raymond James Chris Donaghey – Suntrust Robinson Humphrey Michael Lewis - BB&T Capital Markets Jason Kupferberg – UBS Bill Loomis – Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc. Greg Wowkun – Banc of America Securities Analyst – Cowen & Company [Julie Santorio] – Morgan Stanley Timothy Quillin – Stephens, Inc.
Good day everyone and welcome to the CACI International first quarter 2008 earnings conference call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time all lines are in a listen only mode. Later we will announce the opportunity for questions and instructions will be given at that time. (Operator Instructions) A special reminder to our media guests who are listening in please remember that during the question and answer session of this call we are only taking questions from the analyst. For opening remarks and introductions I will turn the conference over to the Senior Vice President of Investor Relations Mr. David Dragics.
Good morning ladies and gentleman I am Dave Dragics, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations of CACI international. We’re very pleased that you’re able to participate with us today. Now as is our practice on these calls we are providing presentation slides they’re on our website and also during our presentation we’ll also make every effort to keep all of you on the same page as we are. So moving to the next exhibit number two, before we begin our discussion this morning I would like to make our customary but important statement regarding our written and oral disclosures and commentary. Now there will be statements in this call that do not address historical fact and as such constitute forward-looking statements under current law. These statements reflect our views as of today and are subject to important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from what we say today. The primary factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those we anticipate are listed at the bottom of last evening’s earnings release and are described in the company’s Securities & Exchange Commission filings. Our Safe Harbor statement is included on this exhibit and should be incorporated as part of any transcript of this call. To open up our discussion this morning moving to exhibit three here is Paul Cofoni, President and CEO of CACI International. Paul M. Cofoni: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to personally welcome you to our call this morning. We appreciate your interest and invite you to join us on future calls. With me today to discuss our results and answer your questions are Tom Mutryn, Chief Financial Officer, Bill Fairl President of US Operations, Randy Fuerst Chief Operating Officer of US Operations and by phone from the United Kingdom Greg Bradford Chief Executive of CACI Limited UK. Let’s go to Slide Number Four please. A key component of our growth strategy is to be at the center of our client’s efforts to solve the nation’s number one long term threat, global terrorism. This ideological struggle is independent of Iraq and beyond the borders of any country. It is a struggle for multiple generations. Our generation must collaborate and use our vast resources to protect our freedom now and for future generations. CACI’s focus is to deliver timely and essential capabilities as the nexus of intelligence and security services, to help our clients develop actional information to identify and pre-empt terrorism attacks. We believe this is America’s first line of defense against terrorism and our intelligence capabilities uniquely qualify us to provide great value to our nation and make a real impact on defeating terrorist threats. Our clients rely on CACI’s solution to help solve their most difficult problems in national security, intelligence, homeland security and the improvement of government services. Today I’m pleased to report that at the mid-point of our fiscal year we are delivering on our growth strategy and are performing ahead of our FY08 plan. As we told you in June we expected our earnings for the first half of fiscal year 2008 to be below the first half of fiscal year 07. We also said we expected to see a positive growth in momentum in both revenue and earnings in the second half of the fiscal year and continuing into fiscal year 09. We see positive forward indicators in our second quarter performance, a growing top line, especially organic revenue, growing operating income, acquisitions that are performing ahead of expectations and continued strong hiring results. Next Slide please. The first indicator is our second quarter revenue; it was another record for our company increasing 21% over last year’s second quarter to $578 million. Contributing to that growth was revenue from our intelligence business which we have targeted as a key growth area. Our intelligence revenue grew 46% over the second quarter of last year and is now approximately one third of our total revenue. At the mid-point of the fiscal year our trailing 12 month organic revenue growth continues to move in the right direction. Second quarter organic revenue grew 10.7% following 12.5% organic growth in our first quarter of fiscal 2008. Another indicator was our operating income which was up 3.6% over the second quarter of fiscal 07. As important it grew 10% over the operating income we reported in the first quarter of fiscal 08. Our highly successful acquisition program exceeded our expectations. The two acquisitions we completed in November, Athena Innovative Solutions and Dragon Development Corporations brought 640 talented professionals to CACI of whom 97% hold security clearance. These new employees bring valuable skills and excellent relationships with new clients in the intelligence community. Another positive forward indicator is our hiring program which is consistently producing above our expectations. Our initiative to hire veterans with disabilities has also surpassed internal goals. We continue to successfully recruit the highly skilled employees with top level clearances that are needed to perform our client’s support and mission. The success we are experiencing in our hiring program is a major contributing factor to our growth. The overall government funding environment has also improved. While almost the entire government operated under a continuing resolution during our second quarter now all of FY08 spending bills have been passed. Let’s move on to Slide Number Six. All of these positive indicators and results reflect solid progress in CACI’s growth strategy and point to what we believe will be a successful second half of our fiscal year. We’re executing on our growth plan, improving organic growth and benefiting from the contributions of our strategic acquisitions. We have confidence in our strong growth strategy, our team and our second half performance which is reflected in our revised guidance for fiscal year 08. Tom Mutryn will have more details in his financial overview and Bill Fairl will provide more insight on the progress of operations. Now here’s Tom. Thomas A. Mutryn: Good morning everyone. Please turn to Slide Number Seven. Our year-over-year review revenue growth for the second quarter was 21.2% with organic growth at a strong 10.7% in acquisition related revenue contributing $50 million or 10.5%. This quarter we experienced a significant increase in both direct labor up 21% and in other direct costs up 26%. The direct labor increase was driven by both our hiring activities and by our acquisitions. Other direct costs consist primarily of sub-contractor content integral to the solutions we deliver to our clients. Next Slide please. Our second quarter operating margin was 6.6% compared to second quarter margin of 7.8% last year. The primary causes of the changing margin are the timing of awards fees in continuing higher sub contractor content. While our second quarter pre-tax profit is in line with last year levels, our net income is below last year due to a higher tax rate. Our tax rate in last year’s second quarter was favorably impacted by the retroactive expensing of research and development tax credit. Next Slide Number Nine please. Our UK subsidiary reported record revenue of $22.9 million a 20.2% increase over last year’s second quarter. Net income of $1.5 million increased 67% over the second quarter of last year. Over half of the revenue growth came from organic growth and the remainder resulted from the acquisition of Arete Software Limited last July and favorable exchange rates. Our cash position at the end of the quarter was $11.7 million down from over $250 million at the beginning of the quarter as we used $241 million of cash for our acquisition. Operating cash flow for the quarter was negatively impacted by a temporary slow down in receipts from various payment offices caused by weather and other issues. Had payments been at the level we had anticipated our cash collection would have been about $25 to $30 million higher. I’m happy to report that we have already collected most of these funds and are returning to our normal collections pace. Day’s sales outstanding of 74 days, reflective of the payment delay I spoke of as well of a three day negative impact of our DSO calculation due to the short term impact of our recent acquisition. Next Slide Number 10 please. We are providing updated guidance for fiscal year 2008. Revenue was projected to be higher than our prior estimate due primarily to continued positive organic growth. We now anticipate revenue will be between $2.3 and $2.4 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share to be between $2.60 and $2.80 for the full year. Implicit in this guidance is steady sequential earnings per share growth in our third and fourth quarter as well as positive third and fourth quarter year-over-year earnings per share comparison. We expect our fiscal year 08 operating margin will be between 6.6% and 7% and we anticipate 2008 cash flow from operation to be in about the $130 million range reflecting a return to normal collection activity and a further increase in working capital associated with our higher than originally anticipated revenue growth. Lastly we expect a full year tax rate of approximately 39%. With that I will now turn over the discussion to Bill Fairl. Bill William M. Fairl: Thanks Tom and let me add my welcome to everyone. This morning I will address highlights from operations for our second quarter of fiscal year 2008. Let’s go to Slide Number 11. Our contract awards for the second quarter totaled $444 million approximately 75% of these awards were for new business for CACI. For the first half of fiscal year 08 our awards totaled approximately $1.4 billion. Our contract funding orders for the second quarter totaled $446 million and approximately $1.2 billion for the first six months of fiscal year 08. I would like to touch for a moment on one of our key contract awards for the second quarter. During the quarter we received our initial award under the US Army’s Field and Installation Readiness Support Team also known as FIRST contract. It’s worth approximately $60 million and provides for support to the Fort Bliss Directorate of Logistics. Now there’s a number of reason why we are so excited about this award. The Fort Bliss Directorate of Logistics is a new client for CACI. The effort requires us to add significant new CACI employees, virtually all of which started to work for us at the beginning of our third quarter and perhaps most importantly the number of troops based in Fort Bliss is expected to grow significantly over the next few years to include the stationing of a reinforced army combat division and the testing and evaluation of the army’s future combat system. Since we’re now the largest support contractor at Fort Bliss you can understand why we’re so excited about this award and our prospects for further growth. Now while I’m on the subject of being the largest, as a result of our win last summer at the National Ground Intelligence Center and our acquisition of Athena Innovative Solutions we’re now the largest intelligence contractor in the Charlottesville, Virginia area. Given the present intelligence agencies that’s the DIA’s plans for significantly increased presence in the Charlottesville area, this is an important and critical achievement in our growth strategy. Please turn to Slide 12. Looking to the future our proposal activity continues at a high level. At the end of the second quarter we had approximately $2.5 billion in submitted proposals under evaluation with more than 70% of those for new business. We expect nearly all of them to be awarded by the end of our fourth quarter. The pace shows no signs of slowing down. During our third and fourth quarters we currently anticipate submitting more than $6 billion in additional proposals. We’re very pleased with a 10.7% top line organic growth we delivered during our second quarter. In particular the intelligence portion of our portfolio experienced very strong growth, we were up 46% quarter-over- quarter and intelligence related business now represents approximately 33% of our total business. As we’ve reported on previous calls we’ve been concentrating our bid proposal resources on winning new work with high CACI labor content. During the second quarter our approach was rewarded with a number of new high CACI labor content wins. Two of them in particular our win at Fort Bliss and a $100 billion plus win for an Intel client are expected to generate more than 200 new hires in third and fourth quarters. During our first quarter conference call I discussed the progress we have made in our hiring. This morning I am delighted to report that we achieved outstanding hiring results during our second quarter as well adding over 175 net new hires while increasing our number of open hiring requisitions. Many of these new hires have security clearances of top secret or above and today we employ over 3,800 of these highly prized specialist. Finally regarding the performance of acquired businesses the integration of the Dragon Development Corporations and Athena Innovative Solutions group has gone very smoothly. In summary I’m most encouraged by our performance through the first half of fiscal 08. Our continued strong hiring, key acquisitions and contract awards have set us up for what we believe will be strong performance in the back half of fiscal 08 and we anticipate continuing to build on that momentum as we enter into fiscal 09. Paul that concludes my remarks. Paul M. Cofoni: Thanks Bill and thank you Tom for your comments. Let’s go to the last Slide Number 13. We believe our first half results and strong second half earnings expectations demonstrate CACI is well positioned for the future. We serve clients who carry out the nations most important missions and provide valuable support for national security, intelligence, homeland security and government transformation. We are positioned at the center of helping our clients solve the nation’s number one problem which is global terrorism. We believe all of these areas will remain high priority funding areas for years to come. The more we do to counter global terrorism threats today the safer our future generations will be. We enter the second half of fiscal year 2008 with confidence and strength. We have assembled a highly skilled management team a combination of experience in place leadership and key new hires making outstanding contributions to our growth. We are sustaining excellent client relationships that continually retain and expand our business base. Our recruiting program is more successful than ever as we hire talented professionals who bring immediate benefits and capabilities to our clients. Our corporate development and mergers and acquisitions program continues to be a core competency and a key part of our growth strategy. I am proud of all of our CACI employees, our people are dedicated to being the very best in all we do. We carry on the CACI culture of honesty, integrity, excellence and distinction. We make clients number one, provide valuable solutions for our nations greatest challenges and deliver positive shareholder value. With that Roki we can open up the lines for questions.
(Operator Instructions) We do have a couple of questions in the queue. We’ll here from Brian Gesuale with Raymond James. Brian Gesuale – Raymond James: Wanted to dig into some of this pipeline of business and look at re-competes, maybe if you could tell us the sense of timing and size of those re-competes coming from recently acquired businesses as well as the core businesses? Paul M. Cofoni: Bill do you want to take that one? William M. Fairl: I will Paul. So first of all concerning re-compete acquired businesses, that of course is one of the things we look very carefully at as we go through our due diligence process to see what’s coming up and we have a good track on those. There’s nothing extraordinary coming up there this year. I’d say we kind of take a look over the next 12, 18, 24 months as we go about acquiring businesses. As far as our organic acquisitions go I’ll let Randy take that one. Randy’s been tracking that one kind of carefully. Randy? Randall C. Fuerst: Yes I think the actual flow of those deals hasn’t been anything out of the normal. Quite frankly we positioned pretty well, well in advance of those re-competes. In fact as Bill and Paul said as soon as we win a job we start figuring out how we’re going to win it the next time. So from that standpoint we don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Brian Gesuale – Raymond James: Okay. Terrific and my follow-up would be, Paul it sounds like you have some exciting things where you’re getting some incremental direct labor into your mix here starting in the second half of this fiscal year. Is this going to be the time where we anniversary out of these negative kind of direct labor or mix issues year-over-year? Is that going to be Q3 or Q4 of this year? Or, do we have to wait a little bit longer to see that mix start to turn modestly positive? Paul M. Cafoni: Are you talking about the mix between direct labor and OEC? Brian Gesuale – Raymond James: Exactly. Paul M. Cofoni: I think we actually are seeing that level out here. We had over the last year and a half or so shift heavily towards OEC’s and that seems to have stabilized. We’re at about a 60/40 split and it’s not varying quarter-to-quarter dramatically.
Moving on we’ll hear from Chris Donaghey with Suntrust. Chris Donaghey – Suntrust Robinson Humphrey: I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about what’s going on in the intelligence business? And, if possible can you kind of give us a sense of the overall magnitude and what the dollar value is that from the standpoint of intelligence? William M. Fairl: First of all what we have right now Tom provided our updated revenue guidance which is just now for fiscal 08 between $2.3 and $2.4 billion and intelligence business is now 33% of that so you can do the math there. We’re approaching $800 million a year in our current revenue of intelligence business. I can tell you that when I just look at the pipeline of open hiring requisitions that we have in front of us here that the large majority of those are folks that require clearances and at least half of those are folks with the intelligence related community as well. So it continues to be the fastest growing part of our business. In particular I would draw your attention to the C4 ISR part of our business which is the very important work that we do for a variety of our clients but I would say largely for our army clients up in the Fort Monmouth area up there. That’s been our business that we do through our S3 vehicle, our Etose vehicle and other associated vehicles continue to be very fast growing. Chris Donaghey – Suntrust Robinson Humphrey: Okay great and I know this is probably pretty sensitive information but just can you qualify a little bit the spread across the intelligence community? Is it fairly equal or is there one customer that accounts for the bulk of that? Can you address that? William M. Fairl: Well as you pointed out it is a little bit sensitive there. So what I’ll say to you is it’s a mix between national level intelligence agencies and service level meaning military level, as I mentioned the army at Fort Monmouth for example. To give you an idea it’s kind of a mix between those two but I can’t get into the particular customers at the national level. Chris Donaghey – Suntrust Robinson Humphrey: Okay great and Tom just one quick question on the guidance for earnings for 08. Still a pretty decent spread, can you just walk us through the levers that impact that guidance range? Thomas A. Mutryn: Yes like anything there’s a degree of uncertainty in our forecast, you know our ability to continuing our hiring pace, government funding activities, timing of awards and the like. We are happy to have narrowed the guidance range from where it was previously but there was still a degree of uncertainty and we’re trying to kind of reach that balance of providing significant meaningful guidance but staying within our range and so I think that’s just in our [inaudible] fluctuation as we provide guidance in our next quarter I expect the range will narrow a bit more.
Thank you and now we’ll move on to Michael Lewis with BB&T Capital Markets. Michael Lewis – BB&T Capital Markets: Okay so Tom I was wondering if we could just talk a little bit about the operating cash flow guidance. It looks like there is a slight revision of about $10 million from $140 to $130 million. Let me just understand this a little bit better, is this directly related to the payment office issue that you said related to the weather and is this Dayton by chance? Thomas A. Mutryn: So you know first of all I don’t want to talk about specific payment offices. I don’t think that’s appropriate so I’ll pass on that one. The payment office delay that I spoke about was a temporary situation and we are essentially fully recovered from that. So the full year cash flow guidance is not reflective of those delays that are behind us. What is happening is as we continue to grow and our revenue continues to grow that in effect uses working capital and as we increase our revenue expectation that’s also related to our acquisitions that is a use of working capital, so as a result we are pulling down our guidance a bit to around the 130 range. And I will caution you know the folks that there is a degree of uncertainty in any forecast and cash flow forecast is not [inaudible] earnings per share guidance or range on that one. Michael Lewis – BB&T Capital Markets: Okay that’s fair and then Paul or Bill I was wondering if you could provide us a little additional information on the Intel contract of $1 billion plus IDIQ that you mentioned in the press release? More specifically how many products are actually awarded that contract? And, what do you think some type of ramp will look like for possibly bringing in some revenue off that? William M. Fairl: It is a multiple award contract and I believe there are eight contract holders on it. The task orders are beginning to flow and my understanding is they’re somewhere between rather north of 50 task orders in the pipeline ready to come out. We started to bid a couple of them so I’m going to withhold making any projections here other than to say the pipeline has just, the past week or so begun to flow on that contract. So we’ll see as time passes here a little bit. Paul M. Cofoni: And that’s as I recall Bill, that’s all new work. William M. Fairl: Yes. Paul M. Cofoni: It’s all new work. William M. Fairl: Yes. You’re exactly right. Paul M. Cofoni: This is the only positive for us and we know we’ll get some of this work we have a really strong team working on this not just our own people but industry partners as well so we’re going to get a real gain on this vehicle that will help out business.
We’ll now move on to Jason Kupferberg with UBS. Jason Kupferberg – UBS: Nice to see the margins starting to bounce back here and I wanted to get some commentary around that. I mean is it fair to say that the trough in margins is now in the rear view mirror having been last quarter and that gradual positive trajectory that we’ve started to see in December should continue going forward? William M. Fairl: Jason as you and other people have observed and we have observed our markets, credit downwards over the last couple of years primarily due to the shift in the mix which we spoke about. You know we watch this very carefully as you can imagine. I think we are coming close to kind of the bottom but we are very cautious of trying to make bold predictions in this particular area. The situation is that we are going after two activities simultaneously you know CACI direct billable employee, good business, profitable, adds to the bottom line and at the same time often we are in the role of a prime contractor with a large number of sub-contractors which is good business for us, profitable as to the bottom line. It is a mixed issue if you will and it becomes a challenge to project and predict that mix going forward. But long winded answer but we feel that we are close to the bottom if not at the bottom. Jason Kupferberg – UBS: Okay and if we can just talk about the award and funding environment I mean since the appropriations bills and the bridge got done at the end of December what have you seen so far in January? And, as we look ahead during the balance of your fiscal year understanding that the balance of the supplemental has yet to be approved, how do you see that award in funding activity the tempo of it playing out here over the next, you know, remaining five months of your fiscal year. William M. Fairl: I’ll talk to the funding environment, your observations are right on the mark there but much like the way Tom described the cash flow situation, I can tell you at the beginning of the year we construct a plan for ourselves, what we need in the way of funding, not only this year but the growth into next year and we track that week-by-week, and as were sitting here essentially at the end of January I can tell you that we are slightly ahead of plan there. So we kind of made up for that much like Tom talked about with the cash situation. But we have to watch the supplemental as you observed that’s kind of the next key thing that has to happen.
Thank you we’ll now move on to Bill Loomis with Stifel Nicolaus. Bill Loomis – Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc.: On the direct hirers you mentioned that you will add 200 for Fort Bliss in the Intel wins in the second half, what’s the amount of hires you’ll need net to meet the guidance in total in the second half? And, then I have a follow-up question. William M. Fairl: Bill we have not historically given out these numbers that we put in the plan for net hires. Let me say that we are ahead of our plan. At the half way mark we are well ahead of our plan for hiring the numbers of people we need to achieve our plan. That is part of why we are so confident at this point. We still have a great deal of work to do. This is a thing that you work on every single day but our recruiting team combined with our operations people hiring managers are doing a superb job at identifying the right resources and getting them on board joining the CACI family for the benefit of clients and we’re doing it at record rates of hiring and well ahead of our plan. Bill Loomis – Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc.: And as far as hiring you said most of the open reqs for Intel, quite a few of them are for top secret or higher. How’s the days to fill been running on your hiring for on the intelligence side for both secret clearance and on the top secret? Paul M. Cofoni: I think the question is days to fill for the intelligence req. Is that what the question is? William M. Fairl: Bill we don’t spit them out quite that way but I can tell you put them all together and again, most of these positions require some sort of clearance, put them all together we’re running at essentially historically low rates for the company. Again, it’s an indication of what Paul talked about, how well that team is working together, our recruiters and our line people working together to get them filled. Get the positions open and get them filled as quickly as possible. Stay ahead of it. Paul M. Cofoni: And I think Bill may have mentioned that the number of requisitions are increasing so it’s almost as soon as we fill a slot one or two more open up. That’s another really important factor that is giving us confidence looking forward.
(Operator Instructions) We’ll now here form Greg Wowkun with Banc of America. Greg Wowkun – Banc of America Securities: On the last call you mentioned that you had about 40 re-competes left in the year. Can you give us an update on your win rate? How that’s trended in the quarter and maybe any pressure you’ve seen on pricing? William M. Fairl: There wasn’t a lot of activity in the second quarter with awards and you see that reflected not only with our re-competes but with our total award numbers for the quarter. Again, I think that was in part related to the continuing resolution activity. We still expect those to be awarded as I mentioned on the last call by the end of our fiscal year. Re-competes were down, we’re about half way through the year in terms of total numbers of re-competes. Our goal is always to win 100% of our re-competes and until we get and stay at that level we are not going too satisfied there. So we are south of 100% on that re-compete win rate but focusing on getting towards that all the time. I still expect that those things will be awarded by the end of the year. Competitive pricing pressures, you know I mentioned last time it really is deal specific some cases yes there is pricing pressure and other cases because of the complicated nature of the business or some new wrinkle that’s been added it’s more about innovation than it is about price. So the trick for us is to know which is which and construct our deal appropriately. In all cases we want to be best value driven and win these things on the basis of innovation. Greg Wowkun – Banc of America Securities: Great thanks. So and as a follow-up can you comment on your preferred uses of cash and or acquisitions still the preferred use of capital here or should we start thinking about share buybacks or debt pay down? Thomas A. Mutryn: We continue to see good opportunities in the market for acquisitions. You know our accusations program has been very successful. We anticipate it to continue to be successful. So our preferred use of cash right now is to continue to invest to provide long term value to our shareholders through our successful M&A program. William M. Fairl: I will add to Tom’s remarks that we do from time to time visit this question with the board and have had a variety of discussion about potential core stock buyback and we do that with business case approach thinking about it and to date we still as Tom said, see acquisition targets out there that would yield a better return on investments than our [inaudible] cost of capital and also yield positive net present value and are accretive if not immediately certainly within a short period i.e. within a first year. If we look at the five acquisitions counting the one we did in the UK that really occurred in and around the first half of our year, what we’ve seen so far is that our business case was a little conservative but pretty much right on and that the in aggregate the acquisitions are performing to the business cases that we established. Now I’ll remind everyone that when we did the convertible a while back in May and at that time we did purchase as a part of that whole process transaction of $1 million shares. So we have done that. We will look at this again from time to time and continue to evaluate it but that’s how it looks right now.
Thank you. We will now hear from [inaudible] from Cowen & Company. Analyst – Cowen & Company: So I just want to dig into the guidance a little bit more. In the second half it looks like your guiding sales 1168 to 1268, so that’s about an 8% spread 100 up over that and if you look at the EPS it’s 137 to 157 which is a 15% variance or so. Obviously what this means is the margins there’s some variance to the margins on the work you’re expecting. What is that variance and how should we think about margins in the second half of this fiscal year? What the progression’s likely to be and what’s going to move that around? Thomas A. Mutryn: I’ll take a first crack at your question. Consistent with our initial guidance we have a greater spread on our earnings per share guidance than we have on our revenue guidance. For the simple explanation that it’s easier for us to forecast revenue that’s one variable as you go down to operating income, there’s operating expense, indirect expense, ODC versus direct labor mixed tax rates etc, so there’s more variables in place and so hence a wider range. I think that’s consistent with how we look at the world and it’s consistent with the prior guidance. What are the variables? We talked about them before you know government funding, ability to hire, mix of business, tax rate, indirect expense, etc, and so those are some of the items which will kind of impact our second half performance. As we said we expect our full year operating margin to be between 6.6% and 7%. Kind of implicit in that is the higher operating margin is in the back half than in the first half. That’s very consistent with what we said when we first issued guidance for fiscal year 2008. Analyst – Cowen & Company: Again is that a mix issue meaning you’re having more direct labor sales in the back half or is it you know just a function of G&A absorption as the top line [inaudible]? Thomas A. Mutryn: There are several factors going on mix issues is one of the issues that we’ve been successful in hiring direct billable employees. You’re earlier question was asked with regards to either the bottoming out of margin or are we reaching a steady state of sub-contractor versus direct labor mix which we think we are so several factors are at play.
Thank you. We’ll now hear from [Julie Santorio] with Morgan Stanley [Julie Santorio] – Morgan Stanley: So a couple of questions, we are seeing a nice pick-up in the pipeline, you said $6 billion getting set to be submitted by June. You know we’ve seen the pipeline looking pretty strong in the past but I think back to 2006 the pipeline was looking good but the problem was that a lot of the deals in the pipeline were being pushed out. Is there a change now versus back then? So you see less risk in a lot of these upcoming deals being pushed out? Paul F. Cofoni: Good question. I will just give you one thought and then I will let Bill or Randy jump in. I would say the level of protest has reduced a bit but there’s still some important protests that are holding up work. You remember Oncor, I think that’s been over a year now and the Alliance, that’s the GSA Oncor was [inaudible] and Alliance GSA. These are very large vehicles tens of billions of dollars of ceilings and there both hung up now for a long time. But it was a little worse than that because we had first and [inaudible] back in the time frame you’re talking about Julie. So I’d say there’s been a little bit of improvement in the let’s say the damming up of work over protest and I think that the government, we’re not having the radical sort of stop and go activity from government funding that we were experiencing back in that time frame. Those are two very important things. Now Bill and Randy might want to add. William M. Fairl: I’ll add a little bit to that I think your second point Paul, last year at this time we were talking about the conversion of those awards to actual revenue and earnings so we were seeing kind of stop and go that you referred to. Since about our last quarter of last year and coming through our first and second quarters we’ve begun to see those awards, those phenomenal awards and bookings that we had converted into revenue and earnings. So I would say that’s different this year and you’re point about the protest I think is well taken. Two years ago this protest thing just, I don’t want to say came out of nowhere but all of a sudden it really blossomed like everybody was protesting everything. That’s now part of the landscape. We’re used to that. We put it into the planning. So when we think about these awards schedules that we talked about we take into consideration things are going to get protest and it’s going to be a long time before things happen. So I think we’re better at understanding that phenomenon.
I would say that you’re right, the pipeline is very robust and you mentioned the $6 million mark. The pace of the deal flow from a year ago I believe has increased and we’ve got a lot of people working props and quite frankly, Paul has moved us into more of an account based approach as we look at the market and so we’re getting better visibility on deals and how the [inaudible] those deals. So I would say the flow has actually increased. [Julie Santorio] – Morgan Stanley: And flow increasing, sounds like what you’re saying has a lot to do with just internal tacky changes on the business development side rather than just the government being more active?
From my perspective we have a much stronger focus in the strategic accounts that we are pursuing. So yes we are helping shape those deals as well.
We’ll now move on to Laura Lederman with William Blair. Laura Lederman – William Blair & Company, LLC: A few questions, one is on the subject of funding as we have another supplemental coming up, can you talk a little bit about the odds of the government running out of money before that’s past. I realize it’s a hard thing to forecast but love to talk about it a little bit. Also shifting to acquisitions can you talk a little bit about the health of the pipeline size if you’re looking at what’s in there are they kind of small, a lot of little ones
With regards to the funding the rest of the supplemental, I don’t think anybody on the outside of capitol hill has any idea of how congress is going to attack that at this point. They have not laid their cards on the table so to speak. Suffice it to say you know, come March it will be a topic because they have to finish the responding to the request and that’s also when General Patrias comes back for another six month report. So it’s, we just have to take a wait and see position. But yes it will put pressure on the DOD appropriations and I would refer anybody that’s interested in that to go back to Gate’s December 21st press conference when he talks about funding of the DOD. So that’s the situation with regards to the supplemental for FY08. With that I will turn over to Bill for the acquisition part, part two of your question.
Yes as far as acquisitions go we remain quite active there. We have a very active pipeline and I will tell you we’re looking at both the targeted sort of very tactical acquisitions, we want to get into a certain customer space or new technical capability. We’ve got lots of options that we’re looking at. Our team has been great at identifying kind of those gaps that we have there and how we want to fill them. If you reflect back on acquisitions we’ve done here recently, we’ve just been very pleased with how that’s worked. Wexford for example that got us into the whole special operations asymmetric worker area, just a great, great acquisition along with our other folks that have joined us, Dragon development, software development for the Intel community that we didn’t have before good presence there. Athena Innovative Solutions, I mentioned that’s now got us as the largest Intel contractor down in the Charlottesville, Virginia area [inaudible]. So we’re still looking at that going forward at those targeted [inaudible] get us into a customer spot, get us into a new technical capability, get us into a new geography if you will. At the same time we’re looking at opportunities for these larger deals as well. We have a number of those that we’re taking a look at and evaluating.
Thank you we’ll now move on to Tim Quillin with Stephens, Inc. Timothy Quillin – Stephens, Inc.: A year from now a new administration is going to take office at what point do government customers start to put off new projects because of uncertainty about changing priorities with the next administration? And, also if could say what the tax rate is expected for the next couple of quarters? Thanks.
That’s a good question and I imagine we might have multiple points of views about that because it’s not exactly predictable as you can understand. Keep in mind that we have been for the last two or three years not seeing high volume of new start programs and the reason is of course that necessarily government resources have been prioritized towards the efforts in Southwest Asia and therefore there hasn’t been a we actually seen a reduction in new start work. So it’s hard to imagine that would change between now and the change in administration. I think we’re on sort of a tempo that will continue only affected by any decisions to draw down troops in Southwest Asia and some of that is starting to occur we heard from the President during the State of the Union speech that several units have returned to the states and will not be replaced. So as that reduction increases there could be some new start activity. I don’t know, David did you want to add anything.
Well Tim it’s a 14 month government process. Next week the budget comes out starts on October 1st so whoever gets elected in November isn’t going to have much to do with changing that except on the edges. I mean we see this every time there’s a change in administration and we actually get these questions every four years. The real impact that the next president will have will be on the budget that it turned in two years from now if you think about it because three weeks, two and a half weeks after the inauguration you’ve got the budget for the fiscal year starting October 1, 2009. So you know you may see some changes on the edges but the real impact won’t be felt until you know the budget that is proposed for 2010. Timothy Quillin – Stephens, Inc.: Okay. Paul M. Cofoni: Yes and Tim you also had a question in regards to tax rates. Is aid that for the full year we expect tax rates at approximately 39% and I would model 39% for the third and fourth quarter as well.
There are no further questions at this time. I will turn it back over to our speakers for any additional or closing comments.
Thank you Roki for your help today. We certainly appreciate it and we would like to thank everyone who participated on the call today for your questions. There were some very good questions and we enjoyed the opportunity to respond to those and help inform you further on our progress. We know that many of you may have other questions or more detailed questions for us and our team and we’ll be available to take your calls in about twenty minutes. So again thank you for coming on board with us this morning. That concludes our fiscal year 2008 second quarter conference call. Have a great day.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen that does conclude today’s conference call. We thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.