Quanta Services, Inc. (NYSE:PWR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Duke Austin : Yes. Thanks, Jamie. When we think about the renewable segment is primarily around utilization and how quickly you’re going to get absorption early on. And as we move on to the projects that are stated, certainly, you get absorption in the back half. You’re a little light, and you saw it in the fourth quarter, you’ll see it in the first quarter. We know the projects that we’re on, we talked about $3 billion that we have started. The back half, when we look at the back half, certainly, there’s opportunities there. We were prudent about how we looked at it. We felt like with the way that the supply chain work this year, especially on the panels and things of that nature and how the IRA comes in and how quickly it comes in. We take the same approach to guidance every year, which is prudent, and I believe we did the same this year. It’s exactly the same way.

Operator: And the next question comes from the line of Noelle Dilts with Stifel.

Noelle Dilts : I know there’s been a fair amount of discussion around supply chain. But I have heard that the transformer issue remains fairly challenging with extremely long lead times. So — and we’ve talked about that before. So I was actually just curious to what extent you think that’s getting better? Are things getting a little bit more predictable as it relates to some of these components that have been in short supply, specifically as it relates to electric T&D?

Duke Austin : Thanks, Noelle. The — when we look at the supply chain, most of your larger Us, your larger customers have solved much of this, not to say that the transformers and certain items are long lead times they are. And it is issues, there is issues around it. But once we understand it, once we understand cadence, we can be much more predictable about how we deploy crews and assets. So that’s helped us. I do think there’s opportunity there for us and how we participate in solving these solutions with the client. That said, I don’t — transformer is going to be a while. I think the back half of the year, maybe even into the fourth quarter before that levelizes out and we get enough capacity in the market. But with the amount of EV penetration, the things that we see, you’re going to see some shortages in transformers, and we just have to be more robust about how we deploy assets.

Operator: And the next question comes from the line of Steven Fisher with UBS.

Steven Fisher : Just on the electric transmission and distribution kind of customer spending outlook. There’s been some mixed data points on utility CapEx over the last few months, but I guess still overall, positive. I’m curious what discussions you’re having with the utility customers, specifically around the planning for the IIJA funds, how are they baking those into their spending patterns? And how will that ultimately flow into your bookings and backlog?

Duke Austin : Thanks. Here’s what we see. We see North America is load growing as we look at it across our segments. So the growth of generation in North America, you have that going on, you have renewables and the way that we’re looking at penetration through transmission, you have EV penetration ongoing. So all those things are coming in to these CapEx. I hear that and I hear well, you’ve seen something different. All I’ve seen is our customers moved our CapEx budgets up primarily in distribution on the outer end because of penetration of EV and then all your transmission that needs to be interconnected. The way that you think about it, you think about all the things that are necessary to make this work, yes, you can delay a bit.