DLHC - NASDAQ

Good morning, and welcome to the DLH Holdings Corp's Fiscal 2023 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. This is call is now being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference to Chris Witty, Investor Relations Adviser. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On the call with me today is

Thank you, Chris, and good morning to everyone. Welcome to our 2023 second quarter conference call. We continue to make good progress since last quarter, and we are also remaining on track for a strong fiscal year despite the macroeconomic headwinds in the business. We have a debt of gratitude for the outstanding performance by our workforce that remains committed to our clients' missions and delivering differentiated value on our programs. Beginning with Slide 4, I'll first provide a high-level overview of our quarter's financial highlights. With GRSI on the recent acquisition under our belt, the second quarter revenue essentially reached $100 million, reflecting our first full quarter of operations post closing. Of course, we have surpassed 100 million mark before during the first 2 quarters of last year due to a large short-term COVID-related FEMA contracts that we had, including the last year. But this year's milestone reflects the ongoing business base that we expect to build upon going forward. The company has substantially expanded our technology-enabled solutions profile, particularly in the areas of health IT, digital transformation and side. This is, of course, consistent with our growth strategy that we have articulated over the years. Our recent couple of quarters have been very active with regard to proposal development and program shaping for future organic growth, leveraging these competencies. Our reported operating income of $6.0 million, while EBITDA rose to $2.5 million. Our improving EBITDA margins reflect a strategy of expanding our business through highly differentiated services. We ended the quarter with roughly $204 million in debt, but after the end of the quarter, paid down an additional $8 million. Kathryn will review that in greater detail in a few moments. And we will continue to use the company's operating cash flow to delever the balance sheet as quickly as possible, consistent with our history. Our reported EPS was $0.06 per diluted share and our backlog at quarter end was nearly $941 million. Turning to Slide 5. I wanted to briefly provide an overview of some recent developments, including 2 important contract awards. The first game as a ceded on a highly coveted contract vehicle to provide technical solutions and support to the National Cancer Institute Center for biomedical informatics and information technology. This program will allow DLH to continue to build it's expertise to the national imperative of scientific research for cancer causes and treatments. It's a great opportunity to apply our advanced IT solutions and expand our business base with the National -- continue to expand our business base with the National Cancer Institute. The estimated aggregate ceiling value of this multivendor blanket purchase agreement is $1.7 billion. And we hope to see competing to see the opportunity to compete on multiple task orders in the not-too-distant future. Also, after the end of the quarter, we won a contract to expand our National Information Warfare business, Naval Information mortar business. Through this award valued at roughly $15 million, we will continue to provide turnkey management solutions for information systems and cybersecurity, leveraging advanced logistics and artificial intelligence to assist in capacity planning and architecture modernization. Such wallings and our significant pipeline of future opportunities underscore the strength of our advanced innovative offerings and the value that we have built through our long-term growth strategy, including the acquisition of GRSI. In addition, we continue to strengthen our governance and Board of Directors recently adding Judy Bjornaas, former Chief Financial Officer for ManTech to the company's Board of Directors at our Annual Meeting in March. Given her nearly unmatched expertise and experience and strong track record within our industry, we're pretty delighted to have to onboard. She has already made a positive impact on our organization, and we look forward to her coming a key role in our continued success. DLH is built to compete favorably in the government services market as a technology provider, underscored by our advanced capabilities, bolstered again through our most recent couple of acquisitions and the demand for services that we provide. Our highly credential staff and innovative offerings are in line with the major government priorities for fiscal '23 and beyond. In fact, the White House's fiscal 2024 preliminary budget calls for historic investments in research, artificial intelligence, machine levy and digital transformation, which are all in our wheelhouse and bond well for future top line performance. We believe we're at the beginning of an exciting new chapter in DLH's evolution, where we're combining technology leadership with our long-standing mission support and scientific research credentials. We have strengthened our position across many of these areas, building our existing track record of innovation, cloud computing, enterprise IT, systems engineering and integration, cyber and secure data analytics across a host of government agencies and programs. Now more than ever, our highly differentiated capabilities and strong customer relationships are paving the way for greater overlap between the government's needs and that which we can provide. Once again, we owe this success to our dedicated professional workforce who rises to the challenge every day of delivering on our clients' expectations and in doing so, accelerating the company's organic growth trajectory. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Kathryn John. Kathryn?

Thank you,

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question will come from Joe Gomes with Noble Capital.

So I want to start off with the top line was a little light versus our expectations. And probably, maybe you could just drill down a little bit more to that. You mentioned the legacy business was down, I think, about $2 million in the quarter. So business gets moved to the right or just some things didn't come in that you thought might have come in? Just trying to get a little better handle on that top line.

Yes. Great question, Joe. And you actually hit it spot on both our on contract, existing contract growth as well as new business opportunities have continued to slip to the right. As you may recall, some of our on-contract growth, of course, for some of our existing task order IDIQ contract, which required a government to get those programs through the acquisition process. We've seen that continue to slip to the right, a little more so than we expected and seems to be largely attributed to internal government delays. But we see no long-term impact of that, just things slipping to the right. The same for our new business pipeline, even some of our acquisitions or contract awards that we had the latter part of last year, we're still just now starting to have a pretty heavy load of the bidding activity. And for those who turn into proposals to actual contract awards is just, again, running through that same cycle slipping to what we think will be more Q3, Q4 prospects.

Okay. that I did notice a net increase in VA pharmacy revenues year-over-year. I think they increased by about $3 million. Was there anything behind that just doing more business with them? Or was there some onetime items in that, that drove that revenue increase on the pharmacy side?

Yes. Joe, coming out of COVID, we've learned a lot about our veterans and their readiness to deal with some of the challenges that we are coselling quite frankly, the VA put into effect of a fair amount of more regulations that will drive more traffic to the mail-order pharmacy as opposed to allowing metros to come in and pick up demands at local via hospitals. So we're going to continue to -- we think that trend is -- which has increased. It's probably level off now, it probably remain stable as we go forward. But you have seen the left that was kind of post COVID regulatory environment change for venture.

Okay. And thinking with the VA for a second, can you provide us with an update on the contracts there and the VA potentially looking to rebid out those contracts?

Yes, nothing's really changed since our last report. We -- as you know, we have submitted the government did require the submission of SDVOSB proposals, service-disabled veteran small businesses. And we are continuing to participate in that portion of the acquisition strategy. We also remain -- as before, we remain ready and available that should they determine that, that is not in the best interest of government that we'll be able to continue to provide those services through extensions of our current contract, which currently run out to the fourth quarter calendar year, and then we'll evaluate what the next acquisition strategy if it's subject to change. But no awards since we last spoke and all of those proposals went in during first quarter calendar.

Okay. And Katherine, maybe you could talk a little bit -- if I look at the adjusted operating margin for this quarter [indiscernible] last year about 6.8%. Just wondering what happened there. GRSI side was expected to help drive operating margins up higher and we kind of took a little bit step backward in this quarter.

Yes. A key contributor to that is, of course, the noncash D&A, which is about -- puts about 0.5 point of pressure on that. Otherwise, it's really just a function of the relative revenue contribution from the various streams of revenue that we have, just the blend of the revenue. So nothing I would say that indicates that we wouldn't expect to get the relative contribution from the acquisition that we expected more so just the particular mix that we had in the quarter.

Okay. Fair enough. And then one more for me, and I'll let someone else ask a couple of questions.

Sure. I'll get into too much on the competition sensitive side. But we did mention a year or so ago that there was a major acquisition that would open up a lot of bids within also NIH mission to a health customer, and we refer to that contract as CIO Sp4. And while it has taken a while, it was really delayed a lot due to a large number of protests very often due to smaller businesses, but to some extent, large businesses as well. That acquisition has moved really pretty close to having been finalized but the government has continued to have delays in the final award. But that's one that, of course, we had felt that there's a fair amount of pent-up opportunities for us to be able to bid. Beyond that, as we also announced 2 other awards that we had that were multiple IDIQs and one of those, again, with our strategic interest in the National Case Institute. And those procurements, those task orders are just now starting to break. We've actually bid 1 or 2, and we expect another 4 or 5 before the end of this fiscal year. And the other opportunity, which we also announced the defense health agencies, we -- Omnibus 4, but is for medical research for military kind of health. And that one also while it has been awarded. The government has yet to release any request for task order proposals. We do still remain hopeful that we'll see some this fiscal year in time to at least be perhaps by this year, that revenue -- given that we're already in bank, the revenue now was like will probably be more likely FY '24 early start.

Great. Thanks for those updates. Really appreciate it, and I'll get back in queue.

[Operator Instructions]. Our next question will be a follow-up from Joe Gomes with Noble Capital.

Yes. No one else is going to ask them. I'll ask some more. One of the key items with the GRSI acquisition was cross-selling opportunities? And

Yes. Those are the areas that David happen I'm really, really most excited about. And well, there are some major programs that some of our existing major targeted agencies, including the National Institute of Health, the Syneron disease control programs and agencies where we currently have a business base, but there's some adjacencies in the nature of the work is in the future. But things like precision medicine that depends very heavily on the computing power, but secure data environments as well as extensive support from biomedical research talent that really combines the benefits of what we have been building both in our heritage business and the tremendous bolstering that we've gotten from the addition of GRSI. These are key programs that the future that our nation is really heavily focused on advancing the state of that business. And we think we're really, really uniquely positioned for some of those. The majority of those was cross-selling opportunities, we think, are within the HHS arena. We also have some opportunities that would not have been in -- we would not have been in a position to prime that supports the readiness posture largely our fleet in the Defense Health Agency. And we think the combinations of cross-selling with some of the engineering and technical capabilities from GRSI along with the health technology related business that came with the IBA acquisition really position us in a differentiating way for several opportunities going forward. So I think what you'll see a continued expansion of our support for military metros in that regard as well as in the public Hill side of the house for research with a heavy dependence bond technology and innovation for the future.

Okay. Great. And then went back to the GRS for a moment they did $32.6 million of revenue in the quarter. [indiscernible] implies that it comes out to about $130 million. And on your initial chance you were talking about $140 million at GRSI. Should we expect that to see maybe that increase on a quarterly basis to get back to get closer to that $150 million run rate?

Yes. Definitely, we -- as we've discussed, the GSRI has a strong track record of growth, and we've set that expectation of low double digits. So we do think that they are moving upward and just the volume of activity that

Great. Thank you, Kathryn, again, interest expense was $4.9 million. Again, you projected, I think, about a $14 million increase with GRSI debt. Are you still comfortable with that number? Or do you think maybe some of these higher rates out there will increase that number a little bit above the 14% for this year?

Yes. I do think there's certainly going to be pressure on it as a result of continuing to -- interest rates continuing to grow, including that increase yesterday. We've obviously hedged a major portion of that with our swap contract we put in place in January. But still, we do have some floating rate debt, and that's going to be subject to impact from that as well as in the quarter, in particular, as we mentioned, we had some -- we were disappointed in the way that the contract payments laid out. We're happy to report we clear that congestion by this call, but obviously, we're happy with where we ended up on March 31. So it's multipronged, of course, pressure on the interest rates is going to result in higher interest expense. And there's a noncash component of that, too, that we might want to put a finer point on in terms of -- from an EBITDA perspective, the amortization of deferred financing costs is a noncash component. But nonetheless, as you suggest, the cash component of interest expense, I think, is going to be a bit sounder than $14 million.

Anthony, back over to you.

It appears there are no further questions. I'd like to turn it back over to Mr. Parker for any closing remarks.

All right. Well, thank you, again. Thanks, everyone, for joining us and your continued interest in DLH. As Kathryn conveyed earlier. We remain very, very excited about this new chapter and we feel very well positioned to continue to execute our strategy for both organic growth and building the value proposition as we go forward. So thank you all, and we look forward to chatting with you next quarter. Bye for now.