Leonardo DRS, Inc. (NASDAQ:DRS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Andre Madrid : Maybe to follow up on Michael’s question on Colombia. Does the booking that you received after the quarter end, do you think that derisks in any way the kind of margin expansion profile that you guys were projecting through the out years? I think you guys said something maybe closer to like 70 to 100 basis points of margin expansion company-wide on Colombia repricing. So if you can give any clarity on that?

Michael Dippold : Yes. I think that the negotiation and where we landed on a price commitment perspective will continue to aid in our ability to be more efficient. So what Bill said, I think it’s the right way to think about this is this has given us clear visibility. It’s helping us work our supply chain. It’s helping us maintain our labor force in a continuous production environment. All of those are going to create efficiencies that will help us in driving that margin expansion that we have been leaning on, Andre.

Andre Madrid : Got you. And then another one on IMS more broadly. It looks like book-to-bill came in a little soft for the quarter at 0.8x. Could you maybe talk about the demand profile across that business broadly? I know a lot of it’s driven by Colombia. So could we expect some lumpiness on that front moving forward? Is that just kind of the nature of the business?

Michael Dippold : Yes. Looking at book-to-bill in a quarterly cadence gets a little difficult. You’re right, it was 0.8x from a book-to-bill in Q3, but that was on the heels of a Q1 book-to-bill of about 1.8x. So you really got to look at it a little more holistically throughout the course of the year. And within our IMS segment, even outside of Colombia, we’re getting a lot of demand from the macro environment and the tensions we’re seeing in our force protection arena. So the demand coming through from IMS is very robust, and I think you’ll see that in the year results.

Operator: Next question comes from Jon Tanwanteng went with CJS Securities.

Unidentified Analyst: This is Justin on for Jon. I was just one morning. Was there any pull orders into Q3? And then following that, can we get a little color on what’s driving the increased adjusted EPS outlook?

Michael Dippold : Sure, sure. So the increase in the adjusted EPS outlook is really driven by some of the benefits that we saw from the R&D tax credit. So that’s certainly a tailwind into the adjusted EPS metric. And as you know, from an operational standpoint, we continue to have a little bit more conviction hence, we tightened the guide rate on both on the revenue side as well as on the adjusted EBITDA side, but the increase is largely the flow-through of the benefit from the tax R&D tax credit offset in part by a little bit higher kind of share count that we’ve been seeing through the increased option exercises from some of the employees.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. That’s helpful. And then just quickly a follow-up. Can you give an update on your low earth orbit efforts?

William Lynn : Yes. In space, generally, we have moved more into low earth orbit as that’s really where the demand is. We’ve won a weather satellite in that venue as well as a position on the space tracking system for the space development agency, and then we’re doing a demonstration for NASA of uncooled technology, which has the potential to really lower the weight that you would have to put on to a payload because the cooling technology is quite a wake burden. And we think those are opening opportunities that over the next 12 to 24 months give us the chance to take what really has been a niche capability for us and pull it really more into our core business. And we’ll see over the next 12 to 24 months as other opportunities open, and we’re able to take advantage of those.