Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to APi Group's first quarter 2022 financial results conference call. All participants are now in a listen-only mode until the question- and- answer session. Please note this call is being recorded. I will be standing by should you need any assistance. I will now turn the call over to Olivia Walton, Vice President of Investor Relations at APi Group. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today are Russ Becker, our President and CEO, Kevin Krumm, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Sir Martin Franklin and Jim Lillie, our board co-chairs. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that certain statements in the company's earnings press release announcement and on this call are forward-looking statements which are based on expectations, intentions, and projections regarding the company's future performance, anticipated events or trends, and other matters that are not historical facts. These statements are not a guarantee of future performance and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.
In our press release and filings with the SEC, we detail material risks that may cause our future results to differ from our expectations. Our statements are as of today, May 4th, and we have no obligation to update any forward-looking statement we may make. As a reminder, we have posted a presentation detailing our first quarter financial performance on the investor relations page of our website. Our comments today will also include non-GAAP financial measures and other key operating metrics. The reconciliation and other information regarding these items can be found in our press release and our press presentation. Also, as a reminder, there's a presentation containing supplemental information relative to prior periods and other useful information for investors available in the presentation section of our website. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Martin.
Thank you, Olivia. We are proud of the approximately 26,000 leaders at APi and focus and effort they put forth in navigating another complicated backdrop to the quarter. It was just over three years ago that we first met Russ and discussed building a business together, primarily based on our view that a statutorily required services strategy was economically resilient and that these activities were necessary no matter what the economic climate might be. Throughout the challenges since that initial meeting, from navigating the COVID-19 pandemic to dealing with supply chain disruptions and inflation, to acquiring and integrating the Chubb platform, the team has never lost sight of serving our customers safely and efficiently. We're grateful for their unwavering commitment. The integration at Chubb is off to a good start, and the strategic rationale for the transaction is proving even stronger than initially anticipated.
Our belief when acquiring the business was that the acquisition would not only position APi well for continued success and improve the protective moat surrounding the business, but that it would also create significant upside for shareholders and employees. We believe that the combined business will offer customers more customized and proprietary offerings through our uniquely trained technicians, as they're called in the U.S., or engineers, as they're called in Europe. We believe that the skills of our technicians and engineers, combined with our suite of offerings, is a distinct competitive advantage. In addition, we believe that our scale will drive synergies and savings that can be redeployed back into the business to accelerate growth while enhancing margin expansion. We have great confidence in the business and the direction we're heading.
We are excited about the opportunities for the company in the years ahead and look forward to updating you on our progress throughout the course of the year. With that, I'll hand over to Russ.
Thank you, Martin, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join our call this morning. I will begin my remarks by commenting on our strong start to 2022, the positive momentum we have across the entire business, and the key factors that we believe support the resilience of our business. I will then provide an update on our ongoing integration at Chubb before turning it over to Kevin to discuss our financial results and guidance in more detail. We saw continued robust demand in the first quarter across our key end markets. For the three months ended March 31st, 2022, net revenues increased on an organic basis by approximately 16%, driven strategically by healthy growth in inspection and service revenue across the majority of our markets in Safety Services.
As well as general market recovery in Safety and Specialty Services compared to the prior year period, which was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We estimate that approximately two-thirds of this growth was driven by price and pass-through of material and labor costs, and one-third was driven by volume, which we measured through labor hours. It is important to note that this will shift over time based on our mix of work and macroeconomic factors such as inflation. This growth is tactical as we focus on margin expansion because on average, inspection and service revenues generate 10% plus higher gross margins, and monitoring revenues generate 20% plus higher gross margins than contract revenue.
Going forward, on an annual basis, we intend to provide detail on our consolidated backlog. While this metric has less relevance to APi, given our focus on inspection and service revenue and our goal of reducing our contract loss rate, it does provide a barometer of the trends in the markets we serve. Our consolidated backlog continues to build and was at a record high level of $3.6 billion as of the end of March, providing us with a solid foundation for growth as we move through the rest of the year. Backlog was up over 10% compared to the end of December 2021, including Chubb.
It's important to note that while backlog is an important indicator of the positive momentum that we have in the business, we remain focused on disciplined project and customer selection and therefore we do not expect to see backlog growth each quarter. We remain focused on running the business regardless of what's going on in the macro economy. Whether dealing with challenges faced in navigating supply chain disruptions, inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, increased volatility in the economic climate, geographic anomalies, weather or other, we believe that there are several key factors that strengthen the resiliency of our business and help to reduce the impact of an always volatile business environment. First is our people. Our core purpose of building great leaders continues to define who we are. It is our identity and our culture.
We believe that it is the unifying principle that connects everyone within our business, regardless of their role. This purpose is particularly important as we integrate the Chubb team into APi. You've heard me say that the Chubb business was somewhat neglected over the years under prior ownership. Bringing the team into the fold at APi is a key part of the integration of the business. We believe that great leaders, among many things, create great shareholder value. As COVID-19 becomes more endemic, we recently held our first in-person two-day leader lab. It was an opportunity for 125 leaders across our global businesses to benefit from APi's culture of organizational sharing of knowledge and best practices and collaboration across businesses.
We have spent approximately $30 million on leadership development over the past five years, and plan to continue to invest in and support our leadership development culture, which we believe empowers the leaders across our businesses, drives business performance, and increases future cross-selling opportunities. This investment is unique in our industry, and we believe that it is a competitive advantage. Our employees, technicians, and engineers have careers, not jobs, and we believe this investment reduces turnover, aligns communications, and drives performance and productivity. This is a competitive advantage for APi, particularly when many companies see team members opt for new opportunities. Second is our recurring revenue services-focused business model. The regulatory driven demand for our services provides predictable, higher margin, recurring revenue opportunities. We liken this to a protective moat around APi.
Our go-to-market strategy in Safety Services is to sell inspection work first because we estimate that every dollar sold can lead to $3 to 4 dollars of subsequent service work. This strategy differentiates us from our peers and ultimately creates a stickier client relationship that we believe positions us as the preferred life safety and security services provider in the buildings where we perform the inspections. Following the completion of the Chubb acquisition, we achieved our previously stated goal of more than 50% of our revenue coming from inspection and service. As a result, we are now moving the goalpost to the right and have a new goal of 60% plus. Third is our revenue diversification across geographies and markets, customers, and projects.
Our global footprint with approximately 500+ locations in 20 countries allows us to maintain relationships with local decision makers while also having the ability to execute multi-site services for national and international account customers. We believe that our low customer concentration, with no single customer representing greater than 5% of our revenue and the diversity of the end markets we serve, help to build a protective moat around the business. We believe that this too is a competitive advantage. The last point I'd like to highlight is the relative variability of our cost structure, which provides us flexibility to effectively navigate the changing market. Our significant union labor force in the U.S. and subcontract labor force internationally allows us to flex our workforce capacity as market conditions dictate, without incurring significant trailing costs or severance.
As we've discussed on prior calls, our average project size is approximately $5,000 in our largest segment, Safety Services, and $75,000 in Specialty Services. In addition, the average duration of our projects is short, which we believe allows us to reasonably control inflationary variables and manage our supply chain. We remain focused on real-time pricing and operational efficiency to ensure true costs are reflected in the services we provide. As many of you heard us state previously, our business is not immune to macro marketplace disruptions related to supply chain disruptions and inflationary cost pressures. In general, we believe we've adjusted our project pricing models. With that, the significant step up in revenue related to pass-through pricing on project materials will compress our margin.
Instead, we remain laser focused on our long-term margin expansion lever, service revenue, monitoring accounts and inflationary pricing on these recurring services. Because we believe this focus will allow our margins to bounce back quickly as we move away from the current inflationary environment on the material. We expect these negative variables will be with us through the balance of the year. However, we do not believe they limit us in achieving our long-term margin expansion goal of 13%+ Adjusted EBITDA margin by 2025. Before turning the call over to Kevin, I would like to provide an update on our ongoing integration at Chubb. We are pleased with the progress made so far in the four months post-close and are excited about the opportunities that lie ahead. We continue to build out the depth of our team to ensure we are well-positioned.
We have recently added resources with significant international and integration experience in areas such as human resources, procurement, accounting, finance, and IT. The first half of this year is focused on ensuring the steps are in place through structure, bringing our branch operating model and metrics into our platform, validating synergy assumptions developed during the initial, and evaluating the quality of the leadership team to ensure we have the right resources and right people in place moving forward. There has been a significant amount of time and effort spent across multiple functional areas to develop actionable, measurable, and executable multi-year plans to leverage our. Our initial assessment prior to closing of the acquisition captured $20 million in savings in a business that had been historically under-invested in.
After having our team on the ground for the last 90 days and working with local leadership, I am pleased to report that we believe we now see a clear path to value capture opportunities that are at least $40 million. We expect this figure to continue to evolve and grow as we learn more, and we believe that most of the projected value capture opportunities can be achieved within three years. It is our intent to reinvest some of the initial cost savings to help position us to maximize the opportunities that lie ahead. We plan to provide a more detailed report to investors of our plans and the opportunities for the business later in the year. There is significant. We are in the very, very early days of this opportunity.
The business is performing in line with our no negative surprises, and more importantly, what we have found has only reinforced our excitement about the acquisition. The opportunities are there to not only reduce costs, but also to drive top line growth, and I look forward to continuing to report on our progress. In summary, I am pleased with the forward progress of our businesses and what has been achieved in the first quarter. We feel good about the momentum we have across the board and the outlook for the balance of this year and the years ahead. Over to Kevin to discuss our financial results and guidance in more detail. Kevin?
Thanks, Russ. Good morning to those who have joined online. I'll begin my remarks by reviewing our consolidated results and segment level operating performance. Within our Safety Services segment and will be excluded from our organic net revenues until 2023. Reported net revenues increased by 83% to $1.5 billion compared to $803 million in the prior year period. Acquisitions completed in Safety Services and strong organic growth in Safety and Specialty Services to 26.4%, representing a 371 basis points increase driven by this revenue resulting from recent acquisitions completed in the Safety Services as well as organic growth and improved productivity in Specialty Services. These factors were partially offset, which caused downward pressure on margins.
Adjusted EBITDA margin was 8.7 basis points increase compared to prior year period, driven by an improved mix of inspection and service revenue resulting from services as well as strong organic growth. This was partially offset by supply chain disruptions and inflation, which caused downward pressure on margins. As Russ mentioned earlier in the call, net revenues increased on an organic basis by approximately 16% compared to the prior year period. Excluding the impact of acquisitions completed in safety services over the past 12 months, both gross profit margin improved on a year-over-year basis. Adjusted diluted earnings per share for the first quarter was $0.23, representing a $0.13 per share increase compared to the prior year period, primarily by strong organic growth in Safety and Specialty Services. Our adjusted free cash flow $7 million.
While Q1 is traditionally our lowest cash flow quarter, impacted by working capital build to cover supply chain disruptions and to support our strong revenue growth. Or said another way, in a world of supply disruptions and limited availability, we made the decision to front our work needs. Finally, we also saw cash used in acquisitions to rebuild working capital where we took the offset benefit as a purchase price reduction. That said, we anticipate most of the supply chain related working capital investments being temporary and to be recovered by year-end, and we expect our adjusted free cash flow conversion to levels on the way to our long-term average adjusted free cash flow.
I will now discuss our results. Safety Services net revenues for the three months ended increased by 130% to $1.1 billion, compared to $466 million in the prior year period, primarily driven by revenue from completed acquisitions. Net revenues increased on an organic basis by 14.6% compared to the prior year period, driven by continued growth in inspection and service revenue across the majority of our markets and general market recovery compared to the prior year period, which was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Adjusted gross margin for the three months ended March 31, 2022 was 31.5% compared to the prior year adjusted gross margin of 31.5%.
This is primarily driven by an improved mix of inspection and service revenue, offset by supply chain disruptions and inflation, which caused downward pressure on margins. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the three months ended March 31, 2022 was 11.8%, point decline compared to the prior year period, primarily driven by the impact of completed acquisitions, supply chain disruptions and inflation, which caused downward pressure were partially offset by an improved mix of inspection and service. Discuss our results in more detail for Specialty Services. Specialty Services reported net revenues for the three months increased on an organic basis by 19.8% to $412 million, compared to $344 million in the prior year period.
This was driven by an increased demand for our specialty contracting services and general market recovery compared to the prior year, which was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The three months ended March 31, 2020 20%, representing a 196 basis point increase compared to prior year, primarily driven by improved productivity and improved mix of service revenues. These factors were partially offset by supply chain disruptions and inflation, which caused downward pressure on margins. Adjusted ended March 31, 2022 was 5.6%, representing a 93 basis point increase compared to the prior year due to leverage on higher volume and an improved mix of service revenue. These factors were partially offset by supply chain disruptions and inflation, which caused downward pressure on margins. I will now.
While the macro quarter, the resiliency of our business and top-line momentum give us confidence to increase our guidance expectations for net revenues and confirm our prior guidance for Adjusted EBITDA. We now expect full-year net revenue of $6-$6.5 billion, and expect growth in net revenues on an organic basis at constant currencies will be between 6%-7%. We remain confident in our full-year Adjusted EBITDA guidance of $650 million-$700 million as per press release. As we commented on our last call, where we will end up within the range will largely finalize and implement integration activities across our platform of supply chain disruptions and inflationary pressures, our revenue growth and exchange rate movements during the year.
For the second quarter, we expect net revenues to be $1.7 billion, up from $1.575-$1.625 billion, and Adjusted EBITDA to be $170 million, consistent with our prior guidance. As mentioned on our last call, we anticipate interest expense for 2022 to be approximately $120 million. Depreciation and CapEx to be approximately. Effective cash tax rate to be approximately 24%. From a capital allocation perspective, we continue to target an average adjusted free cash flow conversion of approximately 80% and intend to use the cash generated to reduce net leverage to return to our 2.5x over the next couple of years.
As we have previously said, with the target some years may be closer to 70 and some may be closer to 90, but on average, we think 80% is reasonable over the long term, a reasonable target over the long term. When we believe our own company represents the best available investment opportunity, we may repurchase shares. To that end, in March 2022, the board authorized the new stock repurchase program to purchase up to an aggregate of 250 million shares from time to time. This is reflective not only of our confidence in our ability to execute cash. Our Adjusted diluted weighted average share count for the first, which is approximately 40 million higher t han we had as of fourth quarter 2021. The increase is primarily driven by the dilutive impact of 333 million shares relating to the $800 million perpetual preferred equity transaction. We have conversion from time to time. We think it makes sense to consistently reflect our adjusted results, assuming the conversion. We expect our adjusted diluted weighted average share count for the second quarter to be approximately 270 million. Jim?
Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. As everyone has said, we are grateful for the efforts of our leaders who navigate and drove strong results in the first quarter. We are pleased that the business has what we believe is strong momentum despite a choppy macroeconomic environment. Clearly, Russ and team are focused on operational performance and successfully navigating all the macro turbulence the company two years ago. We couldn't be more pleased with the performance trajectory of APi. As Co-Chairs, Martin and I view our role as providing our unique resources and the benefit of our shared experiences to help APi perform, drive shareholder value. From our perspective, the company is doing what it needs to do and is positioned well for success, having added new leaders to the bench with unique global skills to help drive performance.
Additionally, new resources and tools are being added each month to improve efficiency and performance. We are pleased to provide the investment community new insights into the business on this call to help you understand the business better. We intend to continue to evolve the detailed information provided quarterly and look forward to providing more color on our strategic activities related to the acquisition of Chubb later in the year. We intend to maintain our relentless focus on growing recurring service revenue, disciplined project and customer selection, pricing opportunities, leveraging our spend, driving operational excellence, and realizing synergies from the acquisition of Chubb as we work towards our Adjusted EBITDA margin goal of 13%+ by 2025. New opportunities within our business and to the macroeconomic environment in which we a ssess how to best deploy our growth drivers, optimizing the performance of our existing business, our capital structure, and investing capital in our business, including evaluating opportunistic acquisitions. With that, I'd now like to turn the call back over to the operator and open the call for Q and A.
At this time, if you'd like to ask a question, please press the star and one on your touch tone phone. You may remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing the pound key. Once again, that is star and one to ask. First question from Andy Kaplowitz from Citi.
Close. Good one.
We'll just stick with Andy.
Andy's fine. First question. I know you just raised organic guidance to 8%-9%, you know, versus the 6%-7% that you had, Russ. Maybe you could talk about the assumptions in that increase. Is that or is there at all a volume increase in there? And then obviously, you know, you grew above pass through and pricing being two-thirds of that, it was still higher than our forecast. Again, was that all pricing and pass through, or were there areas of your business that are outperforming your own expectations?
Andy, in my remarks, I said that two-thirds of that was, you know, pricing pass through, and one-third of that was volume. You know, man-hours by business basis, and that's, you know, really how we keep our eye on the ball that we are seeing, you know, in the business. You know, we've been, you know, really in our conversations with our different business unit leaders as it relates to stay out on the forefront on price at its price.
Okay. Then Russ, maybe asking you about sort of Chubb in this context. Obviously, you know, going to $40 million of synergies looks good. Can you give us more color into where you're seeing the extra synergies as you're now on the ground? Then maybe talk about the probability that that $40 million could, you know, move higher over time, and has the timeline changed at all from when you get these synergies? I think you had said eight-
Well, I think the 18-36 months is real. You know, some of the different countries that we operate in, you know, the processes that you have to go through to make some of the changes that will ultimately need to be made, you know, in these businesses takes more time than it would potentially. Things in that timeframe is really realistic. It's not all gonna happen, you know, in day one. You're ultimately, you know, looking at have, you know, two phases of some of the changes. I would say that in the business and we start to focus on, you know, driving the business really towards a similar branch-built model that we currently have, you know, in life safety business.
That's where you get more visibility into some of the changes and what needs to be done to empower the branches and empower the branch leaders, versus, say, having from corporate. As we spend time in the business, and we've had a number of different visits, you know, to Western Europe, we can see it. Like, you can really see what needs to be done in this business. It actually gets me really excited, because you have more and more clarity around, you know, what needs to be done as we continue to try to drive towards this branch-led operating model, which is exciting. We also get very excited when we look at the procurement opportunities.
There's, you know, we felt just as a core APi from a procurement perspective, you know, and now as we're continuing to build out our procurement team here, you know, we see combined synergies between, you know, the scale of both businesses coming together, and we see really a nice opportunity for us to take advantage of that. Really, you know, when we were talking a little bit about this yesterday, Kevin, you're scratching the surface on commercial opportunities and and we're just really getting going there. There's gonna be a number of opportunities for us to cross-sell, you know, with the existing business, take advantage of some of these multinational customers that we have that we're already starting to have some dialogue with, trying to, you know, tap into Blackstone's real estate portfolio.
There's a number of things that really give us great confidence that $40 million is there, and it'll continue to evolve, and we'll continue to keep you informed, you know, in that process.
Andy, if I could chime in. I mean, one of the things that I think what Russ and Kevin and the team are doing that I think is different than what has historically occurred under prior ownership is, you know, Russ is out there pounding where senior leaders have never visited before. He's in individual countries and having them build bottom-up plans. From those bottom-up plans, you know, you're getting ownership from country managers on what to do, how to do it. You know, it's their plan rather than someone in some other country just telling them what to do. There's a lot of buy-in on what needs to happen, when it needs to happen, who's accountable and what the economic return is.
You know, we're in early days of that, but it's really a team effort that Russ is driving rather than an administrative directive.
Appreciate all the color, guys.
Our next question comes from Markus Mittermaier from UBS.
Yes. Hi, good morning, everyone. Maybe I'll follow up on the discussion you just had there. What's the cadence to get to the bottom-up branch-led platform? What has to happen between now and then, sort of like if you think forward two years? So, is it kind of ripping out the old IT platform or what's the process to get there? Can you give us a bit more color on that?
Well, Markus, good morning. Thank you for your question, and thanks for participating this morning. First and foremost, we have to carve this business out from Carrier, and that has to be, you know, our number one priority. There is a lot of work to do there, you know, specifically, you know, I would say probably the two biggest work streams would be in the area of IT and HR. That needs to be the primary driver and the focus, okay? That takes, you know, some resources, and it takes, you know, the right talent, both from the Chubb side and our side, and we are prioritizing that. All right. It starts there.
That doesn't mean you can't make some changes that you need to be making. We've already started to, you know, to execute on that where it's appropriate, you know, in some of the different countries. I mean, it's just one of those things. It's like an ore freighter in Lake Superior. You know, you don't change the direction of that ore freighter in a matter of minutes. It takes some time. Our branch-led business model operating model is somewhat different than, you know, the way, you know, the Chubb business has been built over the many years under UTC and Carrier ownership and leadership.
Changing that and finding the right mix, you know, between their model and, you know, where we are from an operating perspective, you know, is ultimately going to take some time. The other aspect of it too that we don't, most of us don't think about is that we still don't have access to Hong Kong, we still don't have access to China, as those countries continue to suffer from lockdowns associated with COVID. You know, we are diligently building plans. We are, you know, focused on, you know, being prepared to make, you know, execute on our, so to speak, our phase one changes that we need to make and, you know, are already trying to take advantage of some of the procurement opportunities that are gonna happen there.
I just go back to 18-36 months as a realistic timeframe, and we wanna be realistic with you and what we share with you. Trust me, we are very active in the business and we'll be attacking all fronts as we see that opportunity present itself.
That's very helpful. Thank you. Maybe one more on backlog, the $3.6 billion. Appreciate the update to the guidance here for the rest of the year. How should I think about that $3.6 billion? Obviously, a lot of projects in there. What's your ability to reprice once you put that into the backlog? What's your visibility there on margin across that $3.6 billion? Thank you.
Yeah. Number one, that is, you know, our contract installation backlog. It also includes larger time and material projects with our industrial maintenance customers. It would also include our anticipated work under certain master service agreements and blanket contracts. It's not just, so to speak, fixed price, lump sum, you know, contract related work. There is a variety of opportunities that's included in that $3.6 billion. You know, margins vary, you know, based on segment and based on individual company, to be totally honest with you, Markus, inside that. We have confidence in the margins there. We've been preaching, you know, price.
We've been preaching protecting yourself in your contract languages, which goes back to your original proposal to make sure that you're protecting yourself from, you know, inflationary pressures associated with it. We have really good confidence in the quality of the backlog, you know, that we have, but it would be extremely difficult for us to give you an exact, you know, margin percentage based on it. It would vary by segment and by business.
Got it. Okay, great. Thanks for the color. I'll get back in queue.
Our next question comes from Julian Mitchell from Barclays.
Hi, this is Kieran de Brun for Julian . You know, just looking at the 60%+ as a new target for inspection service revenues, when do you think you'll be able to achieve that, and what actions are you guys taking to reach that goal?
Well, I mean, you know, the reality of it is, you know, I can't tell you if we're gonna get there, you know, in three or four years, to be totally honest with you, Kieran. You know, It's really driven by our relentless focus on growing the inspections. You know, our inspections, you know, were up again, you know, on a year-on-year basis, you know, for this quarter, which really gets us, excited. We had really solid growth, you know, in that piece of the business. You know, we need to drive that inspection-first mindset, you know, into the Chubb business so that, you know, they're thinking about things, you know, in a very similar fashion, that we are.
As long as we continue to grow the inspection piece of the business, we know that we're gonna grow the service piece of the business, which is the recurring revenue portion of it. We're going to incrementally make, you know, make gains on it, you know, each and every year, and that's what's positive for us. That's what's, you know, where we're driving the business to, and that's what is, you know, our biggest focus. We still have work to do as we, you know, continue to build out our inspection sales team, and that is happening and ongoing, you know, every single day. That's really our number one strategic priority, you know, across the business.
Got it. Thanks. I have one follow-up. Just looking at, you know, the $40 million synergy, you know, number that you talked about. You know, for the cost to achieve that, should we assume some sort of similar timeline? Or how should we think about that?
Well, I guess we said that we believe that we're going to, you know, capture those synergies over an 18-36 month, you know, period of time. That's where our focus is. As I said earlier in my remarks, you know, our number one focus right now is the separation from Carrier, and that needs to continue to be our priority. We believe that we see opportunities up to $40 million and, you know, hopefully that's going to continue to evolve, but it's going to take us that period of time to capture.
Got it. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Ashish Sabadra from RBC Capital Markets.
Hi, this is John Mazzoni filling in for Ashish. Congratulations on the strong results. Given the higher international tensions, and I think you mentioned this previously on Hong Kong and China, could you just walk us through how you're navigating international risks and, any of the actions you're doing perhaps in Europe on knock-on effects or any other things you're seeing in terms of just, kind of the overall business environment? Thanks.
Well, I think, you know, when I think about, you know, navigating, you know, risk, you know, obviously, you know, we continue to watch, you know, how things continue to evolve in the Ukraine with Russia. We have very little exposure to that. Our legal team has stayed on top of that, you know, looking at areas where we may have customer, you know, customer ties to Russia and, you know, what sort of impact that may or may not have on the business. It has been very low, and it's been extremely pretty small. You know, as it relates to, you know, how things potentially evolve with China and the position China takes, you know, that's something that, you know, we continue to keep our eye on.
Our exposure in China is small. The majority of our business in Asia is focused in Hong Kong. We continue to, you know, really just keep our eye on it and have open dialogue about any sort of risk and what sort of action planning that we may have to take if there is potentially additional problems and challenges there.
I think you know Martin and I were talking the other day, you know, it's kind of funny that since we've been a public company, we've known nothing but headwinds. You know, we went public and so did COVID. Then we've had supply chain issues and you know, it'll be interesting when the world just calms down a little bit. This company has performed amazingly well and put up the numbers that it has put up in what has been a crazy couple of years. You know, it's just gonna be interesting when you know, the waters smooth out and you get a bit of a tailwind in what's going on in the macros.
You know, look at how well we've performed over the last couple of years with global headwinds that have nothing to do with the business. I really think, you know, you really see the resiliency of how the business is set up and what we call the protective moat. You know, we look forward for the day when the world just takes a breath.
Great. Thank you for the color. Maybe quickly, could you just remind us on labor and how the union workforce in the United States and the subcontracted workforce internationally helps? It sounds like the color around the $30 million spent over the past five years on leadership development is helpful, but just maybe around what you're seeing in the hiring environment and how you think you can pretty much navigate that as well, just because the issue of kind of the tough.
Yeah. There was a lot there in that in your question. First, just to tackle the union component of it. The majority of our workforce is union, and that does a couple things for us. It gives us really good visibility into their wage rates and, you know, the cost structure associated with that. And, you know, even going through this, you know, kind of a challenging time from a people perspective, in our collective bargaining agreements negotiation, I would tell you that they've all been resolved and settled at very fair in escalation in those wage packages.
I've been actually very impressed with the leadership of the union and how they have been reasonable in their expectations and haven't tried to take advantage of, you know, the hot labor market and situation there. The other aspect of the union aspect of it is, you know, when Friday afternoon comes and we don't have work for that, you know, individual on Monday, you know, we can basically lay them off and send them to the union hall without any trailing severance costs. That's all built into their wage packages. To flex up and down, you know, as we commonly in Western Europe work is the use of a lot of sub instead of having permanent employees.
That allows them greater flexibility to, you know, flex what their needs are. Flex labor more often than they would have, say, having full-time employees. Dollar investment, you know, in leadership development over a number of years. I would just tell you that, you know, we have believed for almost 20 years now that investing, you know, in our people and investing in our people as leaders and as human beings is what's ultimately gonna drive, you know, the greatest results and create shareholder value in itself true. The industry that are actually doing the work in the field. They haven't made the level of investment in those individuals in the same way that this personnel and staff. From my perspective, that's an absolute shame.
You know, almost 70% of our workforce, you know, is showing up on our customer sites, you know, every single day. Those men and women wanna be invested in as human beings, just like you and me. You know, that we've done that's unique at APi is that we've taken our leadership development efforts to those men and women, and I think that is something that creates a unique environment for us so that that people will want to be a bigger part of something that stands, you know, you know, our purpose of building great leaders. I mean, that means something, and it stands for something, you know, bigger than, you know, an individual self. I think that's something that is unique to what we're trying to accomplish, you know, at APi.
I think that's something that, you know, we can do and bring to the Chubb organization. You know, we already have one individual from our team that we're planning to relocate to London. He was the individual that originally helped stand up our leadership development efforts way back in the early 2000. He's going to relocate to London and help bring that effort to Chubb.
How are we going to, you know, bring that same energy and enthusiasm from a leader development perspective to the Chubb organization? As I said in my remarks, I really think that that's going to be a big part of, you know, what the Chubb organization, you know, forward.
Great. Thank you so much for the color.
Next question comes from Jon Tanwanteng from CJS Securities.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. In reaching the target margin, just given that I understand that, you know, you can grow profit dollars in line with the expectations or maybe getting to the margin percentage just in this environment, what's driving that? Is it maybe an expectation of moderating inflation, more synergies or something else that we should be?
John, hey, it's Kevin. I'll take that one. This year with the significant pass-through that Russ talked about, you think about some of our businesses, if you take one of our businesses in segment as a proxy, fabrication, you know, they're obviously seeing a significant run-up, and we're pushing through from a price standpoint related to steel. You know, that's gonna compress margins this year. All that said, they continue to focus, and you can use that company really as a proxy for our contract work, especially and broadly. They continue to focus on productivity initiatives, and continuing to push more and more of our offerings through that service and recurring revenue.
In a year like this where we see the run-up, of course it's gonna compress margins, but as we continue to focus on the long-term levers that we've talked about, you know, for the last couple years, and this inflationary pressures subside, we expect there to be, you know, a higher ramp, let's say, next year and the following year in our margins, as we see that work start to show up, and as the material and-
This is actually for you. What is your expected interest expense for the year, just given the keeping that at a floating rate at this point?
Expected full year interest expense right now is $100. We're comfortable with that, if that's your question. You know, we're forecasting as we do, based on you know sort of the mix of fixed and floating that we have.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Yep.
Our next question comes from Kathryn Thompson from Thompson Research Group.
Hey, how's it going? Just in terms of this is just a bigger picture, you know, understanding you're more services focused, but I guess that backdrop, how are you thinking about managing inventories and just basic goods as the world shifts from a just-in-time, and how relevant is this trend really for APi?
Kevin, do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah. Kathryn, I mentioned this as well, but you see, you saw the impact of, you know, just in time we're trying to get in this world where availability sort of gets you on defense a little bit. We're doing what we can to get materials for jobs in time to do the work that both rates that we're seeing. That's become. Also in my mind, we saw that as a working capital investment here in the first quarter. Obviously, as we move through, for that and have less of an impact as we move sort of Q2, Q3, and the most significant impact we're gonna see really is in the first half of the year. We expect to work a lot of that off in the back half of the year.
In terms of supply chain timing from others in the construction cycle. With your next goal of 60% of your revenue, this is organic growth versus acquired.
Majority of your growth in organic, Kathryn, this is Russ. You might have some small M&A activity associated with buying customer accounts, et cetera, that will be additive onto that. But essentially, you can count on most of that being organic by nature. When you think about it, lion's share of the work that's labor intensive as we continue to grow, that we're susceptible to supply chain related issues. I mean, you have component issues from a fire alarm perspective and security. On the security, has been seeing some challenges in the last.
Also, you know, an item that we continue to keep a close eye on. You know, pipe is a big part of, you know, what we do in all aspects of our business. We continue to monitor not only cost, but availability. As we continue to grow the, you know, the inspection service side of the business, we become less and less susceptible to those issues and challenges.
Okay. What sequential trends are you seeing in terms of types of projects kind of in the proposal pipeline? I guess importantly, who are you taking market share from?
You know, to try to address the first part of your question, I think the end markets that we serve, you know, continue to be very strong and the data center space Facebook, Microsoft, Google, what they're doing and the investment that they're continuing to make is really positive for us from both a installation, but more importantly, an inspection and service base, you know, semiconductor, the Intel's of the world, you know, continue to provide robust opportunities, you know, for us. I think that that's, you know, something that we need to continue to stay focused end markets and the opportunities from both an inspection and service perspective and ultimately an installation perspective will continue to be robust.
What was the second half of your question, Kathryn? I'm sorry.
It just really, who are you taking market share? I mean, who are the big buckets, in terms of taking market share? Happening, post-COVID world is. It gets down to service. You know, we see this as an opportunity. Share, which it appears that you are from others that just don't have as good access to products and people. That was really one of the big buckets where you're seeing market share gains.
Yeah. Well, I mean, the industry is so fragmented. I think that so, you know, we're gonna be taking share from, you know, a lot of smaller, more family-owned type businesses in the regional and local communities, you know, that we serve. That's where our scale and technical capabilities are going to be, you know, ultimately, you know, a big advantage for us and something that we, you know, continue to stay focused on. It's like anything, you know, you are right. It's about service, and it's about your commitment, you know, to serving your customers with flexibility, safely, efficiently, and everything else associated with that. I mean, this is also very much still a relationship based industry and space.
I think that our inspection-first strategy that we've employed as it relates to how we sell inspections into the marketplace allows us to create more solid, sticky relationships with our customers. That's, you know, a driver for us. Our customers continue to consolidate, and that's an advantage for us as our customers continue to consolidate and grow their businesses. That's going to create opportunities for us if we're delivering and we're executing and we're maintaining those key relationships.
Great. Thank you very much.
We have time for one more question from Andrew Wittmann from Baird.
Great. Excuse me. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess I wanted to ask a little bit on the integration, maybe from two perspectives. The first one, I guess is, I think I heard in the prepared remarks, obviously the $20 million-$40 million synergy, but I also heard that there's gonna be a level of reinvestment. I was wondering, what the expectation is for the net, savings to EBITDA would be after the reinvestments. Maybe for Kevin, if you could talk a little bit about what this year's budget is for, like, acquisition and integration costs. I know this quarter, in the adjusted reconciliation, there's large numbers for the acquisition expenses, which makes sense in the quarter where you actually close the deal. The organization expenses were actually fairly modest.
I was hoping to understand how that geography moves. I would expect the integration and reorganization expenses to maybe go up and the acquisition expenses to go down. What's the net budget maybe for the year for those type of items, just so we have an order of magnitude as to what the cost is here?
Yeah, I can take both those. I'll start on the latter, Andrew Wittmann, and then you'll have to remind me. I think the first one was the $20 million-$40 million, but we'll have to come back to clarify that question. On the acquisition, the one-time cost, yes, you're right. You saw about $24 million related to just closing the deal in the quarter. Then you should have seen somewhere around, you know, I'll say $15 million-$20 million, I think it was close to $17 million, on just ongoing costs. The majority of that cost that you saw in the first quarter was related to our continued investment in carving out the Chubb business from the Carrier infrastructure. Okay, there's various things in there, but I'll say that was largely what was in there.
We are still working through the full year view to that, so we're not ready to guide on it. I think you asked for a budgeted number. But we'll have two buckets there. One will be, you know, cost to capture the value opportunities that we're talking about, and the other is cost that we're gonna continue to see for the year as we carve this business out of the Carrier platform. Okay, the cost you saw in Q1, I think you can. Those will step up slightly as we move through the year, but we are still in the planning phase here in the second quarter.
The first part of the question was, if you've gotten to 40 of gross synergies, what's a realistic expectation for the net benefit to EBITDA from cost synergies?
I'll jump in on that one and tell you later.
I'm just curious with what is demand from some of the customers. I mean, you look at what Amazon's results were for the quarter. Clearly, there's a relation to home delivery services. It's not just Amazon, it's probably others as well. I guess, Russ, given that this has been, to my understanding, a fairly large driver of your growth over the last couple of years, are you seeing any signs or changing any expectations around what the longer term outlook might be or at least the intermediate term outlook over the next couple of years could be on this specific end market?
Yeah. We do play in the space, but it's not a significant, you know, component of our revenue mix by any stretch of the imagination. I think I've often commented that our focus is on capturing the inspection and service from the Amazons of the world. We'd rather chase those around than chase the original installation work. Maybe for us with the right customers, the right relationships, then we're going to be interested and willing to participate in that. I think that the diversity that we have, Andy, with our customer base, not only from, you know, individual customers but also from an end market perspective, gives me, you know.
I'm not worried about it, you know, at all. We've been keeping an eye on it. You know, our manufacturing business and specialty services does some Amazon work, but they have a great backlog, you know, as we continue through 2022. They also have great customer diversification, so that if Amazon does pull back and we do, you know, say, miss out on one of their, so to speak, project related opportunities, it won't have any impact on our business and our results. We keep an eye on it, we track it, but we're more interested in the ultimate service and inspection work than we are on the original builds.
Hey, Andrew, going back to the 20-40. I mean, while we'll give you color when we do the more fulsome presentation in the back half of the year. I mean, the reinvestment really is a one time. The synergy savings are perpetual, so, you know, you have to look at it.
Got it. We'll look forward to the update, later this year on that. Thanks, guys, for the perspective.
Thank you, Andy, and nice to hear from you. I'll wrap things up here. In closing, I would be remiss if I didn't thank all of our APi and Chubb team members who have remained focused on not only supporting our company and customers, but also the communities in which we serve. The safety, health, and well-being is our number one priority. I want to thank everybody for taking the time to join the call this morning. Thank you for your continued interest in APi. Thank you. Have a great day.
This does conclude today's program. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at this time. Have a great day.