Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc. (NYSE:HII) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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That the team can completely focus on that pipeline, bids, execution and performance. So I think the 8% to 8.5% is just being conservative. Obviously, we want to see a couple of more dollars out of that division last year. We are guiding growth year-over-year right now. We did see Mission Technologies to grow 4% from 2021 to 2022 and each of the business units had growth in them. So those are all positive signs. I think the 8% to 8.5% is just waiting and seeing the awards happen. When the sales hit, I would expect we are going to be on the upper end of that range, if not over it.

Seth Seifman: Great. Thank you very much.

Chris Kastner: Thanks, Seth.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is from Gautam Khanna from Cowen. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Gautam Khanna: Hey. Sorry about that. I hope you can hear me.

Chris Kastner: No. Yeah. Thanks. Now we had you, Gautam.

Gautam Khanna: Great. Great. Hey. Thanks. I was curious if you could just give us some color on the timing of the milestones through the year. If you can tell us like, if there’s anything that’s in the month of December that has the potential to move out or things we should be watching

Chris Kastner: Yeah. Just

Gautam Khanna: in terms of Q4 the way things happened

Chris Kastner: Sure. Sure, Gautam. When you look at the 2023 milestones, I think, Tom already mentioned that Q1 was pretty light. The pretty evenly distributed across Q2 and Q3, but then CVN 79, excuse me, LPD 29, yeah, is in Q4. So that’s at the end of the year. So that’s the one we will have to watch. We got a lot of confidence in and the team down in Mississippi, but that’s the one towards the end of the year.

Gautam Khanna: Okay. Thank you. And then just curious on VCS, anything incremental from last quarter on schedule with respect to…

Chris Kastner: Not really. Pretty stable from a schedule standpoint on the VCS program. We have movement here and there, but it’s pretty stable. I got to hand it to that team, the program team and the construction team. They are getting after it and they are learning every day. So it’s been pretty stable. We need to stay on.

Tom Stiehle: Chris has talked about that rhythm of the program, launch one and sell one-off when we saw that in 2022 and in the milestones, you will see that in 2023 and 2024. So we are working it.

Gautam Khanna: Okay. And just on that last point, anything with respect to negative catch-ups or you can talk about 422 on VCS in aggregate anything, yeah, you can never call it out as material, but can we assume that there were kind of consistent negative marks in the program or anything you can tell us about that?

Tom Stiehle: Nothing really significant to highlight here. I mean I mentioned in the keel the — the keel net was at Newport News on that, which was down and they just kind of sprinkled over the programs, but there was nothing really to highlight here.

Gautam Khanna: Okay. Thank you, guys.

Chris Kastner: All right, Gautam.

Operator: Thank you. Our final question today comes from Noah Poponak from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead, Noah. Your line is now open.

Noah Poponak: Hi. Good morning, everyone.

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