Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation (NASDAQ:GLDD) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Scott Kornblau: Yeah. I’ll reiterate what I said before. Q4 did not have any dry docks. And as you know, that does impact margins, we take a vessel out and have the additional cost. But if I just look — not just look at for the whole year as opposed to quarter-over-quarter, we have that mix of backlog to get us to that — what we always aim for the high teens operating margin and that mid-teens EBITDA. We are absolutely now setting ourselves up to return back to normal. And I would call that the normal margins that we strive to get.

Brian Russo: Okay. Great. And the $44 million of performance obligations that are excluded for the backlog for offshore wind, is that just Empire I or does that also include the second contract that, I guess, is pending FID.

Scott Kornblau: It is not pending FID. It is a signed contract. It is included in there. Right now, we are under NDA to disclose who it’s with. But no, that is a signed executed contract. We’ll do that work right after we finish Empire I at the end of ’25.

Brian Russo: Okay. Great. And just curious on your thoughts. We’ve seen a lot of consolidation in terms of project developer ownership of offshore wind projects. We also saw utility sell their stake last night to global infrastructure fund. And I’m just curious, is Great Lakes even better positioned now as a preferred vendor of the consolidated ownership of these projects. Just wondering what your kind of general thoughts are there?

Lasse Petterson: The general thought is that, what we are doing is to install the rock on the sea bottom, and the ownership structure is really changing a lot over the past couple of months. But what we’ve seen is that Equinor and BP has parted ways. And Equinor is continuing with the Empire Wind I and they are reevaluating Empire Wind II. BP is looking at the Beacon Wind 1 and 2, and we probably will see that come to the forefront to the end of the decade. It’s good to see strong companies such as BlackRock getting behind some of these developments. It’s huge capital outlays for them, developing the offshore wind field. So when stronger companies are coming into the market, we see that as positive. But in general, we know the developers. We have good contacts with all of them. And with the Acadia being the Jones Act compliant vessel, we are very optimistic about the utilization and her engagement throughout the coming years.

Brian Russo: Okay. Great. And then just lastly, when we look at 2024 and into 2025, just your CapEx profile and as the new vessel CapEx winds down, there seems to be an inflection point, right, as CapEx winds down, your operating cash flow is normalized and is growing. We should start to see that inflection point kind of accelerate towards the end of — or the middle or towards the end of 2025. Is that kind of a fair statement when we look over the next 18 to 24 months?

Scott Kornblau: Yeah. That’s right, Brian. ’25 will be finishing up the Acadia and Amelia Island, but the CapEx, as you said, will be winding down. One of the advantages of having new vessels, is that it keeps your maintenance CapEx down from where we historically were. So yeah, you’re thinking about that right. We’ve said all along, we had this big cash outflow as we build for the future. That would wind down in ’25 and then we’d quickly start building up the coffers again.

Brian Russo: Great. Thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you. And I would like to hand the conference back over to Tina Baginskis for closing remarks.

Tina Baginskis: Thank you. We appreciate the support of our shareholders, employees and business partners, and we thank you for joining us in this discussion about the important developments and initiatives in our business. We look forward to speaking with you during our next earnings discussion. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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