Granite Construction Incorporated (NYSE:GVA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Unidentified Analyst: Hi. This is Adam on for Jerry today. Thanks for taking my question. Nice to see the positive free cash flow inflection in the quarter. Can you just update us on how you are thinking about the free cash flow and receivables trajectory in Q4 and into 2024? And then as a follow-up, how are payment terms on new projects you are winning? How do they compare to what you were winning in 2022 and 2021?

Lisa Curtis: Yes. Hey Adam, this is Lisa. Good morning. Yes, a really good quarter from a cash flow perspective coming in at $153 million for the quarter. We have talked before about from an internal perspective, how we look at operating cash flow and ultimately, free cash flow is, first, we are incentivized internally at a 5% operating cash flow as a percent of revenue, that being at 5%. And so we manage our CapEx looking at we spend approximately 1% to 2% for maintenance CapEx. And so you take that from our operating cash flow, that leaves about 2.5%, 3%, so that’s our target of what we are shooting for. So, as we work through some of our challenging projects from the past, which are – which some of that is included in our contract assets, we anticipate cash to be freeing up as we are moving forward, and we have seen that in Q3 in our operating cash flow.

Our net contract assets went down around $55 million, as I mentioned in the third quarter. And overall, that’s just key working capital account movements. Receivables are up in the quarter, which we expected. That wasn’t unusual. We started the year off flow and then picked up activity levels in Q2. So, we were full speed ahead when we entered Q3 with a very busy quarter was coming in with revenues of $1.1 billion. So higher accounts receivable that we expect to turn in Q4, along with just other working capital accounts with higher activity. And so going into 2024 at a minimum, we would anticipate our operating cash flow targets being similar or even pushing a little bit higher as we build momentum and start to release some of the contract assets that are on our balance sheet, improvements in our contract liabilities.

And then receivables, just from a collections perspective, we are always working with the teams to focus on cash collections and just generation and just speeding up that process. And so that area is working well, but just continue to maintain the focus going into 2024.

Unidentified Analyst: Thank you. Very helpful. And I appreciate the color of capped by procurement type. Can you update us on the contract mix of your CAP? So, how much is fixed price versus fixed unit price? Any color there would be helpful.

Kyle Larkin: Yes. I don’t know if we have the breakdown between fixed price and fixed unit price on the bid-build side of things. But our CAP, if you look at the best value, it’s been pretty consistent between last year in Q3 and this year in Q3 of right around 42% or so. Our fully designed projects are at 53% of our CAP today. And so I think we feel good. We feel like we have de-risked the company. Our design-build again went from 5% down to 3%. And so that’s relative – as you see those I-64 job certainly wind down that we expect – we don’t expect that to go to zero, there are still owners that have design-build contracts that we have a compelling reason to pursue, but they are kind of the exception in our business today.