Primoris Services Corporation (NASDAQ:PRIM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Steven Fisher: Okay. That’s great. And then you started to build up a couple of quarters of consistency here, which is nice to see. Where would you say is the biggest execution uncertainty in your plan for 2023? And what are you doing to proactively manage that uncertainty or risk?

Tom McCormick: I think our biggest risk is always execution on our project work. It’s in different areas of probably industrial and in electric power delivery are probably the two areas, but those are the ones that see the most project work. And I guess you can go to pipeline, but I’d say — but we have placed in both of those groups, really strong leadership teams. We brought in a lot of talent. So I’m not really worried about the industrial group at all. I’m certainly not worried about the renewables group and the electric power delivery is actually doing pretty well. And with the talent that we’ve brought in, I think we’re going to see marked improvement. Our biggest risk still is pipeline is going to come out of the trough.

Are they going to — are we going to — we have a good management team in there. We’ve made some changes, and we’ve added some talent there as well. I think this group is going to be very disciplined. It’s — and they’re seeing quite a bit of bid work, but is that work going to be realized? And is it going to be executed. Some of it is going to be executed this year. I thought that’d be our biggest risk. Now it’s a small part of our business, but that’s probably the biggest risk.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Sean Eastman with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Alex Dwyer: Hi, this is Alex on for Sean this morning. Thanks for taking our questions. So very good cash flow in the fourth quarter, I know you guys are expecting it to come, but probably more so in the first quarter, so maybe a bit earlier than expected here. But is there anything that happened there? And how should we think about operating cash flow in 2023? Will this be up or down year-over-year? Or is there a good conversion ratio to think about?

Ken Dodgen: Yes, Alex, I mean, Q4 had the benefit of a couple of things. We had some working capital improvements in terms of payments from our customers. We also signed a couple of new larger projects during the quarter, which had some upfront payments. So that definitely helped, we actually pulled — I think we pulled a little bit of cash flow from Q1 of this year back into Q4 as a result of the timing of signing those projects. So it was good, and we’re going to get to continue to watch as we go forward. With respect to 2023, cash flow from operations, I’m expecting to be in the $100 million to $150 million range. As we continue to grow, we’re going to have to invest in working capital. We’re going to hopefully have less solar materials that we’ve got to pre-buy upfront, but we’re still watching that closely, depending on how that releases, but it should be a good year for us, but it’s going to be seasonally weighted the same as it was in 2022.

Alex Dwyer: Got it. And then I just wanted to ask about your communications business. Like I just wanted to ask where you’re seeing the most activity. Is it rural and RDOF; is it fiber to the home? Is it 5G spectrum deployments? Just any thoughts there would be super helpful.

Tom McCormick: It’s probably across the Board. It’s a lot of it is in fiber, a lot of is in 5G. We’re seeing growth — a lot of growth in Texas and in the various other markets that we’re in, but Texas is a big market for us. So I’d say across that more in 5G and then fiber, lot of fiber deployments.