Not me.
Are you gonna do it?
You want a safe harbor statement? You know.
You need to make it. Well, that's fine.
You know, Cai, I'll make a statement. The good news is that, you know, we released yesterday, we filed our K.
Right.
We're about as safe a harbor as I'm gonna be.
Okay.
You know.
If I can have your attention. We're going to move on with our program, we're delighted to have with us Leidos CEO, Roger Krone, who I've known for many years. We're gonna do a dialogue, and he's gonna make some future-looking statements, forward-looking statements, just so you're aware, in the 10-K filed yesterday. You'll have all you need in that. Roger, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
Well, thank you. You know, Cai, we were saying, you know, we put out our, we released earnings yesterday, and we filed our K. I think, you know, we're in really good shape relative to disclosure. It's great to be here, and thanks for shortening my drive by five hours. Moving the conference to the Washington, D.C. area.
That's why we did it.
There you go.
That's why we did it. Roger, you know, you've put together a company that was pure services. You've added a lot of different businesses. You know, you've gotten scale. You're involved in lots of areas. If you look at your business, what are the key target areas that you would like to grow in, and why those areas?
Well, let's see. We're about, you know, midpoint of the guide, a little short of $15 billion for 2023. I think people view us as a growth company, to keep growing, we have to expand our breadth and depth. In existing customers, we've got to provide more goods and services to those. In customers like the Pentagon, that's gonna be areas of growth in the Pentagon, like hypersonics, like space, like areas like that. When we go around the rest of the federal government, there's still a lot of the federal government that's, frankly, on mainframe. Move to the multi-cloud for some parts of the government. Other parts of the government have moved to cloud, but they're not as secure as they need to be.
There are things like confidential computing and zero trust areas where we can offer that capability. There is as a service, which is, we think, sort of the next transition. You know, we bought a 1901 platform, which is a ServiceNow as a service, a platform.
There's some things globally that we're excited about. Our security business, we're expanding globally into Europe and Pacific Rim. We like the Five Eyes countries, so we wanna go where the U.S. goes. We've always had a significant presence in the U.K., as we'll call it, like a mini Leidos doing the same kind of work in the U.K. and then in Australia.
Cai, I'm sure you're aware, and, you know, the people on the call know, we were able to buy an airborne surveillance business from Cobham and Advent and add to our portfolio in Australia. We're in markets that are global, and we appreciate being able to grow globally.
Right. One of the areas where, you know, you've had good growth has been kind of enterprise IT, move to the cloud, more security. It seems like, you know, the government's going through a broad movement where lots of different agencies are, you know, moving more quickly and major new systems from what they used to have. How long do you think this cycle, if you will, could last? I mean, are we early in the cycle, halfway through, toward the end?
Yeah. Well, you know, we talk a lot about it. In the Pentagon, I think, we've moved faster to cloud, by the way, now multi-cloud. The federal government writ large is got a long way to go. If I were to make some guess about in the Pentagon, maybe we're at 35%, 40% transformation. You look at Treasury, like there's a big procurement we have bid on called T-Cloud, which is to move the Treasury to the cloud. They've barely started the journey. In some of the Pentagon support agencies, the combat support agencies in our DES contract, that's what DES is all about.
You know, $11.5 billion IDIQ is to take organizations like, DHA and, DLA and put them on what we call DoDNet and facilitate multi-cloud. It will certainly persevere way beyond my tenure with the company. At least five more years, maybe 10 more years. Then we'll probably move to more as-a-service, and it will evolve.
Right.
You know, we started cloud, and now we've already moved to multi-cloud and edge to cloud, and it's just gonna continue. The pace of technology is such that that will be a great business to be in forever.
You know, we had DES, $11.5 billion came out of kind of nowhere, at least from an investor point of view. You mentioned T-Cloud. Are there any other, you know, big guys like that that might come out, you know?
In the digital transformation area.
Yeah
And we've talked about this, as have others. Probably the next big, kind of digital transformation is the FENS program with the FAA. That should be Q1 . what we have told our investors is, should be award Q1 . You can almost guarantee a protest. I think that will be highly contested, so add, you know, award Q1 , 99 days. Frankly, it could be a second round of protests.
Yeah.
That one could go to Court of Federal Claims.
How big is that?
Of course, you know, we haven't said because. It's $ billions, you know.
Okay.
I obviously don't wanna give out our price, but I don't know, $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion.
Okay.
Yeah, pretty significant. In that's in the digital transformation. In our pipeline, we have other programs in the multi-billion dollars that we're looking for, we have proposed this year or we hope for an award this year.
Can you give us any help in terms of you know, what are the big ones you're looking for this year?
Well, I can kind of go through the list. I talked about FENS. We have a program, where we operate the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research on behalf of NCI.
That will have a big number headline in the big number billions. We book it on a net basis. We get a management fee for that. Although it's gonna appear as a large competition, it won't be a large revenue impact for us. This is the way we've always accounted for it. It is in the, you know, kind of $4 billion-$6 billion range.
Smaller is Indian Health Service. That ought to be in Q1. Then we've proposed on some other programs, there's a logistics program for VA. There's a logistics program for the army called CHS-6. Those are likely to be e-events this year. Then a real wild card for us, Cai, is we have a bid in the $5 billion, $6 billion, $7 billion for the NASA's Human Landing System program. We're teamed with Northrop on that. That award, Thursday on schedule, could be Q2. We really like our offering. We have sort of a horizontal configured lander, but we know we're up against some real stiff competition on it.
Right. Do you feel your chances are better now that Elon is basically involved in other things?
Well, we're No. Is, you know, Elon had the first lander award. This will be a competition between, you know, frankly, Bezos and ourselves.
Let's see. I can't really speak to NASA's view of the billionaires. What I can tell you is that what we propose is more traditional NASA contractor, NASA solution, and they have, you know, awarded, you know, to a billionaire and, you know, I don't know how that program's going. I'm sure it's going well. We're just more of a traditional alternative.
If that suits the interest of the agency, then we have a better chance. I don't really have an opinion. I think we have a very exciting concept and especially when you start moving logistics to the surface, the way we have built our lander, the payload, you can put a habitat module there, and it can be inhabited, or we can move large habitat modules and rovers and things in our concept. We really like what we propose, but we'll see whether NASA really likes it or not.
Got it. Indian Health, the VA Logistics, CHS-6, how big are those approximately?
Indian Health Service, you know. Let's do it by billions. Indian Health Service is sort of up to $1 billion. The other two, probably somewhere between $2 billion-$5 billion each. Again, without getting into the specifics, you know, which for lots of reasons, competitive reasons, I prefer not to.
Right. No, no. That's very helpful. This should really be a good year for awards. Potential. Potential for awards.
I should look a lot like 2022. Wh ich I would tell you was a good year for us. It was an AEGIS year. It was, I think it was a DES year as well.
And I would caution, and Cai, you understand this, every company tends to book a little differently. You know, when we booked DES, the headline was eleven and a half billion dollars.
Right.
We booked $130 million.
Right.
I think it will be a good year from winning.
Right.
From a booking, I think it's gonna look a lot like last year from a book to bill because, you know, like on DES, the DES program may get to $11.5 billion.
Right.
We don't put that. It doesn't go through our book to bill. It doesn't go into our backlog. I think there's a lot of Franchise opportunities that we're competing for. Then it's up to, you know, Chris Cage and his team on what I get to book.
Right. Got it. You've got a lot of product development initiatives with Dynetics, and I think you've talked about growth picking up in 2024. I mean, there's Mayhem, there's, what, Lunar Lander, there's Tranche 1. I mean, what are the key? I mean, Lunar Lander, obviously a key target.
Right.
What are some of the other ones that are really important, where the decisions might be made in the next, you know, this year?
Oh, wow. Well, you know. I thought you were asking me a different question, like what are the other programs that we have in Dynetics that will accelerate our growth in 2023 and into.
Well, sure. That's part of it.
Yeah. you know, IFPC Enduring Fires Protection Program-
Enduring Shield.
Enduring.
Right.
Okay, which if y'all made the trip down to Huntsville in December, you saw the prototypes that we're building, which will lead to production. Which will lead to a significant ramp in 2024. The high energy laser program we call IFPC-HEL is in, the same, category. There are other programs. There's a weapons program. There's some smaller programs that will help us to ramp as well. The Wide Field of View program, and I know Laura was just here from MDA.
We have a Tranche 1 award. The RFP for Tranche 2 is right around the corner. I expect every other year they're gonna buy another tranche of satellites and sensors. That's gonna be a growth business for us as we deliver on Tranche 1 in 2024. There, you know, a lot of things that we've already won that we just need to perform against and deliver on our commitments.
I mean, how secure should we feel about 2024? 'cause, I mean, one of my concerns is we got a lot of potentials, but basically, we have total disarray in the government as usual.
Yeah. You, you know, Cai, I think what you ought to feel is like we do, is the future of 2024 is in the hands of the team at Leidos.
Right.
If we perform and we deliver, then, 2024 will be a fantastic year. Yeah, there's some more programs we would like to win that would help the growth in 2024. Most of that, you know, and you know how the, you know, the time constant is in our industry, it takes, you know, we win a program like FENS, it takes a long time to ramp. We've seen that on DES. We've seen that on other programs. Most of the growth in 2024 relates to us delivering on our commitments, making things happen. The SES business continue to recover. Programs like Reserve Health Readiness program to continue to recover and get staffed. You know, we feel really confident in 2023 and where we are, and we, you know, we just see additional growth in 2024.
Got it. You mentioned energy as an area of 10% growth. Roughly how big is it?
Say that again.
Your energy business, you mentioned that as an area of like double-digit growth.
Yeah.
Roughly how big and what's driving it?
North of half a billion.
You know, in kind of a round number.
What we call our commercial energy business.
Yes.
We provide engineering services t o investor-owned utilities.
Mm-hmm.
It is a significantly high growing business. I mean, I, you know, without giving you a number.
Right.
We have added new lines to that business in the last year.
Mm-hmm.
We've added, electrical vehicle fleet management.
Mm-hmm.
A lot of our government customers are interested in converting their fleet to EV. We're not going to make EVs, but what we find, for example, you know, like might be the post office that says, We want to convert to electric vehicles, they need a company like us who understands mission, understands electric utilities, to help them through that transition.
Mm-hmm
of how they could electrify their fleet.
Mm-hmm.
There are different other government organizations with, you know, massive fleets of vehicles, and that's a great growth opportunity for us. Then we've added a Chief Climate Officer.
Mm-hmm.
You know, kind of part of our ESG, but what we found is, the government agencies who are trying to set policy are awash in climate data. We're now collecting data on climate and temperatures and what's going on in the oceans all over the world, and we have literally petabytes of data. So we've added a climate officer, and this is a great application of big data and AI ML to help those customers like NOAA sort through the literally mountains of data. We've added a couple of new lines, which we think will continue the growth that we've seen in our commercial energy business. Our commercial energy business certainly grows faster than the company and has a higher margin than the company average.
Okay. Then update us on the PACT awards. Where are they? Airport security order prospects, are they picking up now that traffic is growing again?
Let's see. Our exam business, you know, has multiple lines.
Mm-hmm.
I'll try not to take too long on this. Let me talk specifically. You know, it's referred to by a lot of people as the burn pits, but it's actually broader than burn pits. It's burn pits, it's asbestos on ships, it's other things. Some of it actually goes all the way back to, you know, Agent Orange and Vietnam. What the PACT Act did, which was a law, is it made certain ailments that veterans have eligible for a benefit under VA. The way that process works in the VA is, you know, you have to submit a claim to the VA, and then the VA conducts an exam. Today, most of those exams are conducted by contractors like Leidos.
Right.
Right? We, we conduct a medical exam, we write a report, we give it to the VA, then the VA adjudicates it. We're not in the adjudication. We just started this, right? The veterans are making claims to the VA and building inventory of claims, and then what the VA has to do is allocate that out to they do some that they self-perform on, but allocate it out to contractors, of which there are several. We're one. I'm sure Maximus is another one and, you know, OptumServe.
To say we have seen this big rush and flow of PACT Act cases, I can't tell you that. I think we've seen solidification in what we call our district one through four, which is where the PACT Act cases would reside. I haven't seen the spike yet. You know, our experience with VA is it just takes creative time and lag for this to come through. We expect PACT Act volume to increase throughout the year.
Mm-hmm.
Which will help, you know, in our specific case, to offset what we call the loss of district six or transition exams, where the VA opened competition there. At the same time, we have won an award for international exams.
Mm-hmm.
Which would be accretive. You know, overall, we expect the strength in our exam business to remain. You know, this goes back to where could there be upside? There could be upside for Leidos in the number of exams, but we're not being overly aggressive just because our experience with the VA is it just takes time for this to work through the VA system.
Your assumption is what? We net out to a flat year, PACT is an upper-...
Yeah.
Loose.
Relatively flat. The mix changes a little bit.
Mm-hmm.
If you were on our call, and I know you were, we talked about our margin becoming more normative in our health business.
Right.
In the mid-teens.
Right.
That's because we were sole source on the transition exams.
Mm-hmm.
Which we call District 6, so that's a little bit more competitive. The mix is such that, and some other things are going on in the health group.
Mm-hmm.
That will cause our margin in the health group to be.
Right.
What we call in the mid.
Mid teens.
Yeah.
What about airport security? Have the order prospects picked up there now that we're seeing traffic come back?
Yeah. Yeah, I, yes, and we saw growth this year, and we'll see growth next year. You know, part of the excitement in our Q4, where we both had top-line growth and we saw, you know, significant margin improvement, was from our security inspection business. We just had a lot of equipment that we delivered in the Q4.
Mm-hmm.
You know, that may or may not repeat from, seasonality, in 2023. I also wanna caution, everyone is that, you know, by the way, I literally did. I flew on Southwest over the Christmas holidays, and if you asked me, I would tell you that air traffic is back and volumes are higher than they were pre-COVID.
Right.
That's because I was traveling in the U.S.
Right.
If you're traveling in the Pacific Rim.
Right.
Which I'm gonna do next week, volume is still way down.
Right.
We've seen a lot of activity in the U.S., you know, TSA, but if we look at Pacific Rim, we had an opportunity in Hong Kong that was canceled, so the volume and the strength globally isn't there yet. We have not seen the recovery worldwide that we all have seen in the U.S. It's interesting being a global business. You gotta be a little bit careful about what you see when you go out to Dulles, that that is not what you're gonna see, you know, if you're in Sydney or you're in Beijing. Yeah, good strength. You know, it's a great margin business for us.
The service revenue is strong. Again, the service revenue is tied to traffic, but the global rebound is not happening. As you know, China is just starting to reopen, and that's a big driver of volume in the whole Pacific Rim. Again, we're excited about the business. We're still probably 2024, 2025 before globally we're back at pre-
Right.
-COVID levels.
You know, you have a number of revenue drivers, and I think people were a little disappointed in your revenue. You know, I think your revenue guide was a little below, you know, where some of us on the street were. You mentioned, I guess, a couple of revenue headwinds. Maybe you could give us a little more color on Focused Fox. What's the other one? Items, UFF, the NGA contract.
Right.
The revenue headwinds that you have.
Well, thanks for the question. By the way, you know, you've kind of answered it. Appreciate that. We have said there's about, in 2023, about $150 million of headwinds, really reprograms.
Mm-hmm.
Our terrific defense health program, which has been, you know, in our top five programs for a long time, is actually starting to finally ramp down.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we're more than half complete by a very successful program on cost and on schedule. There will be a time when we've put, you know, the Cerner Millennium at all the military treatment facilities. We're seeing about, you know, a 10% reduction in that program, year-over-year.
In 2023?
In 2023 from 2022.
Okay.
From a revenue standpoint. you know, these three programs add up to be about a $150 million headwind.
Okay.
The second is Focused Fox.
Mm-hmm.
You know, it's not late-breaking news, but, I was informed by my law team that, you know, there are three competitors. There was a winner.
Right.
There's another competitor. I understand they protested on Monday.
A fourth one?
I can tell you that we protested yesterday.
Okay.
Which is a re-protest after a corrective action.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we have, we've been very thoughtful about that program. It's a really important program to us. We have incumbency on Focused Fox.
Right.
Not a 100%.
Right
... a significant incumbency. The NGA program that we lost, we had the user-defined services.
Mm-hmm.
We lost user-facing services. I like to think that we did a outstanding job or a good job on transition, we were there until the very end. We did have revenue on user-defined services in 2022 that we won't have in 2023. Collectively, think of those three programs as about $150 million that we'll need to catch up this year.
Some of the, you know, when you have, you know, in the, in your business, when you have programs that go away, you know, you have some impact this year, but the following year is the one. I guess, you know, items is UFF, the NGA program, pretty much the hit is this year, and then.
The hit is this year.
That, that's-
It's completely this year.
Right.
We have no activity on UDS or on UFS.
Got it.
... which is the subsequent contract for which we have no role.
Right.
There will be no impact at NGA. Well, we have a very robust NGA business. Those other programs are doing fine.
Right.
We're at multiple locations, with NGA, and we actually view NGA, we haven't talked about it much-
Mm-hmm
... as Admiral Whitworth is thinking about how he deals with his data.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we think there's, you know, growth opportunities at NGA to help him use tools like AI ML to get at the data to be able to free up the imagery analyst to do what they do best.
Mm-hmm.
That's future work.
I mean, so if we think about DHMSM, it's down 10% this year, but it's down in the Q4. If we think about next year, is there another.
Next year being 2024.
2024, exactly. Is there, you know, another anniversary headwind? If we think about Focused Fox, how big are those two items in terms of-
Oh, well, you know, we don't, you know, we don't guide by program and, you know, I'm not gonna give you specifics, but I will confirm there will be another decrement-.
Mm-hmm
... in the Defense Health program next year.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we're always looking for ways to mitigate that. We have an innovation council on the program with the customer where we're looking at other things that we can do to fill in that gap. There will, you know, definitely be a reduction on the Defense Health Program in 2024. You know, we're not guiding 2024.
No, no, I understand.
We'll have to see about 2024.
Right. Another issue that's sort of come up is, inflation and wage hikes.
Mm-hmm.
How large, you know, on average is your wage hike likely to be in 2023? I just discovered, I guess I should have known this, that most of your competitors, like it's in the Q1 or the Q4 that they implement the wage hike, so you kinda get a stairstep. When do you basically put it into effect?
Yeah
roughly how big?
We increase wages in kind of two ways.
Okay.
We have our annual cycle.
Mm-hmm
... where, you know, we have a budget, we go through performance evaluations. That number is north of 4%.
Mm-hmm
... which is relatively consistent with what we have seen across the industry. We do out of cycle adjustments around special people and special skills. Depending upon what's going on in a program, what's going on in a specific market area, we might do an adjustment for a group of people and, you know, you might say, Oh, well, what are you talking about? Okay, people in the intelligence community with certain clearances.
Mm-hmm
certain special skills that are hard to recruit.
Mm-hmm.
There's the new people coming in. You know, what does it take to hire someone from a college and university? Right. That's not in our annual budget, we may find at times we have to pay more to replace a person who has retired, there's some inflationary process there.
What you're saying is it's basically not just all in the Q1, it's kind of it's...
No, I think it's always continuous. I think everybody in the industry has the same problem.
Right. Mm-hmm.
You know, we hire people throughout the year.
Mm-hmm.
We said on the call we hired over 11,000 people last year.
Mm-hmm.
When you hire somebody new, you're paying market-
Mm-hmm
... and, you know, sometimes there's, you know, with the existing workforce, there's a lag before you can get them to market. We're just, we're dealing with those staffing trends like everybody else.
Got it. On your October 21st investor day, you indicated 2022 to 2024 organic growth of 5% to 6%. You know, looks like organically you're gonna be short this year, I mean, you're talking 2% to 5% all in. Can you still get to the 5% to 6%? The one thing that I ask is, in 2021, that was before Ukraine, that was before, you know, relations with China taking another downward dip. How come the number isn't better than 5% to 6%?
Yeah. the kind of two things there-
Yeah
is first of all, it's a long-term guide.
Right.
It's meant to be long-term.
Right.
Not something we're gonna go adjust quarter- to- quarter.
Right
or even year- to- year.
Right.
If we didn't see a way forward to meet our long-term guide, we would change it. It's something that we really don't wanna be in the process of changing.
Right
... and trying to follow, trends. You know, when you speak to the guide that we put out yesterday.
Mm-hmm
... boy, it was Valentine's Day, too. A lot has happened-
Right
... in the last 24 hours.
Right.
We're the beginning of the year.
Mm-hmm.
We're always very thoughtful about what we put out as our guide.
Mm-hmm.
We, you know, a lot of uncertainty if we wanna talk about budget and debt ceiling and things.
Mm-hmm.
We try to be very thoughtful when we put our guide out, and then our job is to beat that number.
Mm-hmm.
There is a lot of opportunity, we think, to do better than the midpoint of our guide, and be at, if you will, at the top of the range, you know. You know, maybe if we get really lucky, we win a Lander program, we could be above the range. Then it also speaks to the enthusiasm that we look in 2024.
Mm-hmm.
Right? That we expect 2024 to be as strong, if not stronger, from a top-line growth standpoint. I will just spend a minute and talk about, you know, we had a 7% increase in the defense budget last year. We've had a 10% this year. There's a huge unobligated balance on Ukraine supplementals. I know I've had a lot of questions today and I know others have, is okay, well, why aren't we at 10% if the defense budget's at 10%? You know, our experience has been they don't always spend their money. They have unobligated balances. There's a lot of discussion between McCarthy and the budget hawks about, you know, un-rescinding unobligated balances. Whether that 10% that was in the omnibus actually makes its way completely unadjusted-
Mm-hmm
through the PPBS process into the hands of contractors, you know, is yet to be seen. It's a great number. It's a great print.
Mm-hmm.
To say, Well, the budget went up 10, so our defense segment should be up 10, it's, as you know well, that's not really the way this system works.
Mm-hmm.
It does create enthusiasm for us around, you know, top-line growth, and it's why we still feel that the long-term guide that we have out there is appropriate.
Got it. You know, I guess my point was 20 21 was before we saw the Ukraine, which has created incremental guide, and was before, you know, weather balloons and further downtick in our relations with China.
Yeah. We know Cai on Ukraine, just to touch on that, and shooting down weather balloons, you know, we don't make Sidewinder missiles.
Right.
You know, we don't make javelins and stingers.
Mm-hmm.
I think there's upside potential for us in Ukraine if the administration and the Pentagon decide to change the mix of support in Ukraine.
Mm-hmm.
Right now they're buying essentially inventory...
Mm-hmm
armaments-
Mm-hmm
... and things that we don't really, we don't make or sell.
Right.
We've said our Ukraine plus is about $25 million a quarter.
Mm-hmm.
That's mostly in ISR areas.
Mm-hmm
and the intel group.
Mm-hmm.
It's not a big number.
Mm-hmm.
If the administration would decide, if you will, like they did in Afghanistan, where we had literally 300 people on the ground in Afghanistan doing direct support of the Afghan Air Force, if they move to that posture.
Mm-hmm
There could be a lot more for us in these Ukraine supplementals. They have yet to decide that. Those are policy decisions, you know, made by the administration. We would be willing to provide some level of support. You know, we can do infrastructure support. We could help to rebuild, you know, some of, you know, the cities that have been decimated. We can obviously do aid and other things. But, you know, right now, the U.S. contractors are not on the ground-
Mm-hmm
... in Ukraine the way we were in Afghanistan. Frankly, we are on the ground in many countries...
Mm-hmm
... supporting the military, but we're not on the ground there.
Got it.
We are peripheral to the ground.
Mm-hmm.
We're in countries around Ukraine, but we're not there yet.
Adjusted EBITDA margins. This year, you know, you're basically what, 10.3% to 10.5%, you know, essentially flattish, with health down, and so you're getting improvement in civil, improvement in defense.
Right.
I assume from what you're saying is at this point it looks like going into 2024, health should be kind of the same. Based on paper, is there more room for civil and for defense to improve in 2024, which would get you to the $10.5, which is?
Yeah.
the goal?
Our long term is 10.5.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we printed a $10.4. We guided midpoint to $10.4.
Right.
What we've said is we expect, you know, health to come down more normative to the mid-teens.
Right.
We think, civil, you know, this year was at 10. We think they can repeat 10. There's potentially some upside there.
Right.
depending upon how things evolve.
Mm.
You know, the math is that the defense segment will increase and needs to increase.
Mm-hmm.
Some of that is mix in the defense segment. That's where we'll see more hardware, right? We have talked about our hardware strategy. We're about 10% product today.
Mm-hmm.
We'd like to see that number move up into the 20%.
Mm.
as we do that, as we have more, you know, like airborne aircraft assets.
Yeah.
We have more higher margin business, then, the margin will creep up. We expect growth in margin in defense 2022 to 2023.
No, no, I get that. I said if we think about 2024, health, which is a downer this year.
Mm-hmm.
Assume it looks like it's about the same. If defense and civil continue to show any improvement, the total number would go up.
Yeah.
Is that a reasonable expectation?
It certainly could.
Mm-hmm.
Okay? Our guide, our long-term guide is to get to 10.5.
Right.
I'm not gonna adjust that with you today.
Okay. No, no. What, but what you're saying is the 10.5 looks pretty good.
10.5 is certainly achievable for 2024.
Got it. Cash flow this year is restrained by, you know, CapEx is one and a half, and there's some one-timer. You know, it looks like this is an abnormal peak in that, you know, I think your target for 2024 was a 100% conversion.
Right.
That was before Section 174. If we adjust for Section 174, is that still more or less where you can be?
Right. Well, what we've always talked about is 100% cash conversion kind of on a three year moving average.
Right.
Okay? 'Cause in any given year, you could have a PACT Act. We had to repay the COVID payroll.
Mm-hmm.
-which is in the sixty-
Right. Right.
- number. It comes and goes. You know, the way we guide on cash, unlike, you know, revenue and margin, we do better than.
Mm-hmm.
Okay? We need to set our cash guide right at, if you will, the most aggressive revenue number.
Mm-hmm.
The aggressive revenue number requires working capital.
Mm-hmm.
If you do the PACT Act, from an Op cash standpoint, PACT Act repay, we didn't pay last year, plus the number this year, plus the payroll tax.
Mm-hmm.
You add to that the working capital, that gets you to the $700 floor that we put in today. To get to kind of a three year cash conversion, when you make those adjustments, it does say that we'll be much closer to our EBITDA number in 2024, and we expect that. Now, on free cash, we have signaled that we, because we've got a little bit more product in our mix-
Mm-hmm.
we see opportunities to spend maybe a little bit more than our 1%. We're gonna be, you know, maybe up to 1.5% today.
Mm-hmm.
I wouldn't say that's the operable number. I would say we'll be in between maybe one and a quarter.
Mm-hmm.
The Cobham business that we bought in Australia requires some capital investment.
Mm-hmm.
There's a big program in the army called ATHENA-R where we would buy two Bombardier Global 6500s and spend capital to outfit them.
Mm-hmm.
You know, if that happens, that could be a use of free cash. There are other programs. There's ATHENA-S, which follows ATHENA-R, and then there could be the HADES programs. There's some opportunities to spend some money that would lower free cash. From a cash conversion, again, you think of it as an adjusted three-year window, and we still see the opportunity to do that in a three year window that ends 2024.
Got it. We're pretty much out of time, but if we talk about cash deployment, I mean, obviously first half you can't do much, but when you get to the second half, things might loosen up next year. What's the, what's the priority? Is it pretty much stock buyback now or?
Yeah. You know, first of all, remind everyone, we've got some bonds that are due. We've got a term loan that's due.
Right.
that we took out. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna look at the balance sheet. We're gonna have to, you know, make moves with that. We wanna pay down our debt overall. Our commitment to Moody's, who just upgraded us, is we'll get to our three times leverage.
Mm-hmm.
You know, that's really important. Even with that, we expect to have, you know, several hundred million of unallocated cash. Our commitment, we said on the call, is to return that cash to shareholders, you know, and right now, assuming there's only 1% excise tax, you know, stock buybacks would be preferred.
Mm-hmm.
If the president gets his 4%, you know, maybe everyone in the industry will do more dividends or special dividends. I know we did an ASR last year. To do an ASR, yeah, $500 million, you know, maybe a little bit less than that, otherwise it's mechanically and from a transaction cost, really not a good use of our money to do an ASR. One would expect that we would be in the market in open market purchases.
Got it.
in the second half of the year.
Got it. Terrific. That was wonderful. Thank you so much.
Great. Thank you.
Well done.
See you again.