Centuri Holdings, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to Century's second quarter 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Jason Wilcock, Century's Chief Legal and Administrative Officer and Corporate Secretary. Please, you may begin.

Thank you, John, and hello, everyone. We appreciate you joining our call. This morning we issued and posted to Century Holdings' website our second quarter 2025 earnings release. The slides accompanying today's call are also available on Century Holdings' website. Please note that on today's call, we will address certain factors that may impact this year's earnings and provide some longer-term guidance. Some of the information that will be discussed today contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These statements are as of today's date and based on management's assumptions on what the future holds that are subject to several risks and uncertainties, including uncertainty surrounding the impacts of future economic conditions and regulatory approvals. A cautionary note, as well as a note regarding non-GAAP measures, is included on slides two and 16 of this presentation, today's press release, and our filings Securities and Exchange Commission, which we encourage you to review. These risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made today. We caution against placing undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, and we assume no obligation to update any such statements. Today's call is also being webcast live and will be available for replay in the investor relations section of our website shortly after the completion of this call. Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, Gregory Eisenstart, Chief Financial Officer. I'll now turn the call over to Chris.

Thank you, Jason, and good day to all of you. We thank you for attending our second quarter 2025 earnings call. First of all, I'd like to sincerely thank our hardworking employees across the U.S. and Canada who deliver the highest service quality to our customers in a safe and productive manner. Without them, we wouldn't be here today. We're pleased with our performance in the second quarter, which delivered higher profitability year over year across all of our four business segments. On a consolidated basis, gross profit was 12% higher than last year this time and nearly 20% improved year to date. We drove strong revenue growth across our union and non-union electric operations and also within our Canadian gas sector. segments. US Gas also performed well and continues to make good progress in margin improvement initiatives and delivering predictable performance. Our sales and business development strategic initiative, underpinned by a data-driven approach and a robust project pipeline, along with our shift towards an organizational-wide growth mindset, drove another strong quarter in commercial performance. This is evidenced by 1.8 billion in new awards in the quarter, which materially tops our Q1 record performance of 1.2 billion in new orders. With 3 billion in total bookings through the first half of the year, we've already achieved a book-to-bill through H1 of 2.3 times and are on track to exceed our targeted book-to-bill ratio of 1.1 times for the full year 2025. Further, our strong bookings performance, our backlog, and near-term opportunities give us confidence to increase our full-year revenue guidance. I'll expand on its success in Q2 shortly, but first. Equally, if not more compelling than our current bookings are the strong end markets that we serve. As a result of our shift to get closer to our customers and better understand their needs, we've been able to increase the near-term addressable market of differentiated opportunities to which we will pursue. These opportunities span all core end markets, including gas, electric, and distributed power, including data centers. Since the first quarter of this year, we've added over 2 billion of new differentiated opportunities into the pipeline, which now stands at almost 14 billion. Our sales strategy is twofold. Improve alignment of our focus, resources, and capability, in capturing a larger share of the wallet from our existing customer relationships, and delivering our core services into new differentiated opportunities. The latter includes migrating our resource delivery to mitigate seasonality in our business, particularly on the U.S. gas side. Central to executing this strategy is our one-century approach, which has fundamentally transformed how we engage with our customers in the broader market. The sensory approach requires the entire organization to engage with our customers to not only safely deliver quality services, but to identify how we can increase the scope of what we do to deliver future customer needs. In addition, we have identified approximately 20 customers that we currently underserve and which affords us over $200 billion of opportunity over the next five years. we've created specific plans to engage more closely with these customers, aligning building capability and resource delivery to ensure we meet their needs and successfully maximize this opportunity. Over the last 90 days, I've been able to engage with almost all of these 20 customers, discuss their plans and challenges, and share how Century will align our business to ensure we meet their needs. So drilling further into our commercial success in the second quarter, As outlined in February, we began 2025 targeting over $3 billion in bookings, comprised of $1.8 billion from MSA renewals and over $1.2 billion from expanded scope, new MSAs, and strategic bid projects. Through the first half, we are effectively already there on that target. I'm proud that over one-third of our new awards are additive work above our existing MSAs, which will underpin our future growth. Of the total bookings in the quarter, nearly $1.2 billion represents MSA renewals, primarily from a few hundred-million-dollar agreements that long-standing gas utility customers in the Northeast and Midwest, including one relationship that spans over 40 years. In one of these cases, the award came sooner in the year than we had previously anticipated. A key focus of ours in the renewal process has been ensuring that we generate adequate returns so as to support the achievement of our historical norm of 7% plus gross margin in our gas business. We've also secured nearly $250 million from incremental MSA work, primarily comprised of adding new service territories through these gas-focused MSA renewals. Lastly, we won a $375 million in strategic project awards in Q2, heavily concentrated in our union electric business in the Northeast. These awards are comprised of core electrical work, including utility transmission projects with both 345 kV how voltage line and 115 kV line projects won during the period, as well as work in adjacent and emerging markets such as water infrastructure, distributed power, and of course, data centers. Notable wins in this category included our second water infrastructure project win this year and two awards related to R&G infrastructure. You'll recall that we secured an award related to data center electrical infrastructure in Q1 and have over 20 data center projects currently in our pipeline that we are pursuing. We anticipate the second half of 2025 to be focused on client engagement, positioning, and tendering for 2026. and we anticipate bookings to moderate during the remainder of 2025, with the exception of some MSA renewals and planned project awards. I reiterate, we anticipate that we will exceed our full-year book-to-bill target of 1.1. It's also worth noting that we are already positioning and tendering for 2026 opportunities, yet more evidence of the impact of our forward-thinking sales initiative and growth-orientated mindsets. Now a few words on another important factor of our strategy, capital efficiency. We remain focused on improving the efficiency of the fleet, an area where we can see meaningful opportunity to drive balance sheet strength and confident that we can make significant strides. As announced in July, we hired a senior vice president of fleet and procurement with almost 30, sorry, with almost three decades of experience in the energy and construction sectors to drive our enterprise-wide fleet and resourcing strategy. Coming to us from one of North America's largest utility and infrastructure contractors, where he managed 17,000 fleet assets globally, he will also focus on maximizing equipment utilization and improving capital efficiency across our $1 billion of fleet portfolio. Further, as part of our strategic initiative to optimize our asset management approach, I'm pleased to report that we've made meaningful progress in establishing a more balanced equipment financing model. This hybrid approach to asset financing provides us greater flexibility in managing our fleet of service vehicles and equipment whilst maintaining our ability to efficiently deploy resources across all of our extensive operations. Now to an overview of our business trends for the second quarter. In our US gas segment, and as expected, our revenue was stable year-over-year, and we focused on executing our substantial backlog of awarded work to begin demonstrating year-over-year growth in the second half of 2025. The strength of our recent MSA renewals and improved commercial terms is providing better profitability. We've seen improvement in gross margins year-over-year, supported by better resource utilisation, and work is ongoing as we continue to performance manage and identify further opportunities to drive further margin enhancement. We remain confident that our focus on operational excellence, combined with our stronger commercial terms, will create sustainable margin improvement in the months and quarters ahead. Our Canadian gas operations delivered exceptional results with strong revenue growth and margin expansion. demonstrating the effectiveness of our operating model within that market. Turning to our electric business, we're seeing excellent momentum across both segments. Our union electrical operations delivered robust growth and profitability in core business activities, particularly in industrial-focused markets where we play a role in executing on complex infrastructure projects. In our non-union electric segment, we've sustained the positive trajectory that began last year, with significant revenue growth driven by increased MSA volumes and crew deployment. To further elaborate on these trends, let me now turn over to Greg for more specific details on the financial results.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning to everyone joining us. Second quarter 2025 consolidated revenues totaled $724.1 million. a 7.7% increase from the second quarter of 2024, and consolidated gross profit was $67.8 billion, which is 12.1% higher than the prior year period. Gross profit margin of 9.4% in the second quarter of 2025 was approximately 40 basis points higher than the 9% we reported in the second quarter of 2024. On a GAAP basis, net income attributable to common stock The second quarter was $8.1 million, or 9 cents per share, compared to net income attributable to common stock of $11.7 million, or 14 cents, on a per share basis in the same period last year. In the second quarter of 2025, total company adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP figure, was $71.8 million, or approximately 5% higher than prior year quarters, $68.6 million. Aligned with our internal expectation, adjusted EBITDA margin was 9.9%, which compares with the 10.2% in the second quarter of 2024. Non-GAAP adjusted net income in the second quarter came in at $16.9 million, or 19 cents on a per share basis, compared to $17 million, or 20 cents per share in the prior year period. The difference between our GAAP and non-GAAP adjusted net income primarily reflects the after-tax impact of amortization of intangible assets, certain non-recurring costs, and non-cash stock-based compensation. Now to our reportable segments. U.S. gas segment revenue was $338.8 million, flat compared to the prior year. With the backlog driven by recent successful awards, we anticipate that both revenue profitability improvements will continue into the second half of 2025. Growth profit margin was 7.8% in the second quarter of 2025 and above prior year period 7.4%. This increase was due to better resource utilization under MSAs compared to the second quarter of last year. Following on from Chris's comments, we remain focused on margin improvement in our U.S. gas business through enhanced performance management. We've strengthened our foundation through strategic hiring and improved processes and saw improvement throughout the quarter. Our initiatives and achievements remain a work in progress, but with strong market demand, we are confident in our ability to return to historical margin levels. Canadian gas segment revenues were $55.1 million, up 18.1% from the prior year period, while segment margin of 17.2% was approximately $210 million. basis points improved over the prior year period as we continue to execute very well against the backdrop of steady, strong demand. Union electric revenue was $182.2 million, an improvement of 11% year-over-year. Our core union electric segment, which excludes offshore wind and storm restoration services, grew by 26.4% over the same period in 2024, driven by continued strength in project work centered around industrial-focused end markets, which we perform substation infrastructure and inside electric work. Within this segment, offshore wind revenues with $18.7 million, an expected decrease of approximately 41%, or approximately $13 billion, as project work winds down in line with our expectations. Growth profit in the union electric segment was 8.4% in the second quarter of 25, 100 basis points ahead of the 7.4% we reported in the second quarter of 24, due to the improvement in activity in our core business. Non-union electric segment revenue in the second quarter of 2025 was $149.9 million, a 24.4% increase year over year. Core non-union were increased by more than 50% versus the prior year period, primarily due to an increase in volumes under MSA, as we deployed significantly more crews and had higher work hours. Segment gross profit was 11% in the current quarter, which compares to 13.5% in the prior year period. This reflects the unfavorable impact of the decline in storm work, which carries much higher margins than our core electric work in this segment. And more than offset what was a strong performance in core margins from the favorable impact a more efficient utilization of fixed costs due to much higher volume of work. Company-wide, our G&A expense, excluding one-time and certain non-cash charges, increased $2 million year-over-year due to costs associated with our sales and business development activities and improved performance. Turning to capital expenditures, NetCapX was $19.4 million. compared to $17.7 million in the prior year period, and our pre-cash flow in the second quarter of 2025 improved by $27.1 million compared to the second quarter of 2024. As we typically see each year, working capital increased in the second quarter to our higher activity levels compared to the first quarter. This seasonal pattern is normal for our business, and we remain confident that our leverage ratio will improve from year-end 2024 to year-end 2025. moving to some balance sheet highlights. On a trailing 12-month basis, our net debt to adjust EBITDA ratio was 3.7 times at June 29, 2025, compared to 3.5 times at March 30, 2025, as amounts drawn under our revolver increased by $74.4 million during the period. We ended the quarter with $28.3 million in cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet, Near the end of the second quarter, we initiated a refinancing of our debt arrangements, which was successfully completed in early July. These refinancing actions extended our revolver maturity to 2030 and increased the facility size to $450 million and extended our $800 million term loan fee maturity to 2032 at a modestly improved interest rate. These actions, along with the elimination of legacy change and control provisions from our time as a Southwest gas holding subsidiary, enhance our financial flexibility going forward. During the second quarter, our free float significantly increased following two independent secondary offerings by Southwest, which as of today owns approximately 52% of our shares outstanding. Finally, turning to our 2025 outlook. On revenue, we are increasing our range now expecting to deliver between $2.7 and $2.85 billion, up from $2.6 to $2.8 billion previously, given the strong bookings. For adjusted EBITDA, we narrowed our outlook to $250 to $270 million, from $240 to $275 million. We continue to execute on our margin improvement initiatives, notably in U.S. gas. As we consistently review our business, we are investing in strategic planning initiatives and strengthening our talent acquisition efforts to support future growth, which will result in a slight uptick in our G&A expenses. Lastly, CapEx. The growth we're experiencing, especially in our electric business, is creating opportunity for strategic investment. To capitalize on this momentum and support our expanding operations, we're increasing our planned investment to $75 to $90 million, up from our previous range to $80 million. This enhanced capital deployment reflects our confidence in the business, positions us to capture even more growth opportunities ahead, and importantly, does not inflict with our ongoing efforts to ensure capital efficiency and transition our fleet financing mix. And now, back to Chris to conclude our prepared remarks.

Thank you, Greg. Century continues to execute on our strategic plans of delivering sustainable, profitable growth. To summarize, our one century approach is driving meaningful commercial momentum as evidenced by our 3 billion in first half bookings and the growth in our pipeline to nearly 14 billion. This is underpinned by our robust end markets. Our second quarter performance demonstrates the strength of our diversified platform. We're seeing excellent momentum in our electric operations, particularly strong performance in our Canadian business, and we're making steady progress in our US gas segment. The broad-based execution gives us the confidence to increase our full-year revenue guidance. We're also advancing our strategic initiatives around capital efficiency, including good progress on our equipment financing model and fleet management optimization. These efforts, combined with our enhanced commercial capabilities, positioned as well for continued growth. The fundamental drivers of our business remain robust, supported by increasing utility infrastructure spending and our expanding relationships with key customers across North America, and we look forward to updating you on our continued progress in the next quarter. Thank you very much for your time and support. Operator, you may start the Q&A session.

Yes, sir. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. And if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. Please limit your question for one question and one follow-up. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A queue. Thank you. And we now have our first question. And this comes from Steve Fisher from UBS. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning and congratulations on the progress you've been making. I just wanted to get a sense of, you know, with all the nice bookings you've added into the backlog here, if you can just give us a sense of the margins embedded there and sort of what's the ramp up in these projects and the confidence in the execution is now that the The business development efforts are starting to pay off. The focus will shift to execution and margins. So what kind of confidence do you have in the margins outlook from there? Thanks.

And maybe I'll answer that one, Stephen. Good morning to you. And then Greg possibly add something to it. Look, your assessment's good. You know, we've had a very, very strong six months to get the backlog to give us more volume into the business. that allows us to also be in better control and more predictable. So what I would say is the backlog that we have as we go into the second half of the year is at a higher margin than what we've delivered in the first half of the year. You know, the Q3, Q4 internal forecast demonstrate that we'll see an improvement across all the businesses in terms of margins. So the union and non-union electric, as their projects mobilize during the first half of the year, will get into full flight as we hit the summer months now and as we go into the later part of the year. And we expect to see greater improved margins in the second half of the year, which is giving us ultimately confidence on the full year forecast. You see the same in the MSA work. You know, January, February, March, there was some weather impact, as we discussed on the last call. the msa now work is now customers are now releasing more and more work to us and we'll start to peak in the coming coming weeks and months ahead and inevitably we should see and expect to see greater margins in q3 and even into q4 um i guess the last part of the margins is that i think as we've built we've built more volume into the pipeline we've we've increased our booking levels We're starting to get a better handle on our win rates, a better handle on pricing sensitivity. And as we build further backlog, we will no doubt start looking at how do we get better pricing improvements? How do we become a little bit more differentiated in our offerings to get better margins whilst we'll be pretty diligent in the risk profile we take on the future work? In summary, we expect second half of the year margins to improve from where we were in the first half. We've seen the backlog margins greater than what we've just delivered. We think it will be across all of the segments. And I think now we've got a good and stronger handle on the data within our sales pipeline, as well as our win rates and our performance. We'll look to see if we can push our differentiation further and improve pricing in the future.

That's very helpful, and this is a follow-up. From a resource perspective, to what extent now that you have this book of business, do you need to go out and hire for these projects, or is it more of a utilization play? I think, Greg, you mentioned a talent acquisition effort, so if you just can give us some sense of how much of an effort you need to make on talent acquisition.

Yeah, I think in the... In the near term, Steve, when we look at what we need to deliver from both a budget and a forecast standpoint in the next three, six, nine, and maybe even 12 months, appreciating that straddles into 26, I think we've got sufficient line of sight on what resources we need and where they're going to come from. I think as we start working a little bit longer range planning, we will need to do some We will need to look at the labor supply and talent supply market differently in a more structured way. Currently, we do a lot of resourcing through the opcos, and I think there'll be a lot more work we need to do centrally, but we don't foresee that needed now to meet the next three, six, nine, even 12 months of resources. It's well within the current resourcing capabilities and well within what we've done previously. But in the long run, we will need to look at doing things in a bit more strategic way at a group level versus through the OPCOS.

Terrific. Thank you very much.

Thanks for your question, Steve.

Thank you. And we'll now take the next question. And this comes from the line of Joe Odia from Wells Fargo. Your line is so open. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start on the balanced fleet management comments and just any additional color with respect to the timeline you anticipate to achieve that targeted balance and then how you think about that impact on EBITDA margins, maybe relative to where you're pacing this year.

Greg, do you want to lead that one and the answer to that?

Yeah. Yeah. Good morning, Joe. And we have made really considerable, you know, some considerable progress here in the second quarter and early into the third quarter on our capital efficiency initiative, not only from the strategic hire that Chris mentioned, but also from just getting our RFP done that we alluded to in past calls. That's been completed. We actually have leasing partners in very short order. And so we are working to get those done and you'll see some of that progress here in the second half of the year. Obviously, it'll continue to ramp up and fully be implemented over maybe a bit of a longer period of time. From a margin perspective, I wouldn't expect material changes in margin over the long term. We think that we can get to our targeted goal. It's more than achievable with the work we've done. We'll be able to rebalance some of that potential, keep it a pressure with just increased pricing and better efficiency in our fleet utilization to largely offset any kind of impact from a margin perspective.

And then I wanted to ask on the core electric utility, both union and non-union, and what you're seeing versus earlier in the year expectations from customers, areas where you're seeing higher activity than you would have anticipated, as well as how much of this is the strength of underlying activity versus some areas where you've been able to pick up some share in the market.

Do you want me to do that, Greg, after this one? Sure. I would say the following. All of our customers, I think I alluded to in my prepared notes, I've spent time with 19 of the 20 customers over the last 90 days, and every one of them is clear in that they're increasing their capital budgets. There's a general positive trend across all electric transmission distribution, distributed power, data centers. It's certainly more favorable than at the early part of the year. And it even extends into gas. You know, customers are very much focused on quality of and quantity of resource delivery and looking at maximizing outsourcing because they're ultimately resource constrained themselves. So this is as close to a seller's market that I've seen in my 35 years. The key for us is to get closer to our customers and really align of what they need and then start planning our investment in people, equipment and know-how and start building capability around their needs. And as I say, when I speak with the customers, It isn't in many cases about displacing anybody. Although we've seen one or two of our MSAs where we've got adjacent contractors, we've been able to go to customers and say, look, give us more scope and we can give efficiency to you. We can generate a better return. And so we have displaced and been able to capture more opportunity on some MSAs. But that really isn't the prevalent theme. You know, customers are giving me the messages around, you know, to the quality and safety standards we expect of you. Build up a resource base that's of the same and highest quality, and we've got more work than we've got resources for. That's great, Colin. Thank you.

Thank you. And the next question comes from the line of Sangeeta Jain from KeyBank Capital Markets. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hi, Chris. Hi, Greg. If I can ask you a question on the $14 billion pipeline that you mentioned, how does that split between MSAs and bid work? And further, if there is any specific data center type distributed energy opportunities within that?

Thank you. So thanks for your question. So let's just run through it. You know, the pipeline is, as you said, is, as we've stated, it's just shy of 14 billion. If you look at the mix in there, about two thirds of it is actually new project work and about one third of it is near term MSA renewals. So that should basically tell you our addressable market is very much very much focused on driving growth into the business. We've also got about 2 billion of near-term opportunities that we are currently tendering now, or the bids are already in, and we'd expect decisions this year, and a further 600 to 700 million of MSA renewals this year. So the headlines are, yeah, 14 billion. Two-thirds of it is new project work. One-third of it is MSA renewals. In the very near term this year, we've got 2 billion of pending bids that are out there. And we've got, in addition, 600 to 700 million of MSA renewals that are pending this side of the Christmas break. About 20% of the project work is distributed power or data centers when you look at the mix. I think the last thing I would say is the risk profile. um has not changed at all and we've had questions previously about you know we're looking at bigger contracts the average size of the contract is less than 20 million dollars so it's well within our historical risk profile we continue to deliver the same services for the same end markets as we've always done we've just been somewhat more aggressive in actually positioning ourselves for further opportunity

Got it, very helpful. And then one question on the increase in CapEx that you guided today. So just trying to think of how you are balancing your thinking between, let's say your equipment needs, buying the equipment versus leasing your equipment.

I will give you some sort of strategic guidelines and then let Greg go into some detail. Look, our overall objectives in the next period next few years is to hit a steady run rate where half of our fleet is funded from balance sheet cash and half is funded from leasing. And you could calculate very quickly how much free cash flow that generates over the next three to five years. Secondly, as we look to capture further opportunity, one of the real drivers for bringing in somebody new to lead it is we're trying to seek somewhere between a 15% up to 25% efficiency saving on the use of the fleet. That's either achieved by supply chain improvements, by looking at the five businesses and going to the market as one, or it's driven by better utilization or better life use on the assets. So the two strategic drivers are 50-50 mix, and then driving between 15% and 25% efficiency across the fleet when we look at it as a whole.

And I would just add, even though we're increasing our CapEx guidance, we are not deviating from our internal expectations on mix between buy and other financing needs. So we haven't changed or swayed that, but we are growing.

as you can see in our electric businesses, at a pretty healthy clip. Got it. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you for the questions.

Thank you. Thank you. And the next question comes from Justin Hawk from Braid. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Yeah, great. Thank you for taking my questions here. You know, obviously the awards have been really strong. You know, they were really strong last quarter and even stronger this quarter. I'm just curious on the MSA renewals, just given those are chunky and, you know, you book the whole amount when they come in. But on those renewals, I'm just wondering, on average, what's kind of the scope addition versus, you know, the last time you kind of booked those with the same clients? Like maybe just a way to quantify that. you know, how that scope has changed over the last, I don't know, whatever, five years ago when you booked it before.

Yeah, a couple of things.

You want to start with that? Yeah, you go, Greg.

That's fine. What I'd say as a reminder, you know, when we renew an MSA, we have the ability and we execute and negotiate, you know, greater price increases. related to, you know, from the MSA contract. So I think that's one point that's important to call out as we've renewed these MSAs, we've been able to renegotiate pricing a bit higher than what we had historically had. From a mix of work, you know, we've been able to increase our services with these customers. We've been taking, in certain cases, territories new territories. And so, you know, I point you to one of our slides, you know, MSA renewals, the strategic bids, you know, we've been able to increase the scope, you know, quite substantially in certain areas.

Yeah, specifically, we've added 25% incremental growth on the volume that we, on the renewal, give or take.

Great. No, that's helpful. Twenty five percent. I guess my second question would just be on the guidance and maybe just the cadence for thinking about the back half of the year. You know, you did almost eight percent revenue growth here in the second quarter. The midpoint of the guide is kind of looking for, you know, five percent for the back half. You had some really, you know, big storm comps last year, but just, you know, I guess balancing that would be the U.S. gas operations getting better. But maybe just, you know, thinking about the cadence of how you expect 3Q and 4Q to kind of play out to get to that guidance range.

Yeah, I mean, we're obviously pointed out last year, the second half of the year, we had some unseasonably higher storm revenues that came in. We've said in our guidance, we've looked at more of a historical average and built that into our guidance. We also had higher offshore wind last year. So those two are kind of headwinds going in year over year. But offsetting that is just improved performance, improved core business that we've already alluded to in the first six months. We'd expect that type of cadence to continue to offset year over year.

Great. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate it. Appreciate your questions.

Thank you. And the next question comes from Chris Ellinghaus from . Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hey. Good morning, guys. Hey, Chris. Christian, the bookings are fairly balanced, slightly skewed to electric. Is that a strategic choice or is that just coincidental?

I would say it's coincidental. And some of it's timing. But the overall pipeline, 52, 48 is I think the mix. It shifts from day to day because this is a dynamic situation. But it is coincidental. Some customers take longer to decide, some do not. I think I even alluded to in my commentary, there was one award in the gas side that we didn't, Anticipate till later in the year and that landed in the quarter, so it's not deliberate, no.

OK, so given the increase in the backlog and sort of the balance contained within it. Does that suggest to you, you know, sort of an inherent? Accretion to margin just due to the revenue balance.

I don't know how to answer that one other than to say, you know, we definitely see improved margins in the second half of the year. You know, the out-booked backlog margins are higher than the out-delivered in the first half. Some of that is driven just by the mobilization in the early part of the year. Some of that's driven by the fact that we've got more work now into the backlog, and it's been repriced to current conditions. I think the most notable thing for the business on the amount of work we've booked and the backlog is allowing us to be more predictable, which was kind of something we were lacking last year. We've now got such a head of steam in terms of pipeline size, data analytics, and backlog. that we are now looking not just three months ahead, we're looking six, nine, 12 months ahead. So that's allowing us to be very much more predictable in mobilizing resources, making informed pricing decisions with our customers, because we've got a really good view of where we're going to land at the end of the year. We're very predictable now because of the data and the bookings and the backlog and the market information we've got in-house. So I would say yes, as I answered one of the earlier questions to Steve, and we've alluded to in our notes, second half margins will be better across all businesses. But the volume, the bookings really helps predictability, resource planning, and gives us confidence on making decisions about the future of the business. And it's great to be sat here at mid-year and know that you've essentially got the full 2025 backlog booked. And then we're now looking at seasonality. So we've now got a really good view on where we are currently for Q1 so that we can inform our decisions now to win more work in areas of the country that can help mitigate the seasonality. And we're in a conversation now around where we think we'll be for the full year 26 to drive double-digit growth. Yes, margins, but more importantly for us, I think it's the predictability allowing us to make informed decisions and basically deliver what we say we're going to deliver.

Okay, that helps. Greg, you alluded to, you know, MSA escalators, and I'm not quite sure what you were saying about the increases, but let me ask the question in a slightly different way, and maybe you can add to it. would you call the escalators within the MSA extensions sort of the historical norm or more elevated?

What I was alluding to, Chris, and good morning, is while every year in an all-year agreement, we have an annual escalator embedded into the contract. When we come up for renewal, It's historically proven, and this year is no different, that we're able to reevaluate our unit pricing in a more precise way and ask for and achieve greater price increases than what a normal kind of annual escalator would generally give you. Okay, that helps. Adjust pricing based on actual performance.

Okay, that clarifies that. I appreciate it. Thanks for your details, guys.

Thank you, Chris.

Thanks, Chris.

Thank you, and there are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand the call over back to Christian Brown for any closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.

I'll just wrap up the call. I really appreciate everybody committing the time to us, to supporting us, And we'll look forward to providing updates over the coming weeks and in the next quarter. So thank you, everybody.

Thank you. This concludes our conference call for today. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.