Jacobs Solutions Inc.

ladies and gentlemen thank you for standing by my name is brent and i will be your conference operator today at this time i would like to welcome everyone to the jacobs fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise after the speaker's remarks there will be a question and answer session if you would like to ask a question at that time simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star 1. Thank you. It is now my pleasure to turn today's call over to Mr. Jonathan Doris, Investor Relations. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning to all. Our earnings announcement and 10-K were filed this morning, and we have posted a copy of the slide presentation on our website. I'll do a reference during the call. I would like to refer you to slide 2 of the presentation materials for information about forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. Now turning to the agenda on slide three. Speaking on today's call will be Jacobs Chair and CEO Steve Dimitrio, President and Chief Operating Officer Bob Vergata, President and Chief Financial Officer Kevin Berry. Steve will begin by reviewing our fourth quarter results and then provide an overview of our software and technology platforms. Bob will then review our performance by line of business and Kevin provide a more in-depth discussion of our financial metrics as well as a review of our balance sheet and cash flow. Bob will provide details on our updated outlook along with some closing remarks, and then we'll open up the call for your questions. In the appendix of this presentation, we provide additional ESG-related information, including examples of our leading ESG solutions. With that, I'll now pass it over to Steve Dimitriou, Chair and CEO.

Thank you for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 business performance and 2023 outlook. As I transition to Jacob's Executive Chair, I'm excited and confident about the next phase of our strategy boldly moving forward. This strategy continues to unlock and elevate our transformed high-performance culture to capture significant growth opportunities we've identified across climate response, consulting and advisory, and data solutions, while benefiting from the recurring nature and diversity of our core businesses. From a financial standpoint, we believe the rigorous execution of this strategy will result in enhanced long-term revenue growth and expansion in our profit margin profile. During our last two strategies, we maintained a focus on continuing to reshape our business through organic investments, acquisitions, and divestitures. And by doing so, we were able to deliver value for all of our stakeholders, including our shareholders. Since we started our journey together in 2016, we intentionally transformed our culture and our brand, grew revenue, and expanded profit margins leading to a total shareholder return of approximately 250%, almost twice the return of the S&P 500. We believe the next phase will be equally as transformative as we maintain our brand promise of challenging today and reinventing tomorrow. Let's now discuss our fourth quarter results. We're seeing strong demand with robust opportunities in our sales pipelines and a number of marquee recent wins, which underscores our strategy. During the quarter, net revenue grew 6% year-over-year and grew 11% on a constant currency basis, with another quarter of constant currency growth across each line of business. Backlog was up 5% from the prior year's quarter and 8% on a constant currency basis. Within People and Places Solutions, our advanced facilities business again posted double-digit year-over-year top-line and operating profit growth in the fourth quarter. and the remaining PNPS units in constant currency also experienced year-over-year growth. During the current quarter, Critical Mission Solutions is beginning to see previously delayed opportunities enter the final stages with a major cyber win last week and with another win close to clearing the protest period. PA Consulting and Constant Currency continue to show strong Q4 growth with revenue up 9% and backlog up 8% year over year. PA successfully won a large multi-year contract with the Ministry of Defense to secure the next generation soldier in what's proving to be a digitally-enabled battlefield. From a full-year standpoint, we finished the year within our original guidance range, even when recognizing the translation impact from the strengthening U.S. dollar, with double-digit net revenue and operating profit growth on a constant currency basis. Turning to slide five, let me discuss an element of our data solutions accelerator that's housed within the Divergent Solutions business unit, which we will formally break out starting in our fiscal first quarter of 2023. We have consolidated the majority of our software and data solutions into a single unit to gain benefits from consistent product management, marketing, and research and development. Our data solutions are aligned to three high-growth verticals. of transportation, water, and national security. A competitive differentiation of our vertical software platforms is access and integration of unique data sets and the ability to turn that data into actionable outcomes for our customers. For example, our Streetlight Data Platform is a SaaS solution that ingests a variety of mobility data sources into proprietary algorithms that provide data analytics for both traditional transportation clients and giga projects within the broader infrastructure market. Our geopod technology creates mapping data from multiple confidential customers as they plan for autonomous driving, precision agriculture, and other aerial surveillance requirements. In water, we continue to leverage smart algorithms developed by our domain experts to optimize our clients' operations and maintenance. Both AquaDNA and our intelligent O&M solution can save 10% to 30% in energy used for wastewater treatment. We continue to expand our water solutions across our clients' assets lifecycle. From a national security standpoint, our extreme search solution has proprietary algorithms and compute ability that can rapidly search large volumes of real-time or long data. One critical use case is quickly finding indicators of compromise to prevent cyber breaches. Given the significant amount of data that will be created and utilized in IT and OT environments, we believe the applications of these type of solutions are in the early stages of decades of robust growth. Before I turn the call over to Bob, first I'd like to thank the amazing people at Jacobs for living our values and progressing our culture over the last several years. Every single day, Jacobs is providing critical solutions globally. For example, most recently supporting NASA for the Artemis launch to the moon, or consulting on green hydrogen solutions for sovereign nations, delivering world-scale biotechnology manufacturing solutions, remediating harmful PFAS chemicals from our water, or planning autonomous transportation for the city of the future. It is truly our people that make Jacobs a company like no other. Now I'd like to congratulate Bob on his appointment to CEO. and say that I'm excited we have an experienced and dynamic leader who brings decades of industry domain knowledge and a proven track record to lead our boldly moving forward strategy into the future. Love?