MasTec, Inc. (MTZ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon. We'll get started. I'm Guru Gupta. I run infrastructure coverage on the investment banking team for Morgan Stanley. And I'm pleased to introduce you to MasTec management team, Paul Dimarco, is the Chief Financial Officer; and Chris Mecray is the Head of Investor Relations.

Paul, you've been a frequent visitor. A lot has changed since last year when you came, I think stock has nearly doubled. So congratulations on all of the success. Maybe we should start with, on the macro side, you're seeing a lot of growth. Just give us a flavor for how macro is impacting your business?

Sure. Well, first of all, thank you to Morgan Stanley for having us here. It's a wonderful event, location and participation from the broad investor community. So thank you again for having us. We're in a really fortuitous place right now. We are an infrastructure construction firm. So largely, our end markets have some level of cyclicality. We are at a place, though, where from a macro demand perspective, we're seeing really strong drivers of growth across the business. Our 4 main segments are Power Delivery, Clean Energy and Infrastructure, pipeline infrastructure and communications. Really, all of those have pretty strong multiyear demand sets that are giving us a lot of ability to plan collaboratively with our customers for a pretty robust investment cycle. So we're focused on the right growth, very profitable growth and helping our customers achieve the objectives that they've laid out for their strategic infrastructure development plan. So really excited to have that opportunity set in front of us and allow us to really focus on execution and driving value for our clients.

So Paul, maybe we start with the team that is -- that we are hearing at this conference a lot, data center build-out, AI. Tell us about your focus on your data center business and what you're doing in that area?

Sure. So it impacts a lot of the different things that we do, not just from the pure construction of those facilities, but for the needs of power and interconnectivity of communications that these facilities are going to require. So it's a big driver across our end markets. More specifically directly for data centers, we provide a lot of services across our business, whether it's heavy civil facility construction, utilities hookups, whether it's substations and transmission lines or wet utilities and communication aspects. That we can really provide a lot of the components that those owners need. We've been very successful in selling those service offerings into owners of data centers or partnering with their general construction firms to bring this to fruition. A lot of additional opportunity as we move forward. As I mentioned, there's a lot of downstream impacts. The need for more power is obviously impacting our Clean Energy business and Power Delivery to move that power around as gas fired generation becomes a bigger component of that incremental load in our country and over the next few years. We think it will be a second leg of demand for our pipeline infrastructure space, where we're seeing a lot of demand today just around takeaway capacity for just general demand diversity or LNG export. And we announced an award last year where we're helping Lumen provide interconnectivity to their customer, Microsoft across Microsoft's ever diversifying geography of data centers. So we're seeing it directly on the construction at the facilities, but also more broadly on the things that these facilities need as they move more geographically dispersed from being relatively concentrated in the past. We're seeing it really impact all of the business. So it's an important driver, but it's also important not to overlook. Data center is the most prevalent factor that people speak to in terms of additional electricity in our country, electrification of heating fleets, reindustrialization, there's a number of specific of other specific drivers that are increasing the demand for electricity in our country the first -- for the first time in many decades, and we're excited to play a part in supporting those needs.

So let's continue on the theme of power delivery. The outlook seems to be very bright on the transmission side in that business. Can you maybe review what are some of the opportunities for 2026 and how the margin profile is developing?

Sure. I mean on the transmission side, what that industry has experienced is a very elongated development cycle over most of the last decade for projects that were necessary, irrespective of this new demand for incremental power. And the permitting environment for those types of projects has been very cumbersome, and it's taken a long time. We are finally starting to see these projects move into construction. There's been a couple of awards in each of the last 2 years, including a large project for [ Nevada Energy ] that we're executing on. And we see a really nice pipeline of jobs that are finally working through that process that should move into construction not just in '26, but over the next handful of years, I mean billions of dollars of opportunity. And those were needed many years ago, and we're still hopeful that there'll be some efforts around permanent reform accelerate the development and deployment of the next wave of transmission jobs, which is really important as people make decisions around where they place things like a data center, right? The access to power and some of the constraints around moving power around our country are a big impact on site location. And that industry seeing some amount of permanent reform would be a really tangible driver of value, not just for the power delivery space, but for the broader economy and many of the other services that we do. So we haven't seen the right mix yet. There's been some chatter around it, but we're still optimistic that that's an area that can be tackled by the administration in the next few years.

So besides the growth in that segment, how is the margin trajectory? And are there things you can do on the job side to improve productivity?

Yes. That's an important piece for us. I mean we are coming off of some pretty heavy integration of acquisitions we did in the earlier part of the decade. And we still have some disparity in margin performance across our regional business units. We see the path to unlocking those. A lot of it is through just access to information. So looking at things like crew level productivity on a systematic basis, where area managers know what happened in the prior week in almost real time. That's a big differentiator in our business between who has that and who doesn't. And as we deploy that further across the organization, we think it's a big opportunity to continue to drive value. We've had some challenges with rate case determinations that delayed or deferred revenue with some larger clients, which we expected and they did resolve in pretty short order. And avoiding those types of revenue volatility will also be helpful as we continue to look at the margin progression that we expect. We're forecasting high single digits for this year. And our goal in the near term is to achieve double-digit EBITDA margins for that segment, and we think we're on a good path to do so.

Okay. So shifting to your other segments. In Communications, can you talk about the growth drivers for this year and for the next 2, 3 years? And how the mix may shift of your business?

Sure. So historically, we had -- a larger proportion of our work was driven by the wireless space. We're the largest wireless contractor in the country, and we do a significant amount of the country on behalf of AT&T and good work for the other major carriers as well. More specifically to that client, they made some changes in terms of their equipment that was deployed across their network in late '23. We started executing on that swap out program in the back half of last year and now kind of had a full year of performance now through the second quarter of 25%, which has been a really nice driver of growth. We also took a little bit more market share in the most recent renewal. So that otherwise would have been a little bit flatter market, but we've seen really good growth across our wireless business in the last year because of those idiosyncratic opportunities. Going forward, we really see most of the growth in that segment coming on the wireline side. Multiple demand drivers, all of our major telecommunications and broadband providers have pretty robust plans around continuing penetration of fiber, homes passed goals and just further densification. I talked earlier about the award on behalf of -- with Lumen to build middle mile fiber between data centers. That is a demand set that is just at the beginning of what we think is a pretty broad scale deployment across all the hyperscalers and data center owners. That, again, is a byproduct of this further diversification of geography and the need for interconnectivity between those sites. And then lastly, BEAD is a program that was part of the IIJA and really hasn't had any meaningful impact in terms of spend to date. There were some changes earlier this year in terms of how that package was interpreted to facilitate quicker deployment of those funds from the states to the grantees and we think that will start impacting the business in '26 as well. So those are all really on the wireline side, and we think that we continue to see a really good organic growth opportunity in that segment for the next few years with those multiple opportunities.

Great. Then on the pipeline, the outlook for midstream gas is very, very strong right now. What are you hearing from your customers on new contracts and are we at the start of a much longer up cycle this time?

It sure appears that way. The commentary from customers, both publicly and privately is very bullish. They're talking more proactively about jobs that they have either in the planning process or that have reached the financial investment decision. And if you think about kind of where that industry came from over the last few years, obviously, the pandemic was very disruptive in terms of just demand for oil and gas. But then coming out of that, there was a big push around energy transition, around moving our economy to a more zero carbon power generation state. And frankly, from investors, there was just a lot of negative sentiment around the broader oil and gas industry to return capital to shareholders rather than invest in further production. And we really saw a pretty tangible change in sentiment with the results of the election, where in the fourth quarter, customers' activity around moving forward with projects that have been under development and accelerating those plans has continued to build momentum. We looked at '25, we still do, to a large degree, a somewhat of a transition year. with some revenue contraction versus 24. But over the course of the year, we've raised our revenue guidance. We've had really good backlog growth, and we said that we expect backlog to grow over the back half of the year. A little bit early for us to quantify the overall demand set. But there's multiple drivers that are aligning our customers with the ability to move these projects to a financial investment decision. These aren't speculative builds, right? They're largely committed capacity for their clients. And we think as we're moving product in the near term, just to places of higher demand, that will evolve into the need for gas to support gas-fired generation in the latter part of the decade, and we feel really good about the cycle. We were talking about some analysis of permitting earlier today that showed takeaway capacity from the Permian could double with all the projects that are under various stages of permitting today. So there's a lot of excitement in the industry. And I think part of it is just enhanced sentiment and then the need for that product in different places than it's located today.

That's great. So on the Clean Energy side, both Clean Energy and renewables, how did the news from OBBA over the summer, how does that impacted? All of the regulatory guidance, is that impacting the outlook for solar and wind at all?

In parts of the market, yes, for our customer set specifically, we've been really focused on aligning with developers that have long strategic plans around infrastructure deployment that have sophistication in their procurement, project development, really high credit quality off takers. And what we found is that their reaction to both the various iterations of the one big beautiful bill and the ultimate legislation has been really steady. We haven't seen any acceleration or pause in the cadence of conversation or contracting with our clients. They've retroactively really safe harbored the vast majority of their work that they expect to execute on over the next 3 or 4 years. So we're not having any scrambling around prospective safe harboring of projects with those clients. And that alignment was a really deliberate effort that we had in the latter part of '23 into '24. The consistency of our backlog growth, I think, is indicative of the types of clients and the diligence we're doing with them around projects, and we have great visibility, not just to the jobs that we expect to execute on in '26, but the projects that will come into our backlog after that. So there is a subset of less sophisticated, less experienced investors that may be pushed out because of just the overall constraints on the system, not just -- not construction individually, but whether it's interconnect or permitting or availability of various material input needs that could -- the changes could impact that. But for the work that we're doing at a utility scale with sophisticated clients that have been preparing for a multiyear build for a long time, we're really not seeing any major change in how they're going about that strategy.

So what's the outlook for 2026? Is there still some regulatory issues that need to be resolved? Are there things people are waiting for before they pull the trigger?

No. No. I mean from a clean -- we've been fully booked on 25 for a while and have a really healthy backlog already for 26 of projects that we'll work through. And again, we're just -- we are not seeing our customers overreact positively or negatively. It's -- they had robust plans. There was a lot of work that had to happen before these changes and their projects, like I said, are largely safe harbored. And we're still working to just help them achieve those goals really without a lot of modification.

So in your infrastructure business, what gets you excited? Are there a lot of opportunities for doing behind the meter work? Where is MasTec focused?

Yes. So I mean, the -- outside of the Clean Energy segment, the balance of it is there's about 40% of that business is what we'd call our civil infrastructure, which is predominantly DOT work, and then there's a smaller component, probably sub-10% that is that more industrial piece. The infrastructure side won't have as much beyond the meter, obviously, but the amount of activity we're seeing in the markets that we're providing those services has been really strong. We're really happy with the return profile of those businesses. It's not our highest margin business, but they're healthy. And frankly, the contractual structure and the equipment that's provided when we look at it from an invested capital perspective, are some of the best, if not the best, in the company as those business are operating at high levels of utilization. So we really like that business. We think we've been really deliberate in the types of risks we're taking, right? There's plenty of examples in the past of challenging DOT or municipal projects and the market has reverted to a place of much more balanced risk transfer between owners and contractors. And we think it's an area that we'd love to continue to grow. On the industrial side, which would be where we do more traditional gas-fired generation. We had some tough jobs coming out of the pandemic where we probably took a little bit too much risk. We were forthcoming about those challenges and the impacts on our performance. And we've elected to be much more focused on jobs that we can -- with risks that we can control. So we will expand that business, but it will be expanded on terms that have the right risk profile. We're happy to do more complex jobs, but we're going to do them with owners that we have confidence in and where we're taking contractual risk that we can control. Now that's typically the first rebalancing in a market when there's higher demand. So to the extent that we're seeing a resurgence in gas-fired generation or other types of projects that vertical would do. We do think that the opportunity to have the right risk profile could support more project activity for us in that space. But until we see that coming through in the procurement, we're going to continue to be a little more disciplined in that regard.

So Paul, it seems like all of your business segments have very, very strong outlook and demand drivers right now. So what are the things that can go right from here and what can go wrong? And what is it that keeps you up at night?

Yes. I mean for us, our main focus is on execution still. It's -- we have margin expansion opportunities. We have the ability to not with pricing, all that could be on the table as well. Just on our execution, our efficiency, ensuring we're utilizing our equipment more effectively, we can grow margins. And so that's what we're focused on. There is a lot of growth. The business and -- has been really diligent about -- I've talked a lot about customers and customer selection. We could absolutely grow faster. We could -- but it will be taking risk with new clients or clients we've got less experience with. And so in high demand environments, there is that challenge of what's the right amount of growth versus extracting more value out of projects and we're trying to stay balanced there, right? So the risk profile that we're taking on jobs remains important, but we're really focused, and the teams are really focused on hitting our near-term margin expansion opportunities. We're growing really strong from -- organic growth has been really strong, particularly when you look at the Communications, Power Delivery and Clean Energy segment. I mentioned that pipeline has a little bit of a transition year as these projects -- the new project activity starting here now in the back half, but we grew double digits across all 3 of those verticals in the first half. And achieving that while expanding margins is something we're really proud of. But there's more opportunity there. We want to make sure we don't lose sight of that and keep the focus of those teams on generating the value out of every dollar of revenue that we're able to earn.

So how do you balance this focus between top line growth and maximizing margins for the entire enterprise. Are there things that you can control on productivity, which will lead to margin enhancement? Or is just operating leverage because of the scale of the business.

Yes, there's still opportunity in both regards. I mean the consistency of revenue generation is important. Our first quarter has been relatively light each of the last 3 years. We've improved it year-over-year from '23 to '24 and '24 to '25. But even this year, the first quarter was still well below both our peak production and our peak margin profile. We have to continue to drive that down. So we minimize the underutilization in that first quarter. Weather, just the challenges of working in a winter environment, it will generally result in a low -- some seasonality but we have to continue to narrow that gap, and we think we're in a good position to continue to do that in 2016. So that's an important piece of -- from the operating leverage perspective. From the execution side, right? The consistency of -- we've really tried to think about the whole project life cycle. So I talked a lot about business development and customer selection. That then rolls into consistency of contracting, consistency of risk transfer. Having that same visibility and knowing what we're responsible for, what risks we have to mitigate across the broader project portfolio is really important to drive more consistent outcomes. And then we're trying to -- as we continue to integrate some of the acquisitions that we did over the last few years, building the right systems environment so that data is comparable and accurate and timely to drive quicker decision-making is a big effort that we're undergoing and that will continue. As a finance organization, the best thing that we can do is give our operators accurate timely data so that they can impact decisions as quickly as possible, right? If we're making decisions based on the financial close of any given month, that's weeks too late, and we've left opportunity on the table or we haven't mitigated an issue as quickly as we should have. So we're really focused on those things. And as a firm, we're really excited about the opportunity to drive further value from there.

So what kind of investment is needed in the business as you handle this massive growth that's ahead of you? How do you spread that over time?

Yes. I mean it varies by segment. In some instances, there is a larger capital expenditure component, but we've really tried to focus on the people side of it. We've overinvested in training. We've talked a lot more publicly about the 30-plus training centers we have across the country. About our partnerships with community colleges on splicing programs. Bringing people into the industry and upskilling existing workforce is going to be a key component to continuing to handle the top line expectations from our clients. That's number one, right? And training, you don't get to retain everyone that you work through the system. But giving people an opportunity to build a career and show them that you're investing in them is an important component of that, just like any of us. We want to feel like the firm values, our efforts and giving us opportunities to better our lives for ourselves and our family. And that's what we're trying to do. That will be the gating item of us maintaining double-digit growth. We can get more equipment, but training people so that they can take that next step in their career, move up to a crew supervisory level or project executive level is going to be key. So we can't underestimate that. Obviously, the systems that I mentioned earlier is -- it's a heavy lift. There's an investment associated with that. We're trying to be really focused on how we quantify the value that we expect to get. So that we can be very clear on what we're expecting to drive from these solutions and ultimately what we do as we measure the success of that program over time.

Paul, for 20-ish years or so that I have spent time with MasTec, we always talked about your customer relationship driven by MSAs, but now you're entering more into these framework agreements. What are you guys trying to do there? How are customer relationship shifting?

Yes. I mean it makes large project activity much more like an MSA, frankly, at the end of the day because the level of predictability and advanced view we have on the jobs we expect to execute. But on big project infrastructure that has a lot of interdependencies that are out of our control and sometimes out of our customers' control. What we found is that level of integration with our customer, not just on the job that we're going to start in the next quarter. But the job that they expect us to build at the end of next year or '27 allows us to add value in terms of helping them manage the potential costs. Helping to drive value through how the project is being designed or will ultimately be constructed and then deal with the challenges that are likely to happen across the development of large-scale infrastructure. So that level of integration, the level of communication and frankly, just the ability for us both to calibrate better on how they forecast the time lines with these different tasks. It puts us in a position to deploy resources more effectively for them, ultimately improve our profitability while keeping the cost at a very competitive level for the client. So we've seen really positive outcomes, both in terms of how our projects ultimately are executed and the margin profile we're driving and the customer quality and satisfaction. I was with a client earlier this week. And I asked, what can we do? Is there anything you need from us? And all he said was, "all we need you to do is continue to be consistent, continuing to deliver on your promises." Because I said if something happened, did we miss anything and he said "No, but there are other people that aren't doing everything they say and they're going to do." And when you have the level of integration that we've built with a lot of these framework agreements, it makes it a lot easier to make those commitments properly, right? Because you know what they need, not just again on the next job, but on the second and third and potentially fourth job after that, and you can build those expectations over time. So it's been, I think, a really key component of the success we've had in the Clean Energy space, is the investments that we've made with clients that are looking for that mutual commitment.

Paul, maybe you talk about the financials a little bit. So you've made a lot of progress since you took over the CFO role on working capital management. What are -- what's your current focus in terms of financial performance and metrics?

Yes. I mean, so obviously, we've got the margin profile opportunities. But we've really tried to promote a lot more understanding around the capital that our businesses require and the efforts to make sure we're managing that effectively. That's both with looking at profit metrics that are burdened with things like depreciation. We've really focused on a number of the items below the line below EBITDA, right? So looking at depreciation which is a real cost of being an infrastructure service provider, making sure that we're depreciating our assets correctly and ultimately, driving that back into what are the investments that are required for us to grow a given business. It's working capital and it's equipment. Outside of M&A, like that's what we need. And we've really focused on explaining the impact of that more broadly across the company. So every quarter, we publish a return-focused metrics to the businesses. And I think we've seen much better fixed asset turnover. We've seen the compression in the working capital cycle because we're measuring and monitoring and incentivizing with those types of metrics. So we're looking at the totality of the income statement. I mean, cash flow, I grew up in treasury and cash is what drives our ability to grow the business and buy companies and be defensive of the stock, if we've got an opportunity to repurchase equity. And so the business is really focused on their cash flow conversion. It's part of an incentive comp. And I think it's been a key component of the overall broader financial performance of the business, the ability to delever pretty quickly after the IA transaction. Our ability to have the capital allocation flexibility that we have today is because of the focus that the totality of the business has had on not just the P&L, but on the cash flow and the balance sheet as well.

So on capital allocation, what's your focus for 2026? Will you be active in M&A versus returning capital back to shareholders? How are you thinking about that?

Yes. I mean we are absolutely open to M&A. We're not -- it's not a requirement. So we are going to transact on opportunities that we think are key value drivers for the company. So they need to be incremental to our earnings performance, strong management teams, potentially service offerings that customers are asking us to provide that we don't have today. But because of the growth opportunities we have, we're going to be really selective and making sure that we're finding deals that hit all of the requirements to, frankly, get back to how we've transacted M&A over the last 20 years, right? Outside of the more strategic deals we did in '21 and '22 that we needed to really bolster our presence in Power Delivery and Clean Energy. We're going to focus on businesses that we think are really well run, really well respected by their clients and then bringing MasTec into the equation will allow us to really accelerate growth and margin expansion, which was really -- that was the philosophy and strategy that built most of what is MasTec today. And we think that getting back to that knitting is going to put us in a position to add a lot of good complementary businesses and people into the company.

I think we have a minute or so left. I'll open up for any questions from the audience.

Paul, I just wanted to clarify the question that came up about the business, focusing more on MSAs versus, I guess, like more on the framework agreements versus MSAs in the past. Could you clarify that a bit more sort of where that you're moving to that structurally across your different segments? And what's the driver of that?

Well, I don't think that I'd interpret the question as if we're moving away just that we're utilizing these framework agreements on the larger project activities, right? So the work that generally is procured in our MSA type arrangement is call it, relatively small individual activities, unit-based where any given day, the customer could ask us to do a different subset of activities where we're on a multiyear engagement. That's kind of the definition of what classifies an MSA. As we -- what we've seen is customers on the project side move towards contractual and business relationships that have a lot more characteristics of that long duration repeatable activity focus, but there're still projects, right? So it's not going to classify as an MSA, but it gives us really good predictability on that large project work because we're not talking about, again, the next job, we're talking about the next 2, 3, 4 jobs with any given client. So it's not replacing MSA. It's not us moving away from that construct. It's for a different type of activity that historically would have been more 1 project at a time. So it's moving that large project work to something that has a much more -- much better visibility and much more repetition with the client.

So is it more of a risk management strategy and building much longer...

It just gives us better -- it enhances -- you're operating off of 1 contract. You're talking about jobs with customers over multiple quarters, if not years, right? So the trust, the collaboration, it's been very, very positive in terms of just mutually beneficial outcomes.

Okay. I think we're out of time. Paul, Chris, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you, everyone, for your interest.