Leidos Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:LDOS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Chris Cage: Yes, it’s a great question. Very timely. In fact, we had a review internally with the team yesterday, and we’ve got a really strong team on DES and working hand in glove with the customer. This year, it’s still a modest contributor to the company in the order of $50 million of revenue, but we just walked through a number of active task orders that are either in evaluation by the customer, or some other ones that were coming up for bid and evaluation later this year. So, we’re seeing the activity level increase and there’s a roadmap on migrations of more users under the DoD net. So, again, continue to think of that as something that will be a much more significant contributor in 2024 and 2025 really beyond that. And we’ll have more to say as we get later in the year and have some clarity on when those get determined.

Matt Akers: Great. Okay, thanks.

Operator: The next questions are from the line of Jason Gursky with Citigroup. Please proceed with your questions.

Jason Gursky: Yes, good morning. Tom, I was wondering if we might double-click for a minute on the comment that you made about leveraging acquisitions, maybe to better understand from your perspective kind of what went wrong, whether it was misalignment with expectations or execution, and what do you think it’s going to take to fix what you’ve already acquired and what’s going to change as you evaluate new acquisitions?

Tom Bell: Yes, thanks for that. I wasn’t here, so I can’t say exactly what went “wrong.” I don’t know that anything went wrong per se. I’m just looking at the current annual operating plan and the five-year plans for business against the original business case that was put forward to the board to approve the deals. And there’s a certain gap. Now, I’ve been in this industry 40 years. I’ve frankly never seen an acquisition business case that doesn’t have a gap. So, that’s not new. That’s not novel to Leidos, and that doesn’t say that we’ve made mistakes in the past. That just means we’ve got the ball now and it’s our job to make sure we leverage the investments we’ve made and the capital we’ve deployed to ensure that the real cores of the acquisition business case come to pass.

That’s with focus. That’s with resolve. That’s obviously by getting deep dives into program executions, and also making sure that we go back to the basics of the original business case and say, what is the golden bolt that we were trying to buy, and how do we make sure we deploy it across the enterprise as effectively as possible? So, that’s what I’m focused on playing forward from here. As I suggested in my comments, I think the acquisitions that have been accomplished over the past 7, 8, 9 years here at Leidos, all make sense to me. Now, the key is just doubling down and making sure we make them make sense for our bottom line. Chris?

Chris Cage: Yes. I mean, the one thing I’d add the playing off of Tom’s words, the golden bolt example, I think our 1901 acquisition is a great example of that, right? And you don’t hear us talking much about that because it’s embedded into the organization and providing capability broadly against a number of our digital monetization contracts cutting across multiple sectors. That’s the kind of leverage we want to see gained as we move forward with acquisitions. Dynetics, we talked about the Wide Field of View programs. And quite honestly, that is a combination of a legacy capability that Leidos brought to bear out of our Leidos Innovation Center. Dynetics is now in the midst of executing that program and building the payloads. That is the leverage we want to see going forward. So, we need to move more rapidly to link those capabilities together to get the full leverage out of future acquisition.

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