This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

Maxar Technologies Inc.
8/9/2022
Today, my name is Savannah and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the MaxR Technologies Q2 2022 conference call and webcast. Today's call is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. And after the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. Thank you, and I would now like to turn the conference over to Johnny Bell. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and thanks, operator. Welcome to Maxar's second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. I'm joined today by the company's chief executive officer, Dan Javonsky, and chief financial officer, Biggs Porter. Both will make some opening remarks, after which we're going to open up the line for your questions. We're shooting to wrap up the call in about an hour. Before we get started, I'd like to refer listeners to the company's slide for today's presentation, which can be found on the company's website at maxar.com. Once there, please turn to slide two, where I'd like to remind you that part of today's discussion, including responses to various questions, may contain forward-looking statements, which represent the company's estimates, future plans, objectives, and expected performance at today's date. These statements are based on current assumptions that the company believes are reasonable, but are subject to a wide range of uncertainties and risks that could lead to actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking information. You can refer to the advisory regarding forward-looking statements contained in our quarterly earnings releases, earnings call slide decks, and the company's most recent MD&A section found in our Form 10Q on the company's website at maxcar.com. And with that, I'll hand the discussion over to Dan. Dan, go ahead.
Thanks, Johnny. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'm going to review the highlights of our performance in the quarter, go through our priorities, and talk a bit about recent successes we've had with our strategic plan. provide an update on the Legion program, and provide some information on the environmental work that Maxar has been doing. Please look at a more detailed review of financial results and our recent refinancing activities. Please turn to slide three. We had a solid quarter. In Earth Intelligence, we saw sequential growth in product revenues. Although revenue on the services side was a little light, which is a reminder, is a lower margin business due to challenges hiring cleared personnel and delays in awards. In space infrastructure, we posted solid margin performance at roughly 10%. Consolidated performance, as expected, reflected good growth from the first quarter. Total company booked to bill this quarter was four times, driven in large part by the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer Program Award announced in May. As a reminder, this award added $1.5 billion in backlog for the first five years of the contract, and is a $3.2 billion contract that provides great revenue visibility for Maxar over the next decade. Importantly, it also provides multiple paths for growth with the NRO, other U.S. government agencies, and our diversified customer base moving forward. Beyond AOCL, the Earth Intelligence segment had a diversified set of bookings across the U.S. government, international allies, and enterprise customers. Maxar was recently awarded an option year three contract renewal with the NGA for the Global EGD program. The annual contract value is approximately $44 million. This is the third of three option years for the contract, which has a total value of up to $176 million. We continue to see strong support for this program, and we expect to negotiate additional option years until the next iteration of this contract is recompeted. We've been providing some version of this capability for about a decade now, And with this award, Maxar will continue to provide more than 400,000 U.S. government users with unclassified, online and offline, on-demand access to high-resolution commercial imagery from Maxar, in addition to geospatial data from other industry providers. I'm pleased with the momentum we have in the earth intelligence business and expect recent bookings growth to drive continued revenue growth in the quarters ahead. In space infrastructure, Similar to last quarter, the segment book-to-bill continues to be impacted by the large number of GeoCommSAT awards received in 2020 related to the C-band transition, which are nearing completion. As a reminder, orders tend to be a bit variable and it's hard to predict precise timing. We continue to expect to end the year with a book-to-bill greater than one in the space segment. We have a good set of opportunities in front of us as we continue to perform on our legacy GeoComm business and pursue our strategy of customer, and product diversification. I'll go into it in a little more detail later, but two great examples of diversification have been our teaming with L3Harris as their subcontractor on the STA T1 tracking layer program, where we're providing buses for their 14 satellites, and our down select on the GeoXO program with NASA to perform study phase work for next-gen weather satellites. We're also seeing good traction with our PLEO investments in the commercial sector. On the balance sheet, Our key priority has been to manage through near-term maturities and to provide longer-term financial flexibility to pursue growth initiatives. We've done exactly that. As Biggs will address in more detail, we successfully refinanced our 2023 and 2024 maturities out to 2027 and 2029 and transitioned to a new $500 million revolving credit facility with a stronger and more supportive bank group. These transactions provide us ample runway to execute on our long-term plans for the business And along the way, significantly reduced debt and leverage driven by growth and free cash flow and profitability. Moving on to guidance. BICS will provide more details on the full year in a few minutes, but the quick take is that we are not making any substantive changes to our outlook for revenue and adjusted EBITDA, although we are modifying cash flow guidance to reflect the higher interest rate environment. Please turn to slide four for a discussion on the Legion program. Last quarter, I described a test configuration anomaly on Legion that led to us delaying the first launch to September. Since then, we've continued to make progress and have completed environmental testing on the first two Legion satellites and are in final closeouts. That means we are essentially hardware ready for the first launch. We've also completed integration of hardware and initial performance testing on the third of six Legion satellites, and that spacecraft will be moving on to environmental testing in the next few weeks. The fourth satellite is in its final test phase prior to environmental testing. So we will be hardware ready for the second launch in short order as well. The fifth and sixth satellites are progressing in logical sequence. So from the hardware side, we're on track. Moving to software validation. Our software is code complete. Unfortunately, it became apparent in July that we had delays in software validation and testing that could impact overall timelines. We've made significant progress against these challenges and now estimate a fourth quarter launch window instead of late third quarter. Once these software validation steps are complete, we'll begin launch campaign activities, including the shipment of the satellites to the launch facility down at the Cape, and lastly, of course, on-orbit testing, commissioning, and the beginning of revenue generation. Back on the positive side of the ledger, we have been conducting launch and commissioning rehearsals, and teams have been working to reduce the timeframe between launches. We now believe we can reduce the time period between the first and second launches to two months versus the three months we had previously estimated. Additionally, we've been working on reducing in-orbit commissioning time from our previously disclosed estimate of 60 to 90 days. These steps should allow us to pull forward revenue generation and recoup some of the schedule impacts. Additionally, we have increased our insurance coverage for our World View Legion satellite launches from $520 million to $620 million, with a heavier weighting toward the earlier launches. These policies cover the launches, including our additional third launch, plus the first year in orbit. Following the first year in orbit, we will seek to obtain in-orbit coverage similar to what we currently have on our existing satellites. So to recap, hardware is essentially complete for the first launch. We're in a good position for our schedule on the second launch with closer center lines. We're progressing through software validation and are rehearsing to execute multiple launches and commissioning. And we've bumped up our insurance coverage. Along the way, we've also been making solid progress with our Legion presales and DAF ground systems upgrades and remain confident in the long-term success of the program. Let's now turn to slide five for a quick review of our 2022 priorities. At the top of the list are EOCL and Legion. As I just discussed, we've accomplished one and are making progress on the other. As far as investments in products and go-to-market strategies are concerned, these continue, particularly investments focused on our higher margin products, where we see a long runway for growth. As a reminder, I did a deep dive on our earth intelligence product business back on the third quarter 2021 earnings call, and I would encourage you to revisit the associated slides with that discussion for more details on our focus areas. As far as other key priorities are concerned, The space infrastructure segment executed well this quarter, generating solid margin performance, and the pipeline remains robust as we focus on capturing awards going forward. We've been investing in differentiated capabilities like proliferated low Earth orbit, or PLEO satellites, and continue to expand our partnerships with large defense companies as we develop efficient, commercially oriented solutions for national defense, security, and civil missions. For the SDA tranche one layer, tracking layer, L3Harris is the prime, and Maxar will execute a subcontract for the design and production of 14 spacecraft platforms and associated support for the prototype Constellation. The Space Development Agency commissioned this program as part of the missile warning and tracking warfighting capability of the National Defense Space Architecture. The Tranche 1 tracking layer will provide limited global indications, warnings, and tracking of conventional and advanced missile threats, including hypersonic missile systems. This is a big win and a validation of Maxar's expanding national security scope, where we plan to showcase our capabilities more going forward. These modular satellite platforms illustrate the company's ability to adapt and leverage our deep experience, particularly with proliferated low Earth orbit constellations. Also, two weeks ago, Maxar was selected by NASA as one of two companies to conduct the Geostationary Extended Observations, or GEOEXO, spacecraft phase A study. It's down to two teams. Our space team will develop the concept for this next generation of weather monitoring spacecraft. This continues a legacy of work that started decades ago. Our space team built the first and second GOES satellites in the 1970s and 1990s, which operated well beyond their expected lifetimes. GEO EXO is the follow-on to the GOES series. The Phase A work will establish the performance requirements for GEO EXO and help define the spacecraft's potential performance and development schedule. Please turn to slide six. Couple of other items I'd like to briefly address. We've discussed in prior earnings calls how our news bureau program is working with media outlets to increase global transparency and help combat the spread of disinformation in relation to the war in Ukraine. This current war, more than any other in the past, has helped the general public better understand what Maxar and the geospatial community does with satellite imagery and the importance of understanding what is happening where and when. Maxar has been releasing more than just satellite imagery, which is quite impactful itself. We've been showcasing our precision 3D capabilities that are particularly powerful in running change detection algorithms. You can see a demo of that if you click the link on slide seven. This is a high-precision, AI-enabled environment that allows users to make their way through massive amounts of information at scale. We've also been using our weather desk solutions to monitor Ukraine's agricultural industry. As you know, the country is one of the world's top grain exporters and supplies many parts of the world that are already facing food insecurity. WeatherDesk is our on-demand product that transforms regularly changing weather data into actionable insights. The team has been assessing Ukraine's 2022 spring crop. Farmers planted less acreage this year, as indicated in red on the map on slide eight, and they will likely harvest up to 50% fewer crops if the conflict continues as it's going. The WeatherDesk team is also tracking Europe's ongoing extreme heat wave. For more details on both the assessment and heat impacts, please review slide nine. We also published a blog post about the planting assessment and harvest prediction, which you can read online. Maxar's strengths in global high resolution imagery, multispectral capabilities for doing things like methane detection, analytics expertise, and upcoming leaching capacity provide a competitive advantage to be the trusted standard for environmental applications that require geospatial data. In 2021, our environmental related offerings generated more than $50 million of revenue. and we're on track to grow this business by roughly 20% this year. This is becoming a substantial and leverageable growth vector for us, and we have to be the geospatial industry leader for future public sector and enterprise environment revenue opportunities. And finally, this quarter, we published our first environmental, social, and governance report and are pleased that our ESG scores from ISS have significantly improved in the last two years. Importantly, it provides details on our efforts to build upon good governance practices, develop a more diverse workforce, invest in the communities where Maxar and its customers do business, create more sustainable practices, and leverage our data to help customers and partners make a better world. That report is also available online. So to summarize, we had a solid quarter. We had good wins with EOCL, T1 tracking, our global EGD renewal, continued environmental capabilities growth, and we got the refinancing work done. We still have work to go on leaching, and we're laser-focused on that effort. And with that, I'm going to turn the call over to Biggs for a deeper discussion on our performance. Biggs?
Thanks, Dan. Please turn to slide 10, where we present year-over-year comparisons for the second quarter. Net loss for Q2 is $30 million, inclusive of the $53 million loss on debt extinguishment as a result of the refinance. Net loss per share was $0.41. Revenue was down 7% year-over-year for the quarter. Revenue was flat earth intelligence, and space infrastructure was down 10% for the quarter as commercial and U.S. government backlog continues to mature. Adjusted EBITDA margins for the quarter are down roughly 70 basis points, driven by tough comps at the segment level from a combination of mixed and strong performance in the prior year at space infrastructure, and the planned increased investments we're making this year to drive future growth. Our results for the quarter include increased expense related to our R&D and marketing efforts at space infrastructure, our product development strategy at Earth Intelligence, and our ERP project, which is an important enhancement of the company's government contracting capability. These aggregate to over $10 million in the quarter. On a year-to-date basis, total company revenues decreased 3%, and adjusted EBITDA margins expanded to 110 basis points. So setting aside the comparison to a tough comp last year, this was a strong quarter that met our expectations and demonstrated good sequential growth. Please turn to slide 11. Earth intelligence revenue was flat year-over-year in the quarter and adjusted EBITDA margins decreased 90 basis points, also on a tough comp from last year. On a year-over-year basis, we experienced increases in product revenues from U.S. government programs. However, this underlying growth is masked by headwinds we're facing in our services business year-to-date due to the push out of awards and cleared workforce challenges. The net effect on margins from the favorable mixed shift was offset by increased expenses, including those related to our product development efforts. On a year-to-date basis, earth intelligence revenues are flat, and adjusted EBITDA margins are down 202 basis points, as we continue to invest in the build-out of product efforts, which includes an uptick in labor-related expenses. Importantly, in the current year, revenues grew 13% sequentially, quarter-over-quarter, and margins expanded 600 basis points. We expect to continue this growth the second half of the year, primarily in the fourth quarter. Please turn to slide 12. Space infrastructure revenue decreased 10% year-over-year in the second quarter as commercial and U.S. programs near completion and backlog matures. Adjusting bid-dial margins contracted 290 basis points due to program mix and strong performance compared to the same period of 2021, but remained healthy at 10.2%. On a year-to-date basis, revenues have increased 1%, and adjusted BIDDAH margins have expanded 630 basis points. Recall the first quarter of 2021 included $28 million negative impact on revenue in adjusted BIDDAH from the charge related to Sirius XM7. Normalizing for this, revenue was down slightly and adjusted BIDDAH margins are largely consistent. As a reminder, the increases seen in R&D primarily relate to PLEO efforts and were included in guidance for the year. This spin and our future ERP spin to space infrastructure will continue to create some pressure on margins in the segment over the rest of the year, but as evidenced by the T1 Tracking Award, these are already paying off. Please turn to slide 13. The company generated $19 million in operating cash flow from continuing operations in the second quarter and invested $87 million in CapEx. Cash flows were negatively impacted by 91 million in unfavorable working capital changes, driven by timing of receipts and periodic payments. We expect this to reverse in the second half. Please turn to slide 14 for a recap of the refinancing activities completed in the second quarter after we announced the 10-year EOCL award in May. As a reminder, we had bonds maturing in 2023. We also had a credit facility under which there was a revolver and a term loan that were approaching their maturities in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Because of the interrelationships of the different obligations and pending maturities, the holistic rather than a piecemeal approach was optimal. Our main priority with this refinance was to remove all near-term maturities, protect ourselves from continuing increases in interest rates, secure a new credit facility with a stronger and more supportive bank group, and remove a significant refinancing risk in an increasingly uncertain credit environment. The EOCL contract award provides a firm foundation for this effort. Under the new capital structure, our newest maturity is now 2027 versus 2023 in the prior structure, an extension of four years. In addition, we have the ability to reprice our term loan B starting in December 2022 We opted for a five-year bond with a two-year no-call period to allow us the flexibility to refinance in June of 2024. Once Worldview Legion launches are underway, combined with increased free cash flow generation and debt reduction, we expect an upgrade in our credit rating will help drive better pricing in future refinancing transactions. Please turn to slide 15 for a more detailed breakdown of interest changes resulting from the refinance. When we guided through the year, we projected cash interest of $103 million. This included projected interest rate savings of $10 million from a refinancing. Implicitly, absent a refi, our expected interest cost was $113 million in a steady market environment without any refinancing. This $113 million is for interest payments only and excludes any impact of paying the premium to retire the 2023 notes. Markets clearly moved away from us during the course of the year. Increases in base rates, upwards of 2.5%, spreads and effective yields increased our cash interest costs from what would have happened in a steady rate environment with no refinancing. We saved interest costs on the refinancing of the bonds with a coupon of $7.75 versus $9.75 on the old bonds, but the term loans became more expensive by a combination of rising base rates and increasing spreads. The bottom line is that instead of a decrease in cash interest costs of $10 million, we had an increase of $27 million. Breakdown to $27 million, about $15 million comes from rising interest rates on our existing floating rate debt from increases in the base rate. $6 million is from the timing of final interest payments on retired debt, and $11 million is from increased spreads in our term loan fee. This was partially offset by $5 million of savings on the new bonds. Comparing the $27 million increase in cash interest costs to the anticipated $10 million of savings, we end up with a variance of approximately $40 million relative to our guidance expectations. The comparable variance to our expectations for 2023 is a negative effect of approximately $50 million before any significant mitigation. In a recovered market and better credit rating, there is potential to mitigate the impact down to approximately $35 million with an improved spread and sell-for rates. I say it this way because our no-call period on that $1.5 billion interim loan B expires at the end of this year. So there may be opportunity to bring this down with improved market conditions and improved credit. Our 2023 targets originally contemplated 35 million of interest savings. At a minimum, those savings have been absorbed by the increase in base rates and spread. I would reduce your expectations for 2023 free cash flow by 35 to 50 million, depending on what you believe about market conditions. I'll comment more on this in a moment. As a side note, in this refinancing, we did achieve better pricing on our revolving credit facility. It just doesn't have a significant impact on the calculations I just went through. Although it's been a tougher interest environment than we would have preferred, we did execute and are now in a sound capital structure position with opportunity for further improvement through repricing of the term loan B as early as December of this year and through the call of the bonds as early as June 2024.
Please turn to slide 16.
We had roughly $341 million of liquidity at the end of the quarter. Debt increased $203 million this quarter, driven by $90 million of borrowing from the revolver to fund the refinancing, as well as $56 million increase in Term Loan B associated with the refinancing. From this point forward, our bank leverage calculation is going to look different. Our adjusted EBITDA is being used as a denominator for bank leverage calculation has changed as we move from IFRS to GAAP adjustments and removed the IFRS to GAAP adjustments and reset the covenants to match this as well. Going forward, we still anticipate the covenant calculation to benefit from additional add-backs such as stock-based compensation. However, the calculation will be closer to what can be derived from our financial statements. This new calculation is more aligned with how we internally view our leverage as well. Under this new calculation, our leverage is 4.7 times leverage compared to a covenant of 5.5 times. Our interest coverage ratio is 4.1 versus a covenant of 2.5. Please turn to slide 17. I want to take a couple of minutes to address questions related to our tax asset carry-forwards that came up during our refinancing activities. As we move forward to generation taxable income, the value of these tax assets is going to be more apparent. As of December 31 last year, we had federal NOL carry-forwards of $523 million, interest deduction carry-forwards of $141 million, which are in addition to the NOLs, and federal R&D tax credit carry-forwards of $84 million. On a tax-effective basis, these tax assets aggregate to approximately $225 million at today's federal tax rate. We expect that these tax assets and our tax strategies will shield us from significant cash taxes at least until sometime in 2026. We also expect to continue generating R&D tax credits, increasing annually to around $20 million by 2026. This should help everyone model future tax benefits and related cash flow. Now please turn to slide 18 for an update on our 2022 guidance. Total company revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance remain unchanged. At Earth Intelligence, the total revenue range is consistent with the tightened ranges we presented in conjunction with the EOCL award announcement. Top-line pressure in our lower-margin services business creates some headwind, but we have active prospects in our higher-margin imagery business that should partially or fully offset this. The high end of the range is also still within reach. As we've been saying, much depends on the timing of book-ship business. We continue to expect to see growth in earth intelligence, primarily in the fourth quarter, through and by-product growth across our government and enterprise businesses. This would be consistent with the fourth quarter trend in the prior year. We have a strong pipeline of opportunities in Earth intelligence. Similar to what we said last quarter, this growth would come from a variety of sources, including precision 3D, increased government revenues, including from Ukraine, and DAF customer upgrades. We have taken Legion revenues out of the guidance for this year. Guidance for space infrastructure is unchanged. and we see less risk there as we continue to execute on the work we have in backlog. We also see a robust set of opportunities in this segment. Turning to adjusted EBITDA, at Earth Intelligence, the softness we're seeing in our services business presents less risk to adjusted EBITDA as this is lower margin work. The product growth we were forecasting is higher margin and will help drive adjusted EBITDA growth the remainder of the year. primarily in Q4. At space infrastructure, we're tracking towards the higher end of our range, but this will not impact consolidated results materially, particularly as the intercompany work related to Legion is eliminated. Capital expenditures are tracking towards the top end of our guidance range, driven by Legion, and I've already covered the $40 million change in current year operating cash flow expectations, driven by the recent refinance. Generally, we don't update all elements of our long-range plans every quarter, so don't quarterly reconfirm every element of longer-term guidance. Having said that, we assume constant rates when we forecast interest costs on existing debt and have therefore implicitly changed our line item guidance for cash interest savings in 2023 by $50 million. This assumes a fairly unchanged credit market, which hopefully is conservative. I'm sure everyone will ask about the effect on 2023 of delay in Legion launches from September to the fourth quarter. The effect of that delay and whether there are offsets to it or other factors to consider is too early to call. As a reference point, we have historically said the full year adjusted EBITDA run rate for the first year of Legion was 80 million. But we are tightening our timeline between launches and are focused on commissioning cycle time. As a result, there may be no meaningful delay in achieving the full deployment of all six satellites. To summarize otherwise, we executed our refinancing in a tough market which carries increased costs affecting our near-term cash guidance, but still de-risks and sets us up well for the future. We had good sequential growth in the quarter and our operating results. We have strong opportunity sets across both of our businesses, and we are maintaining our outlook for revenue in a just a bit dog for the year. With that, I'd like to hand the call back over to the operator to begin the Q&A.
Thank you. And as a reminder, that is star one if you would like to ask a question. Our first question will come from Peter Armentz at Baird.
Please go ahead. Thanks. Good afternoon, Dan Bix. Hey, Dan, maybe just to focus on Legion. I'm sure you had a lot of questions on Legion, but maybe just to help level set. How long is the normal kind of software validation period? And then also, if you could just describe how long we should expect on the transportation of the satellites. Thanks.
Yeah, thanks, Peter. Well, we thought we would be done with software validation by now and had some delays that were unexpected. And so that's That's causing the shift from late Q3 into Q4. We've got to get all the way through that software validation testing, but the fact that we're essentially hardware ready has brought down a lot of risk in the program. And so, you know, with a new program like this and a development program, we continue to knock off items on our list of deliverables before we take the satellites down to the range. We're on track to do that, but more than we wanted to see this particular cycle. Once we finish all of that and send the satellites downrange, in the current schedule we're planning on ground shipment. We do still have opportunities to potentially send the legions downrange by air. So it's anywhere from 10 to 14 days we go by ground to you know, same-day service, you know, with a day turnaround loading and unloading if we do it by air otherwise. So, we've got a little bit of slack in the schedule there depending on which route we take. And then, as we also mentioned on the call, we have been using the time wisely, I think, while we've had this unfortunate delay to be able to reduce cycle times, focus on that, focusing on commission and rehearsal activities, and also, we believe, be able to shrink the time towards commissioning of the satellites. So, limiting the impact of any, you know, for investors, the impact of revenue generation, and for our customers, the impact of not having the satellites on orbit yet for their important mission needs.
Appreciate that. I'll leave it there. Thanks. Thanks, Peter.
And our next question will come from Colin Canfield with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Talking a little bit about space infrastructure, can you just discuss or maybe update us on kind of how you view the geostationary market? And kind of within that context, if we think about, you know, a flat to modestly up market, how do you think about the moving pieces between legacy SATCOM and kind of incremental new tech demand or big tech demand?
Yeah, thanks, Colin. So, you know, I'm really pleased that we were able to announce the one down select and also the T1TL award here. It's been our announced strategy for quite some time to continue to service the market we're in, which is the geocom set market. And we continue to expect, you know, off a lower base than what that used to be, but pretty solid numbers of expected awards there that we'll get to continue to maintain our market share. And those have been longstanding and really important customers for us. So we're excited to see continue serving them and that's a good base in our business. But we did realize that for more resiliency in the business, as well as additional growth factors, that we would have to work on diversifying both our product set and our customer sets. And so we've been spending, as Biggs mentioned, good R&D money in new capabilities technologies like PLEO. And we've also been really working our capability efforts for national defense and security programs, as well as NASA programs, which are huge market opportunities. If you look at the dollars being spent there, as well as the strategic importance of space to not just for exploration and science like NASA, but national defense infrastructure and intelligence as well. T1TL is a perfect example of that, being down-selected on the GEOXO program with NASA for eventual GEOCOMSAT. Weather satellites is another element of that. And so we're pushing forward on those fronts. We think we're building a much more resilient business, one that has better growth potential and one that will be able to better protect its margins and increasing cash flow going forward.
Got it. And just within that construct, can you just talk a little bit about what the LHX deal implies for the cash and margin trajectory of the business? I think understanding that kind of going into Trump's one is that it's been a pretty competitive bid environment. And obviously, you don't want to disclose terms because they're competitive. But as we think about how that flows through the business, is there a good way to frame it?
Yeah.
And I'm glad you said that. So I didn't have to. Thanks, Colin.
What I'd say is the one really good thing about this program is we're picking an architectural design that is, you know, it's not 100% across every different program we're looking at, but a PLEO architecture that is usable not just for national defense missions or intel missions, but also for commercial missions. So with this award, we're buying down a lot of design and engineering and technology work up front. So even this is a little lower margin business to start with as it grows and as it ramps and if this becomes a much larger constellation. Again, the 14 satellite infrastructure is sort of a prototype constellation. So if that grows, we'll have already spent a lot of money on the front end here to build those capabilities. And then as we bring this type of capability for other defense and security missions as well as commercial missions, we should expect to see higher margin rates on the other side of that. And as we've said, we always wanted to run this business at better than 10%. It'll be a little lumpy here and there depending on awards and investments we make, but we think we're well on the way to do that.
Got it. Thanks for the call. You bet.
Our next question will come from Thanos Mishopolis with BMO Capital Markets.
Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon.
Hi. Hey, Sam.
Just a second.
Hey, Dan. Just expanding on the services business within the EI and the weakness there. So I guess two issues, part of it staffing, part of it program delays. At this point, any visibility in terms of when some of those program delays will resolve?
Yeah, we, you know, it's been, we get more visibility throughout the course of the year. And that's why we're, you know, as big as address, we're able to hold our revenue and EBITDA guidance, even with some weakness there. And also as we backfill some of that with higher margin product business, but they seem to be resolving. It's just taking a little bit longer than we originally thought it would going into this at the beginning of the year. You know, we continue to have a very robust, you know, we kind of lump it together as the services business, but there's a lot of classified work in there, a lot of work related to cutting edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, space situational awareness, and other things that we're doing. that matches really well into the rest of our earth intelligence product business. And so, you know, it's very valuable business for us. Some of it's just moving a little bit slower than we'd like right now. I think across the industry, the hiring challenges have been pretty well explained by lots of other companies as well. We continue to pour a lot of effort into that, and we think we're turning the corner on it. But we've just got to, you know, we're always hiring on that side of the business, particularly for people with the right tech expertise. as well as the right security clearances.
Great. And then just to join you to the international government-to-defense business within EI, since that was down year over year, so again, really just a tough comp, and as we look forward, you alluded to more DAP program upgrades. Are you seeing ongoing growth in some of the significant offerings in the project?
Yeah, I think probably the two things to call out. One, you mentioned the DAF upgrades. We've got several of those done, but we do have continued upgrades to get done throughout the course of the year. We're seeing several under contract now, but continued strong demand for Legion. So with the DAF upgrades and with the Legion capabilities, we've got built-in growth just with the existing customer base. And then we do have opportunities to add to our DAF number and location of customers throughout the world. And that's going to help us more efficiently monetize the overall constellation, but especially in the high demand regions of the world as well as Legion comes online. The other thing I'd say is we are seeing better product adoption with our international customers as well. The tough comp we mentioned last year was some book shift business with a very large international defense customer. So we could see some of that going forward. And we're seeing strong adoption of the 3D technology as well. So that's exciting for us because the investments we've been making in that, and that's a high margin piece of the business, really seem to be bearing some fruits with the diversified customer base, particularly the international defense and intelligence customers.
Thanks, Dennis.
Our next question will come from Ken Herbert with RBC Capital Markets.
Please go ahead.
Hey, good afternoon, Dan and Biggs. Hey, Ken. Good afternoon. Hey, the fiscal 22 guide for Earth intelligence implies a pretty significant ramp in the second half of the year on the top line. It sounds like this is more fourth quarter weighted. Can you just comment on maybe a little bit more specifics on the cadence you expect in that business as we go through the fourth quarter, I'm sorry, the third to fourth quarter, but then also some of the key you know, programs or other items that you have confidence in that will really get to the, get up into the guidance range for the segment.
So, really, if you recall last year and even the year before that, fourth quarter had good step up, and we expect to have that kind of good step up this year. The last year, you may recall, we increased our product revenues with Earth Intelligence by $100 million. There's a chance to do that again this year, and much of that's in front of us. The DAF upgrades that Dan spoke to, the adoption of 3D, and the general interest that we see out there internationally and domestically, some of that driven by world events, all positions as well to have a Good growth through the third and fourth quarter. I would say, you know, third quarter flattished up some and then a sharper increase in the fourth is the pace we would expect.
Probably just a little bit of an overlay to add on that too, Ken, is that I think we have had the opportunity to move a few of these deals quicker if we would have wanted to, but we're really holding pricing on the 3D product line. It's a unique capability. It's really valuable. And while the deals are taking a little bit longer, we do believe they're going to get done and that'll build a more solid base for the business on pricing and revenue accretion and bottom line accretion going forward. Okay.
Very helpful. And if I could just to pivot over to the legions. You know, you've called out starting to do some development work on, I think, Satellites 7 and 8, maybe some initial work. Can you just remind us on the schedule for those satellites relative to the first six?
Yeah, so just kind of to level set, we do believe we're getting better at the center lines on the current constellation, particularly between the first and the second launch, as we have hardware in hand to finish the software program. Fourth quarter launches assume 60 day center line on the second launch, and then we'll keep working on the third launch there as well. Seven and eight, what we did was we bought long lead time parts and started the procurement process for that, partially because we see continued demand out there, but even more so to build a little bit of resiliency just in case we had issues with any of the current launches or on orbit commissioning plans for the Legion Constellation. So those are, you know, at least, minimum 24 to 30 months out from today if we were to start thinking about, you know, ramping up an effort to put effort into getting those built in on orbit. And we'd want to see a strong customer demand for that. You know, kind of back on the – we mentioned it on the call, but it's in the queue as well. We did enhance our insurance buy to also provide some more resiliency into the launch profile here for the Constellation. So just, you know, we're just kind of building a better – set a barrier around the business as we move forward. The debt refinance was part of that. We're just in a much more solid position where we are today.
Yeah, I would reiterate that. The baseline assumption on these seven and eight is we really wouldn't need to start spending an earnest on those until the latter part of 24. And to go back to an answer I gave to your first question on the ramp up at Earth Intelligence, I just say, you know, There's a long prospect list which supports our revenue assumptions and EBITDA assumptions for the remainder of the year. So we feel, once again, really good about the opportunity set in front of us. It largely just comes down to the exact timing and particularly as much as it's driven by book shift type business.
Great. Appreciate all the detail. Thank you.
And as a reminder, that is star one if you would like to ask a question. Our next question comes from the line of Robert Springharn with Milius Research.
Hi, good afternoon. Hey, there. Hey, Rob.
Dan, could you review where you are on the hardware for WVL Beyond 1 and 2? Did you receive the electro-optical instrument for number four, and when should you get the hardware for five and six?
Yeah, thanks, Rob. So, we do have all of the instruments for the first four satellites. As I said, satellite one and two are essentially hardware complete doing final closeouts. Satellites three and four have the hardware they need, particularly the instruments. One is going into environmental test in a couple of weeks, and then the other will go into environmental reference testing shortly after that. So, we'll be essentially launch-ready from a hardware perspective, with four satellites in pretty short order here. We do not have the instruments yet for five and six, but we've been doing final closeouts on our checklist of items down with Raytheon on those and expect them, you know, in due order this fall to support the launch schedule. Well within the launch schedule, we've got planned up for five and six right now.
Okay. And could you give a little more detail on the software issue you talked about And then on the delay from September to Q4, is that a one-month delay to October? Is it three months to December? How should we think about that?
Yeah, we're not pinning it down. We're just saying Q4. So we went from late Q3 to Q4. And the software delays really were in the software validation, validation and verification testing. And what happened was we just had a lot more challenges getting through the final validation phase of lots and lots of different tests we run on the satellites and the software to be able to ensure that we'll be able to conduct full mission operations and all of the anomaly events that we might expect during the life of the satellites are fully ticked and tied out. And it just kind of hit a roadblock and took a lot longer than we thought. We think we're past that now, and things feel much better in hand, but we've got to complete that validation. before we put the satellites up on orbit.
Okay. Just a last question on Legion. Should we still expect 5 and 6 to launch 60 to 90 days after 3 and 4?
Yes. Yeah. Okay. Excellent. Thank you. You bet.
Our next question will come from Austin Moeller with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon, Dan and Biggs. Hey, Austin. Good afternoon. All right.
So just my first question here, as you continue to win more work using this 150-kilogram modulated LEO bus like you did with tracking layer, Should we expect less lumpy revenue generation in space infrastructure, and should we expect significantly faster assembly times relative to the geocom sats or NASA program spacecraft to try and compete with more of these small sat manufacturers?
Yeah, I think on the – I'll take them in reverse order, and then Big Skinhead color commentary here if you'd like. We'll definitely have to go a lot faster per unit satellite, so – Sometimes the overall course of a program, you know, like 14 buses might take similar to what one geobus might take, but we're getting more, I don't want to quite call it assembly line yet, but a lot more, you know, rote in how we're doing these programs and how we're going to pump out satellites. And we're building the infrastructure to be able to do these on a very high cadence, particularly as we look at maybe larger expanded scope defense projects like this or else commercial satellite applications as well. So the investments we've been making up front, and Briggs brought up a good point, usually you make investments in a business, you don't see them pay off this quickly. We're really excited to see those investments translating this quickly into wins. So that's good for the business. On the lumpiness side, You know, depending on the size of these awards and if we can layer them in and feather them in, you know, hopefully we don't quite see something like the big slug you might see with the, you know, one geostat program coming in. But it's a little too early to tell on that side of the business for us to probably predict that with, you know, full certainty at this point. But as we build out a more, I think, robust and diversified business, we should see, you I don't want to call it quite smoothness because this still is a large spacecraft manufacturing endeavor, but a much more predictable, you know, sort of quarter to quarter, first half, second half, year to year base of the business. Biggs, your thoughts?
I'll just add that, I mean, the team has worked very hard to make the business more predictable. As Dan says, you know, expanding the business base is a positive thing. Although I caution, it is still percent complete accounting, and so you're always going to have some degree of variability from the quarter-to-quarter basis as a result of that. But presumably, as the backlog grows and the business space diversifies, you should see more steadiness quarter-to-quarter on a top-line basis, absent any significant variations from EAC accounting.
Okay, that's helpful.
And then just to follow up, do you anticipate that the delays in the software testing and validation on the ground could potentially increase the schedule margin needed for the software or for the spacecraft validation and testing once it gets on orbit in that 60- to 90-day midpoint?
No, we're not expecting that. In fact, I think a lot of the work we've been able to do is driving that number towards the left for commissioning operations. So we're seeing good results on the rehearsals that we've been doing there. And the additional, the ground teams, the commissioning teams have been taking the additional time to get more fluid and efficient on that part of the process. So We're not expecting the delays in software validation on this end of the launch to impact commissioning. In fact, we are trying to drive it the other way.
Okay, great. Thank you for all the details. You bet. Thanks, Austin.
Our next question will come from Chris Quilty with Quilty Analytics. Please go ahead.
Thank you. So congrats on the Tranche 1 award. I guess that knocks two things off your list of a PLEO contract and a defense contract. But I got three follow-ups. First one is, is this a fixed price contract? Second part, when should we expect revenues on this to hit? And given that SDA is doing two-year spirals, presumably in the next quarter or two, And then the third question, the Tronc Zero wards, all the buses for the tracking layer were 1,000 kilograms or north. So can you scale up the Legion bus, scale down the 1300 bus, or something new?
Let me just make sure I got all those, Chris. So first off, yes, we are under a fixed price model here. And we're kind of excited about that. We've been used to living in that sort of model. So with our long commercial heritage, and L3 Harris has been just a great partner working with us on definitizing contracts and getting not just the capture phase, but also we're very excited about being able to work with them and for them on this endeavor. On the on when revenues hit, you know, the starting gun has gone off. And so we're we're already working really hard. You should start to see, you know, revenue ramp, but it'll it'll start showing up in the third and fourth quarter as we as we start the very quick design and build cycle we've got here in terms of sizes of buses and capabilities of buses. A lot of those investments and where we've seen just a little bit of margin pressure on the space side of the business have been in those technology-related investments that allow us to transition between different bus sizes. So, you know, we've got the traditional 1300. We've spent a lot of money on the development of the Legion capability. We've been developing other modular capabilities as well. And we've been developing what I want to call a, you know, sort of a workhorse P-LEO capability along the way here also. And so depending on, you know, when you go through a prototype phase like this, what happens on orbit, what the capabilities look like, how you model it out, we'll be able to go up or down the stack, either with SDA, Space Force, NRO, other classified or unclassified programs, and commercial programs as well, I think pretty adeptly. Not seamlessly, but I think pretty adeptly with the investments we've been making in the teams and the engineering focus there.
So is that PLEO capability referring back to the Telesat light speed work you did?
Yeah, you know, we did some there, but we've gone a long way past that. We brought in a lot of great talent. Our chief engineer down on that side of the business came out of the OneWeb business. or not chief engineer, chief technology guy for the SmallSat programs came out of OneWeb. We've been hiring really strong talent across the defense and industrial base, including engineering capabilities. And we've had some really good existing folks here as well. So a little bit tied back to Telesat, but not, you know, we've gone way past that, I think. And I guess also we've had other customers paying us for studies as well as we continue to work on our technology. So it hasn't been 100% Maxar funded. We have had customers paying us to develop forward-looking technology there.
Fortunately, I don't think Telesat's gone way past it, but that's a different issue. Follow-up, just on the Earth intelligence, you mentioned that the margin's down because of products up. When you were saying products, were you referring to actual hardware like RGT and DAP, or were you, you know, development of products like, you know, EarthWatch and SecureWatch and whatnot?
Yeah, when we refer to products there, we're talking more about the products like SecureWatch, development work going into things like Global AGD. Our 3D capabilities are vivid base maps as well. And we've been seeing strong adoption and really customers coming into that and saying, this is great. Now let's take that to the next level. And so we've been working on not just those products, but also the environment that we host them in. to make it more easily for our customers to consume the data and the services we've got there.
Gotcha. And speaking of one of those products, Brycon, I think it came up short in Q1. It doesn't sound like there was much movement this quarter, and Q3 sort of flattish, so it's got to be a real big Q4 to hit. I think previously you had talked about getting a range of sort of 80 to 110. Is that still an achievable goal with a real big Q4?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. We're seeing good adoption there. I think what you saw maybe a little slower ramp in Q1 was maybe some bleed over from Q4 into Q1. But then, you know, very strong performance, obviously, in Q2 now. So the adoption rate or the close rate's been picking back up. On the public sector side for the earth intelligence business, you know, that's dependent on how fast we close out production. programs and purchases like with the One World Terrain program, the Army program is a big source of that. On the commercial or enterprise side of our business, we're seeing good adoption rates there as well. And a long runway for growth out into the future with enterprise customers is we do, I think, a lot more diversified enterprise-like business with insurance companies, energy companies, gaming companies, metaverse companies.
as well more much more than just our traditional geolocation services business there gotcha and speaking of insurance have you secured the insurance for the launches because the the market has been hardening quite a bit recently no we we have secured the insurance and we actually did it at a lower cost uh than our uh existing insurance program was at so uh we're very pleased with that outcome and i think is I think Dan mentioned it, not only did we cover the third launch cost, but we increased insurance otherwise, and that increase is weighted towards the first launch, which makes sense from the standpoint of, you know, where risk and insurance should be distributed.
Good. I'm not sure if GEICO is a good option for that, though, so we'll have to see. Final question, Biggs, because I'm lazy. Can you give us the book to bill on both segments?
It's in the TINQ.
You can get through the underlying data. Just a second here.
I'm being lazy.
That's fine. It's very high because of the ELCL award. The firm portion of that, the $1.5 billion, flows in for the quarter. We'd like to look at this on a trailing 12-month basis, in which case EI is 2.3 and SI is 0.9, so overall 1.8. If you look at it on a quarter-only basis, it's very exaggerated by AOCL. It's 5.8 for Earth intelligence. and 0.9 for space infrastructure for 4.0 overall.
Great. Thank you. Thanks, Chris.
Our next question will come from Noah Paponik with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hello, everyone. Hey, everyone. Hey, Noah. Dan, can you just get more specific on... what in the Legion software validation process has surprised you? I know you've said there have been roadblocks, but can you tell us what the roadblocks are, where in the process, what you have to do to get to the finish line, how close you are? It's been pretty vague so far relative to something that is pretty important.
Yeah. It's hard to bring immense clarity to an earnings call like this. I think what I'd say is as we run the software validation, both in the various environments that we have, like our simulators, the hot environment on the satellite, as well as integrating into the hardware environment, there are certain ways when you're code complete with the integrated software that you expect it to propagate through the system and then not hit you know, trigger or hard stop points. And we just hit a lot more of those that precluded us from doing all of the other range of software validation tests that we want to do. So there's some, you know, basic all-encompassing ones up front that we thought we had wired that we turned out not to have quite as wired as we thought we did. And they held up the rest of the validation and testing program. We believe we're substantially through that phase, and so as you look at a burndown curve now, and I'm sure you've seen this before, Noah, where you expect it to hit at a certain rate, and you get a certain number of resolutions per day, and your defect rate quits going up and starts going down, and you've got a good handle on it. Ours just sort of hit a flat line there, even though the teams were working on it very hard, and we weren't seeing the burndown rate we expected. We are seeing that now on the path that are, you know, much higher level of predictability. It's not without risk as we continue to go through this, but as we look at a burndown chart like that, as we look at full-on system validation and then things like fault detection, telemetry triggers, and those kind of things, we'll be expecting to see, you know, much higher validation rates going through. We're about, you know, it delayed us. Yeah, so it delayed us for, you know, several weeks, and it just kind of wasn't what we expected, but we learned a lot, and we worked our way through it, and we're better, you know, understanding the program at this point, programatics.
Okay, that's helpful. I appreciate that. Is it possible to make an estimate of...
know what percentage out of 100 you are now complete on the total software validation for legion it's uh it's a little hard to to ascribe an exact percentage to it just because some of these are very large all systems ones and then some are like you know did a you know particular um uh check heat light you know kind of come on or not yeah um as we count up total numbers so percentages are really hard but i we're We're past a lot of the big integration ones now, and they're now in the more discrete validation aspects of the program.
Okay. And then what remains after software validation?
After software validation, then it's final closeouts and moving the satellites downrange and doing launch phase preparations.
Okay. Yeah.
You know, as unfortunate as this has been, what I'd say is we did make a lot of progress. And last quarter, what we were most focused on was the hardware testing anomaly issue that we had. And we ran that to ground. We got the first satellites through all of their environmentals and are in final closeouts. And so we made a lot of great progress. This one, you know, just kind of slowed down the overall aspects of the program, but we've continued to to burn down the risk and knock off our checklist as we go along here.
Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Noah.
Our next question will come from Elizabeth Grenfell with Bank of America.
Go ahead. Hi. Good evening. I have a couple questions. The first one is, is your EOCL contract dependent on Legion being operational?
It is not. Under the EOCL contract, Legion is backup capacity, if anything were to happen to any of our on-orbit assets right now, for the first several years. And then as we ramp out into the full 10-year award, Legion does start picking up additional potential capacity for those moving from the step-ups from $300 to $340 million a year. But as we sit right now, yeah, Legion is reserve capacity. which is also great because as Legion comes online, we'll be able to monetize that above and beyond what the current EOCL awards are.
Okay. And then, I mean, I know you can extend the life of the satellites you have in orbit, but many of those are approaching the end of their existing life. How much more life is in them? I mean, how much longer can they be extended to compensate for the delays? And then within that as well with, within your new timeline, how much contingency is in when you say fourth quarter? Is that assuming a December launch? Is that early fourth quarter? How should we think about that?
Well, I'm hesitant to say how much exact contingency is there because I just don't know until we're all the way through this. Our checklist is getting smaller and smaller. We're getting much more predictive on the final on this, but we have had several delays and I can't Until we ship these downrange, I won't say the satellites and the environment for them are fully buttoned up. On the question of constellation health, every year we go through a process. So we have two different things we do. We run internal simulations and make predictions about how long things last. But then we also do an engineering useful life publication that we put in our 10K. And we've extended the life of those based on those engineering simulations that are just used for accounting purposes. several times now. We pushed out GOI-1, Worldview-1, and Worldview-2, sometimes multiple times. We'll be doing that analysis again in October to determine whether we'll be adding to the useful lives on those satellites. You know, we continually monitor the health of all of our satellites. The current constellation is fully mission capable. And as we've said in the past, the longer satellites tend to last in space, the longer they will tend to last in space. And we're, you know, looking forward to, you know, starting that work again in October here.
Okay, and then just one more question. What is the total cost of Legion 1 through 6 now with this additional delay? What are you looking at for the total cost?
Yeah, so we reported last quarter, I think, it was over $700 million. It's still in that territory. Additional time spent in the factory does a draw, so additional cost, but it's uh it's not changing you know our guidance for this year uh and uh we'll certainly you know in the fourth quarter make our plans for next year and update uh if necessary the guidance for next year but i would not deem this additional delay to be all that significant okay great thank you very much thanks elizabeth
And our final question will come from Michael Tirmoli with Truth Securities. Please go ahead.
Hey, good evening, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess just on guidance, both this year and next year, specifically cash flow. I mean, you've got a pretty big second half ramp for cash this year. And then just, I mean, how should we think about 23? I mean, you just said you'll make those decisions later. You've got that free cash flow target out there. It sounds like we should handicap that by 35 to 50 million. Is there going to be any potential change? I know you just mentioned the cost of the satellite, but is there any change to CapEx, you know, next year as things are sliding out? You know, just how should we think about cash maybe, I guess? Yeah.
I wasn't trying to lead you to believe that there's a change coming, just that we'll look at every line item in the guidance later this year when we do our plan and then obviously be more up to date with each line item and not to say anything will change other than interest that we know of right now. So I wasn't trying to lead you in one direction or another. Interest, yes. uh for next year uh it would be 35 to 50 million dollars uh from the standpoint of your analysis that you would take out of the 340 that we uh guided to uh i say if you you know we plan things on a constant market basis and uh that would lead to taking up 50 but hopefully we can go and do some mitigation based upon the no-call expiring on a term loan fee and bring some of that impact back down if markets have improved. For this year, the change to our guidance was $40 million associated with interest. In terms of the full year cash flow and how you walk forward, I would think of it this way, that second half EBITDA and cash generation from it before any working capital change will be $277 million. The interest payments in the second half, which are negative, obviously, is $79 million based upon the cash interest guidance that we gave. And then on working capital, we would expect to have $76 million of cash from working capital, which is roughly a reversal of the negative that we had here in the first half, which is the normal trend for us. There's a big burn-off in the front end and then improvement in the second half. But in this case, that improvement is exacerbated some by the fact that at the end of the second quarter here, we had a buildup in receivables to domestic and international customers that we know quickly convert to cash to bring that back down.
Perfect. All right. Great. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
I think just as a, you know, as a general comment, too, we do have many paths still to achieving our 2023 targets, and we're very committed to getting the debt paid down, to enhancing our credit ratings. and to the capex holiday that you see in those cash flow numbers. So interest rates moved against us, spreads moved against us, but we've got lots of other levers in the business to keep driving performance and are very, very committed to doing that. That's healthy company performance stuff there. Yep. Thanks. And operator, I think that's it for us. We really appreciate it. Thanks, everybody, for joining the call.
And that will conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.