NOC - Northrop Grumman Corporation (NOC) Baird's Global Industrial Conference (Transcript)
2023-11-12 00:33:02 ET
Northrop Grumman Corporation (NOC)
Baird’s Global Industrial Conference Call
November 7, 2023 10:05 ET
Company Participants
Dave Keffer - Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Peter Arment - Baird
Presentation
Peter Arment
Okay. Thanks, everyone. Good morning, everyone. My name is Peter Arment, the Senior Aerospace defense analyst here at Baird. We are delighted to have Northrop Grumman Corporation join us here this morning. With us from Northrop Grumman is Dave Keffer, who is the Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Dave is going to make a forward-looking statement and a couple of opening comments, and then we’re going to get into some Q&A.
So with that, Dave, welcome. Thank you.
Dave Keffer
Thanks, Peter, and I appreciate you having us here today. Like you said, I’ll get the legal language out of the way first. And today, we’re going to make some forward-looking statements. Those statements involve risks and uncertainties and information about these risks and uncertainties can be found in our SEC filings.
So I’ll just give a few minutes of kind of high-level overview remarks, and then happy to dig into your questions as we go. We always like to start with our strategy. We think that’s what differentiates the company and what you see evidence of our execution of year-after-year and quarter-after-quarter. Our strategy starts with technology differentiation, leading with technology in our market offerings that then leads to the second pillar of sustainable and profitable growth. The third is around performance and careful execution of our programs and, of course, cost efficiency that goes with that. And then fourth and equally importantly, is around efficient and value-creating deployment of our capital.
I think when you take a look back at our third quarter results, you really see examples of success and execution of all four of those pillars of our strategy. It is a very active demand environment these days, as you know, both domestically and internationally. I’m sure we can dig into that in more detail as we go. But that has led to our largest backlog in our history at $84 billion. We’ve increased our book-to-bill expectation for the year multiple times now exceeding 1.0 in our full year book-to-bill rate. And when you look at really the last 3 years, you see an average book-to-bill above 1.1 leading to the strength in backlog growth and continued sales momentum that we have.
Speaking of the top line, we’ve grown 8% year-to-date through the first three quarters of the year. Our full year outlook is around 6.5% growth, and we’ve provided initial outlook for 2024 as well in the 4% to 5% range. That’s consistent with the range we entered 2023 with, and we’ve since increased our guidance twice to the current level around $39 billion. But it gives you a sense for the kind of stable upticks we’re seeing driven by the strength in the demand environment and our ability to take share given our alignment with our customers priorities.
And at the bottom line, we’ve maintained our operating income and earnings per share as well as free cash flow guidance throughout this year. Free cash flow is one of the real hallmarks of our value creation story these days. As we look at the growth opportunity in free cash flow with our – the midpoint of our guidance around $2 billion this year, not only have we projected a number well in excess of that for 2024 in the $2.25 billion to $2.5 billion range, but then continued healthy growth through 2025 and beyond. A portion of that is driven by non-operating factors like the reversal of headwinds we’ve been facing around taxes and pension cash over the last few years. Those are now going in our favor.
But more importantly, the underlying operating cash flows of the business are joining forces with a lower volume of capital intensity through the middle of this decade and beyond, leading to a really healthy opportunity for a doubling of our free cash flow over the next 5 years or so and all of the value-creating opportunities that come with that as we think about capital deployment. And shareholder returns have remained and as we project into ‘24 are expected to continue to remain our top priority for cash deployment. We’ve returned over 100% of free cash flow to shareholders in both 2022 and now 2023. We’ve indicated an expectation that we’ll do so in 2024 as well. And so we feel really good about the opportunity ahead, the optionality, if you will, around continuing to increase the dividend at a healthy clip, return cash to shareholders through our share repurchase program.
Our pension contributions continue to be relatively low over the projected future. And in aggregate, that gives us a lot of opportunity to continue to create value through cash deployment. So I think that’s a high-level view of what we want to share today, but let’s go ahead and dig into as many details as you’d like.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q - Peter Arment
Sure. Thank you – Thank you very much for that, Dave. So maybe let’s start with your 2024 kind of commentary, kind of that 4% to 5% growth, but there’s different elements of it when you think about it by segment. And one of the areas where there’s been a huge driver has been space. You’ve had a 17% kind of compound growth rate here for the last few years. That is sort of running into law of large numbers. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about that. And then maybe we could talk about a couple of the other segments on where you are thinking about ‘24?
Dave Keffer
Sure. Happy to walk through that. A couple of years ago, we had dramatically divergent growth rates among our 4 businesses. I think the outlook is now much more aligned as we think about 2024 growth. To your point, 4% to 5% across the company, we don’t expect a dramatic divergence from that among any of the 4 businesses. Our space business has reached $14 billion guidance level for this year. That’s 14% growth from last year. And to your point, 17% growth over the last several years, just incredible growth in a rapidly growing market, but clearly indicating share gains as well across a number of different mission sets, different levels of orbit, different capabilities we’re providing to our customers.
That growth in space will continue, but we’ll moderate to a level that we think of as being a slightly modestly better than the company average in 2024, but not so meaningfully so, as we’ve seen in 2022 and 2023. And that’s because we see moderation in the growth of some of the large program drivers in space that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, Sentinel and NGI, for example. Other programs that we’ve won in the restricted space domain continue to be meaningful contributors to our space business, but our reaching levels of maturity in the current phases before they have opportunities over time in many cases, to move to production phases as well.
There are still meaningful growers in our space business. The launch support we provide through propulsion capabilities in support of the Amazon Kuiper constellation, NASA launches as well. We are continuing to see growth in demand and growth in the sales outlook for that part of the business. I’d also note the Space Development Agency or SDA, proliferated LEO constellations where we’re seeing meaningful growth. We’ve had a couple of awards already this year for new business for SDAs Tranche 2 and now see opportunity for that sales to level to continue to ramp as well.
So that gives you a sense for what gives us a bit of upside from the company average in growth in space. Across the other businesses, we anticipate them being about in the range of the overall company growth in the case of our Mission Systems business and our Defense Systems business. Our Aeronautics business is one we’ve said we expected previously to be flattish this year and start to modestly grow next year. We’ve actually accelerated that modest growth into this year, and we’re still seeing some modest growth expected in 2024.
In our Mission Systems and Defense Systems businesses, those are the shorter cycle of our 4 segments. There is opportunity both domestically and internationally in both of those businesses. I’d highlight on the Defense Systems side, growth opportunities in the munitions portfolio. As you can imagine, given the amount of demand both in the U.S. for next-generation capability as well as replenishing stockpiles of current gen capabilities and then a lot of international demand in that side of the business as well. And then over a kind of more medium- and long-term view, the integrated air and missile defense capabilities we have in areas like our IBCS business are meaningful growth opportunities as well.
Peter Arment
I hope quickly this some of that shorter cycle business start to flow through? Because I know Kathy is talked about it a few times on the call and sort of the international demand that’s happening. How should we think about that? Is that starts to kind of either build and then how that affects your growth?
Dave Keffer
The growth has already been occurring this year in our munitions business. We talked 12 to 24 months ago about the fact that we were seeing good demand indicators in that part of the business given the threat environment internationally, the conflicts in Ukraine and now most recently in Israel, there is a lot of demand in our munitions business, not just in those theaters, but also from other countries that see the rising threat environment. And then as I mentioned, in the U.S. it tends to take time for that demand to lead to RFPs and orders and then sales, and that can be an 18 to 24-month cycle in many cases. So the earliest of those demand signals are now reaching the phase of a bit of sales growth for us in 2023. We’ve increased our guidance for our Defense Systems business as a result. And that’s the growth curve or trajectory that we expect to continue in 2024. So I would say that growth is upon us and has an opportunity to continue for the next several years.
We’re also in frequent discussions with the U.S. government about the sustainability of the growth in that market. For us, we are both a prime and a supplier in the munitions business. We have prime programs, including our AARGM and AARGM-ER product suite as well as our new win on the standing attack weapon. But a larger percentage of our business is as a supplier of key missile components and technologies as well as propulsion in the form of rocket motors and that now includes hypersonic capabilities as well. In all of those areas, we’re working our customers to understand both what is the sustained long-term demand signal and meeting capacity and making investments to achieve that level of opportunity and support of our customers, both primes and the U.S. government. And we’re also working with the government to understand where there may be spikes in demand that it makes more sense for them to fund that capacity expansion. And so working through those conversations, but what it all leads to is a very visible continued growth trajectory for that business.
Peter Arment
Yes. That’s very helpful color. I’m not going to ask you to predict the budget outcomes, but on budgets, outlays remain very robust and you’ve got a record $84 billion backlog. I mean, maybe just talk about that visibility and how you’re thinking about that.
Dave Keffer
Sure. Certainly, that’s the type of visibility that gives us an opportunity to project 4% to 5% growth in 2024. The health of our backlog, the long-cycle nature of our business gives us really strong visibility into the next 12 to 24 months at any given time. With that said, there are clearly uncertainties particularly around timing in the budget cycle. And where we stand today is operating under a continuing resolution that the current version of which is set to expire next week. Our outlook for 2024 and for the remainder of ‘23 for that matter, anticipate full year defense budget passage either at the end of this calendar year or early next. That’s the best indication we have at this point but certainly a lot of continued uncertainty as to the final time line there. And our program projections assume budget growth approximately in line with the President’s budget requests for 2024 and then eventually for 2025 as well. Certainly, a lot of political uncertainty continues. We’re kind of used to that environment perhaps there’s even more uncertainty than usual as to timing, but the global threat environment is such these days that it’s hard for us to picture a scenario where there isn’t continued support for the requirements of the defense department.
Peter Arment
Got it. Let’s switch over to the favorite subject that you can’t answer about is B-21. We know it’s a restricted program, and we know you’re only limited to whatever your customer has said publicly. So understanding that, maybe just give us the latest flavor of there’s been some taxing going on. And I think Kathy mentioned on the call that things are approaching towards first flight potentially this quarter. So what’s the latest?
Dave Keffer
Sure. You’re right to say that we’re limited in what we can say, and we’re largely limited to what our customer has said. But I would concur with what you described and elaborate on that a bit. The customer has said that we are progressing well through the ground test phase for the B-21 program and have entered the taxi testing phase as well and that we’re on track for our first flight this year. And so that’s what Kathy and I reiterated on our earnings call over the last couple of weeks and continues to be our best estimate as to the current phase of the program. That first flight will lead to an opportunity for the first lot of the LRIP phase, the low rate initial production phase, to be awarded. We’ve also projected that to be awarded in this calendar year, so this fourth quarter of the year. And we continue to update our projections on that phase of the program every quarter. We will continue to do so in each successive quarter going forward.
Peter Arment
So just an important point that I think is helpful for investors is you currently are operating under the Engineering & Manufacturing Development, EMD phase, of the contract, which is cost plus and that the LRIPs are kind of zero margin, at least which you’ve talked about publicly. But that the EMD phase continues for quite a while. I know there’s been no time line put on that, but they over – these contracts overlap for a while, right? Is that the best way to describe it?
Dave Keffer
That is a fair characterization, absolutely. The – there will be a gradual decline in the EMD phase and a ramp-up over that same period in the LRIP phase. It’s not an overnight change from one to the other, but an overlap of the two. And the specifics of those, we’ll defer to the government on the time lines for, but certainly, you’re thinking of it the right way in terms of there being an overlap in the two phases of the program.
Peter Arment
That’s good to hear. Just because I think there was a lot of misconception out there that it changed overnight, and that’s not the case. Okay. Let’s switch over to kind of international. 15% of your mix. A lot of people always said, well, why isn’t it higher? Well, I think there’s a lot of aspects that your international mix is actually growing quite nicely but so is your domestic. Maybe you could talk about just kind of that kind of dynamic.
Dave Keffer
That’s a good characterization. Certainly, we aspire to continue to grow that 15% international portfolio at, at least, the company average rate, and we see opportunity given the demand signals these days for that rate to be even faster than the overall company’s growth. In terms of why, let’s start with why it’s a smaller percentage of our sales than you may see from some of our industry peers. About 30% of our work is restricted, classified work that, as a result, clearly can’t be exported in the current phases of those programs. There is an additional component of our business, even that’s unrestricted, but not exportable given the uniqueness of the technology and the offerings that our government wants to maintain for its own use. And so there’s a smaller percentage of our business than for some industry participants of work that can be exported.
With that said, within that portfolio, there are some really nice opportunities for international growth, and we’re seeing clear demand signals in a few areas. We’ve talked about a couple of them thus far. I certainly mentioned munitions high on that list. And the AARGM program, the SAW program will both be eligible for use on the F-35. You can imagine F-35 partner countries being a source of demand there. And that’s just on the prime side of the equation. Our munition support in components for missiles and rocket motors and propulsion in general as a key supplier to other large primes give us a lot of international demand opportunity as well. So munitions, certainly a key near-term driver of international demand, integrated air and missile defense, certainly another key example. We’ve talked about our IBCS portfolio where the U.S. Army is – has IBCS as its program of record. Poland, an important early international adopter where we’ve reached initial operating capability as well. And so really outstanding long-term opportunity for the IBCS product portfolio as more NATO countries see the value in connecting disparate sensor and shooter systems, both for the efficiency and effectiveness of their air and missile defense work.
Beyond that, there are opportunities in our aeronautics business for programs like Triton and E-2D that continue to expand internationally. And certainly, though it’s a larger number of smaller programs, our Mission Systems business has a lot of international expansion opportunity as well. I think radars and sensors, airborne components as well. And so really across those businesses, you see an opportunity for our international growth to, at least meet and more likely exceed the company’s growth rate over the next several years.
Peter Arment
That’s great. So a multiyear top line story, for sure. And let’s switch over to maybe talk a little bit about margins because I think that also is a multiyear story that I think could be quite favorable. But initially, inflation’s been stickier than everyone kind of had hoped. There’s been a little bit of pressure on margins, net EACs. But maybe you could just talk to the lagging effect and how that starts to change and also mix is a factor.
Dave Keffer
Sure. Look, we’re a very long-cycle business. And the benefits of that long-cycle nature include the visibility we have and the backlog we build for long-term growth. We’ve talked about that. On the flip side, some of these trends around margins take more time to cycle through than they would in a shorter cycle business. And we’re continuing to be in the process of pricing more and more of our business portfolio and our backlog in these kind of post 2021 inflation periods of the last couple of years. And as we continue to cycle through those older contracts, that creates an opportunity for normalization of margin pressures from those macroeconomic factors.
At the same time, there are more opportunities than just the normalization of macroeconomic pressures for our margin rate to expand over the next few years. I’d certainly highlight cost efficiencies across the portfolio as one of those. We’re looking hard at supply chain costs for ways that we can better partner for efficiency with our supply chain partners and our end customers. Our real estate portfolio continues to be an area we’re scrubbing for efficiency opportunity. And then the digitally transformed company that we’ll be over the next several years, creates opportunity for efficiency, both in the way we oversee the business and manage the business as well as the way we execute our programs all the way to the shop floor through digital technologies that we’re implementing through a very thoughtful and strategic initiative over the next several years. So cost efficiencies also create margin expansion opportunity in this kind of next 5-year period.
And then third and equally importantly is our business mix. We’ve talked about the volume of new business that we’ve won in various segments, Space, certainly chief among them over the last few years. The vast majority of the work that you win in those early phases in a business like ours tends to be earlier stage development work, a lot of which is cost-type contract structure. And over time, that then gives you the opportunity to win production work, in many cases, that is fixed price in nature with more margin opportunity with it if you execute well.
And so we’re seeing opportunity for our cost type mix, which is today around 55% of our business to shift back down to 50% and below 50% over the next several years. And that leads to margin expansion opportunities. So when you consider the opportunity for net EACs to normalize as macroeconomic pressures ease, you’ve got cost efficiencies we’re looking to drive across the business to create affordability, competitiveness and margin opportunity. And then the overall business mix improving at the same time. Those are the kind of underlying factors that give us confidence in a long-term margin expansion opportunity. As we think about the ‘23 to ‘24 margin picture, certainly, we see opportunity for modest margin expansion in 2024, but we’ll look to deliver on that over...
Peter Arment
Sort of a year of stabilization, right? And then we start to see some of the goodness kind of the duration of these contracts start to improve. But on the mix issue, particularly just not to get in the weeds, but Space is 72% last quarter of cost-plus directionally over the next, I guess, few years, several years, however you want to characterize that starts to migrate towards sort of the company average. And that’s part of that flip, right, that you kind of talked about.
Dave Keffer
It is. There are really examples across all four of our businesses, Space very much included, in terms of work moving from development to production, moving from cost-type contract structures to fixed price over the next few years. You mentioned our Space business. There will be examples like our propulsion support in areas like the Amazon Kuiper Constellation that we’ve been investing in that we’ll now be providing the rocket motors on for the next several years. That’s an area of fixed price growth opportunity, the SDA constellations that we’ve won so much business in over the last 2 years, another good example. And so we need to execute well on those programs and drive those efficiency opportunities. But certainly, the mix should shift more in the direction of production, more in the direction of fixed price in the Space portfolio. There are examples in other businesses. Certainly, we’ve talked about B-21 in aeronautics, but there are other aeronautics examples as well.
And then in our Defense Systems business, IBCS and various munitions programs, in our Mission Systems business, we’ve had a lot of restricted classified work that we’ve been ramping up in development phases over the last couple of years that will gradually move into production portions of their life cycles and that, too, gives us opportunity for margin uplift. So there are examples across all four businesses and should see that 55% cost type mix gradually reverse.
Peter Arment
Yes. And one important point I just hope to tease out is just on Sentinel, in particular, right? I think this is just we want to make sure that we – the – you’ve yet to negotiate the LRIP phase of that. So currently, Sentinel’s cost-plus LRIP going forward. So you’re in a much different picture than, say, if people wanted to characterize it like B-21 or something like that, maybe you can talk about...
Dave Keffer
Very different contract structure in this case. In the case of Sentinel, the cost type EMD phase is what was priced and awarded upfront a couple of years ago when we won that contract. The low rate and full rate production phases and phases beyond around sustainment have not yet been priced. And the final contract structure and RFP time lines and such for those phases of the program yet to be finalized, and we’ll continue to work through those with the customer over the next couple of years.
Peter Arment
Terrific. Multiyear top line story, margin expansion story in the future. Let’s talk about cash flow. I know it’s a laser focus of both Kathy and yourself and the rest of the team. Maybe talk about some of the components. I know you’ve worked hard on working capital efficiencies and CAS will be a little bit less of a headwind and CapEx as well. Maybe walk through a couple of – how you’re thinking about that.
Dave Keffer
Sure. We’ve had a few non-operational headwinds to free cash flow over the last couple of years and some operational ones as well as we’ve doubled down on CapEx investment to generate this new set of growth opportunities, both in capability and capacity. But all of those headwinds we’ve been experiencing are now gradually shifting to tailwinds, and it’s important to talk through them individually. First, on the kind of pure operational side of the business where we’re most focused every day, the sales growth and margin rate expansion opportunities, of course, lead to opportunities for kind of operating cash flow expansion as we can manage our working capital efficiency to the really strong efficiency levels that we’ve been generating over the last couple of years. So we’re not relying on increased efficiencies in working capital but maintaining the already strong levels that we’re operating at. And so that leads to kind of business level operating cash flow expansion through the middle of the decade and beyond.
CapEx is an important part of the story to understand. We’ve had a uniquely high period of capital intensity in 2022 and now especially in ‘23 and ‘24 as we reached the 4% to 4.5% of sales level. That’s a higher-than-usual volume of CapEx for us and it represents a confluence of both existing very large programs that we’re making heavy investments in today as well as other new programs that we’ve won over the last couple of years in businesses like Space that require additional capacity and overall expansion of our footprint around facilities and tooling, etcetera. And so over the next several years, you’ll see that gradually decline to a more normalized CapEx level closer to 3% of sales. As we look at the last couple of decades, 3% or even less is a more historical average for us. And so we’re not looking at getting down to a very tight low level of CapEx, but more just a normalized level that continues to fund growth opportunity. But at 4% to 4.5% this year and next, as that declines through the middle of the decade and beyond, there’s meaningful opportunity for free cash flow expansion.
So on top of those kind of operating and free cash growth elements, you have the tax and pension elements as well. On the tax side, the amortization of R&D costs has led to a significant headwind for us in 2022 that’s now starting to reverse itself as we get through the 5-year amortization period and over the 5-year period starting this year, that will become a modest tailwind for us each year in cash taxes.
On the pension side of things, our contributions into our pension plan are very low, just over $100 million a year in – at current levels and in our near-term projections based on the latest actuarial assumptions. The amount that our customers reimburse us through our contracts has come down over the last couple of years meaningfully to just over $100 million from what was over $800 million a couple of years ago. And so that created a headwind, but now will be a modest tailwind for us based on our latest projections over the next couple of years.
So a lot of the kind of non-operating noise we’ve been talking through over the last couple of years, if anything, now eases its way out of the system and leads to an opportunity to get from the $2 billion ish of free cash flow in our guidance for this year, well up into the range of double that over the next 5 years. So dramatic expansion in free cash flow, which then, as I mentioned earlier, leads to dramatic opportunity for new optionality in the ways that we – and the volumes with which we were...
Peter Arment
In our remaining like 30 seconds, what are you doing with all this excess cash? I know the messaging from Kathy has been 100% back to shareholders. So maybe let’s finish with that.
Dave Keffer
It’s a great way to think of it. In the very near-term, that is our continued plan. We’ve now established an expectation for 2024, just like ‘22 and ‘23 that we’ll return at least 100% of our free cash flow to shareholders. We’ve continued to increase our dividend at a healthy clip each year for almost 20 years now and have an expectation that we’ll continue to do that over the near-term as well. Share repurchase has been an important part of our capital deployment program and will continue to be over the next several years also. By the middle of the decade and beyond, we’ll have certainly optionality either to increase the rate of expansion in shareholder returns or to consider M&A or other uses of cash. It’s great to have the optionality we’re seeing in the second half of the decade given all these tailwinds around free cash flow.
Peter Arment
Terrific. Thank you so much, Dave. I appreciate everyone attending. Thank you so much for your participation.
Dave Keffer
Thank you. Appreciate it.
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Northrop Grumman Corporation (NOC) Baird's Global Industrial Conference (Transcript)