Southern Cross Electrical Engineering Limited (SXE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Southern Cross Electrical Engineering Limited Half Year '26 Results Webcast. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Graeme Dunn, CEO and Managing Director. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to SCEE's half year results presentation. Turning to Slide 2 for a brief introduction to SCEE. SCEE is a leading and trusted national provider and manufacturer of specialized electrical, instrumentation, communications, security, fire and maintenance services and products that operates across the 3 broad market sectors of infrastructure, commercial and resources. We operate through several company entities as shown, that have been acquired through our disciplined M&A strategy. This has resulted in the company diversified across multiple market sectors and geographies with 85% of our order book on the East Coast. Additionally, we are diversified across disciplines with 60% of our half year revenues coming from electrical services and 40% coming from adjacent disciplines. The evolution of our company has been in line with our long-stated strategy, as outlined on Slide 3. SCEE sees its electrical contracting as its core capability whilst increasingly diversifying into adjacent disciplines and servicing a broad range of sectors. We will continue to grow by deepening our presence in those sectors and broadening our geographic diversity through expanding our core competencies and adding adjacent and complementary capabilities, either organically or by acquisition. We are increasing our exposure to recurring revenues with service and maintenance style works. We are actively exploring acquisition targets, offering further geographic diversification and new capabilities, and we aim to maximize the synergies and cross-selling opportunities created by the increasing diversification and multidisciplinary nature of the group. Now turning to Slide 5 for a summary of our financial performance for the half. Our underlying EBITDA of $35.4 million was up 30.8% on the record prior corresponding period. Our underlying EBIT of $29.1 million was up 25.5% on the record prior corresponding period. The WestConnex arbitration was settled, resulting in an NPAT loss. The result included $2.2 million for acquisition amortization. Our cash was $58.8 million following the payment of the WestConnex settlement prior to the 31st of December. Our order book of $710 million was up 6% on the prior corresponding period. The Force Fire acquisition was consolidated for the full year (sic) [ full period ]. The infrastructure sector remained the largest sector with 47.8% of total revenue and a fully franked interim dividend of $0.025 per share has been declared. To take you through the next 5 financial slides, I'll pass you over to our CFO, Chris Douglass.

Thank you, Graeme. And turning to Slide 6, just some more detail in the profit and loss performance. So the revenue was down 12.2% on the prior corresponding period. That's a consequence of the Collie BESS and Western Sydney Airport Terminal projects finishing up. They were very big revenue contributors a year ago. I do note that we have new battery projects announced in December, and the Border Force buildings we are doing at Western Sydney Airport will start to ramp up soon. So in the period, ongoing significant revenue contributors are the NEXTDC Artarmon Data Center and other data centers. We are finishing off at Shoalhaven Hospital and ramping up at Shellharbour Hospital, and we've got various BHP, Rio Tinto, Woolworths and Coles projects ongoing. As Graeme noted previously, this result now includes Force Fire for the whole period, and they've been a good contributor to the business. As we come to the next point about really, I think the standout point in the result was our record half year gross profit of $65.9 million, which was up 30.3% on the prior corresponding period. That resulted in a gross margin percentage of 18.9%, and that was driven very much by the good outcome we had at the Collie BESS project. We had a more favorable commercial buildings project mix in the Heyday business compared to what was going on a year before. And the Force Fire business is probably slightly more profitable than the rest of the group. And as we said, they contributed for the whole period. Overheads were up 29.4%. Again, that's a consequence primarily of Force Fire being consolidated for the whole period. So that resulted in an underlying EBITDA of $35.4 million, up 30.8% on the previous year. The underlying EBIT of $29.1 million, up 25.5%. And noting those results in the previous year, they were records at that time. Included within the final result was we announced to the market on 28th November, the adverse partial final award on the WestConnex arbitration proceedings, which we then went and settled before 31 December, and that resulted in legal dispute costs of $46.1 million and giving us an unfortunate NPAT loss for the half of $12.8 million. And just noting those results did include $2.2 million of acquisition amortization, primarily relating to the Force Fire acquisition. We then turn to Slide 7. First time we presented this slide in this way, it breaks down our revenues by sector, by geography and by discipline. So firstly, by sector, infrastructure remains our largest sector, but it has fallen back because the Collie BESS project is now finishing. But the commercial sector grew with contribution from Force Fire, who themselves work in commercial buildings like Heyday and their industrial warehousing component as well. The revenue by geography, again, Collie BESS means that our revenues in WA have fallen backwards, but we now have 70% of our revenue on the East Coast. And the first time we presented this table -- sorry, chart is the revenue by discipline. and it just really demonstrates how the group has increasingly diversified out from pure electrical contracting into some adjacent disciplines. So nearly 40% of our revenues came from manufacturing, security, communications and fire. Turning to Slide 8, the balance sheet. So again, one of the outcomes of settling the WestConnex dispute before 31 December was we actually made the payment out on the project. So cash decreased to $58.8 million. We also had the unwinding of the Collie BESS advance payments in the period. However, the group remains debt-free. Bank guarantees and surety bonds, we had $96.8 million on issue at 31 December, which leaves us headroom of over $50 million in our combined facilities, which gives us plenty of bonding for future activity. We expect that headroom, in fact, to increase because there's still a significant amount of Collie BESS bonds to return in the upcoming -- in this period. The franking account balance is at $67.1 million. And as Graeme mentioned, we're maintaining our interim dividend at the $0.025 per share level that it has been in recent years, and that will be paid on the 22nd of April. Slide 9 is the cash flow. In the context of all the events that happened in the half, we're actually very pleased with this cash outcome. If you look at the list of things we had to pay out, which was the dividend at $13.3 million, and that was a record dividend payout, we paid $4.7 million of deferred consideration, primarily for Force Fire and a little bit for MDE. Then we had the unwinding of the advance payments on the Collie BESS project, and the actual cash payout and the legal fees incurred on WestConnex were $26.5 million. So having paid out all of those things to still end up with $58.8 million in the bank, we actually regard it as a good outcome. So then turning to Slide 10 and now looking to the future. So we entered this half with an order book of $710 million. That's only just below our all-time record of $720 million. So we're pretty pleased with that. The order book has grown, now we have the contribution from Force Fire. And by geography, interestingly now, with 85% of our order book on the East Coast and Queensland is now our second biggest state. And again, presenting the order book by discipline. Again, we can see now that $200 million of our order book comes from the nonelectrical disciplines, manufacturing, security, communications and fire. So at that point, Graeme, I'll hand back to you.

Thank you, Chris. And now turning to our operational highlights and outlook slide, Slide 12. Very pleasingly, we were lost time injury free across the group for the eighth consecutive half year, having undertaken 1.6 million man hours in the period. It's something that we continue to really strive to keep that LTI free. Our workforce stood at circa 1,700 direct employees following the demobilization of the Collie BESS project. The co-location of our Queensland-based businesses into the new purpose-built Brisbane premises has commenced. The Collie BESS project successfully achieved practical completion in the half. The Western Sydney Airport further facility works, including the Command and Canine centers are ramping up. The Force Fire business is performing well and ahead of budget. We were awarded the Sydney Metro St Marys Station project in the half with strong medium-term prospects of further rail projects on the Sydney Metro. The Ausgrid Steel River East BESS project was awarded. Additionally, there is a pipeline of other battery project opportunities on the Ausgrid network. Multiple packages across the group, including electrical, manufacturing and fire were awarded for the DigiCo Data Centre works in Sydney. In the data center market, there is an unprecedented pipeline currently being tendered for commencement in calendar year 2026. As demonstrated with the DigiCo Data Centre project, our multidisciplinary offering is gaining traction with clients. Further acquisition targets are being explored, offering additional geographic and disciplinary diversification. Based on the excellent operational performance across the business in the half, we have raised our underlying FY '26 EBITDA guidance to at least $72 million, and we are expecting further growth beyond. Overall, a very successful operational half for the group. Turning to Slide 13 for a discussion on our multidisciplinary offering. A key strategic aim of the group is to maximize the synergies and cross-selling opportunities created by the increasing diversification and multidisciplinary nature of the group. In particular, overlapping client bases allows the sharing of market insights, business development coordination and development of deeper internal and external relationships. Additionally, we can propose combined service offerings that our competitors cannot match. This is evidenced in the recent awards of a number of projects, including the Steel River East BESS project, where SCEE Electrical as lead electrical contractor is supported by Trivantage Manufacturing for switchboards, MDE for communications, SEME Security for security and Force Fire for fire systems. On the DigiCo Data Centre project, Heyday as the lead electrical contractor is supported by Trivantage Manufacturing, MDE and Force Fire. Whilst on the Sydney Metro works at St Marys Station, Heyday are the electrical contractor and Trivantage Manufacturing are supplying switchboards. Overall, there is a growing proportion of our tendering pipeline that is composed of multidisciplinary offerings. The next 4 slides provide an overview of the key structural tailwinds that are supporting our continued growth. Turning to Slide 15 for a discussion on data centers. SCEE businesses have worked on data centers for over 20 years, and the sector is in an exponential growth phase with huge amounts of capital being raised in recent periods that is now being deployed for the actual construction phase across Australia. SCEE businesses have a multilayered relationship in the sector with both the data center developers and the Tier 1 builders. Currently, all Sydney SCEE businesses are working on or positioning themselves for data center projects in multiple geographic regions. During the period, we performed works at 8 different data centers owned by 6 different hyperscale cloud providers, providing various electrical, communications, fire and manufacturing services that demonstrates SCEE's unique broad service offering across the sector. In FY '25, we turned over $120 million in data center work, and we are forecasting similar in FY '26. Thereafter, we are anticipating significant growth in FY '27 and beyond as we are currently tendering on new data center projects with over $1 billion of work for SCEE over their construction periods. Turning to Slide 16. Infrastructure is a very wide sector across government and private investment. Excluding data centers, renewables and energy, this sector also includes for SCEE transport, health and aged care, defense, education, agriculture, water and other utilities. Currently, there are strong infrastructure opportunities for SCEE that include the Western Sydney Airport in Aerotropolis, where the stand-alone facilities project are now underway. Building on the numerous projects already completed, we are expecting a long-term pipeline of works with further airport expansion and development of the surrounding Aerotropolis region, particularly industrial warehousing construction for Force Fire and Heyday that we are actively tendering. In the New South Wales and ACT health care sector, the Shellharbour Hospital, Heyday's largest ever hospital, is well into construction, and we are positioning around further major hospital developments presenting in the medium term. And building on our Sydney Metro experience, including the recently awarded St Marys Station on the airport line, we have high confidence of further projects on the Sydney Metro West Station developments in future periods. Turning to Slide 17 for a discussion on renewables. As we are all aware, Australia's energy transition requires considerable investment in renewable power generation, supported by battery storage and grid reconfiguration. SCEE actively participates in this thematic, having constructed multiple solar farms, wind farms and battery energy storage systems. Of significant success was the completion in the period of Synergy's 500-megawatt Collie BESS project, which was over $250 million of work for SCEE and is now fully operational. Force Fire has virtually completed the installation of fire safety solutions on the Macintyre Wind Farm in Queensland for Nordex and positioning around further developments there. We were recently awarded the Steel River East BESS on the Ausgrid's New South Wales network. And as mentioned previously, multiple SCEE businesses are contributing to this project. Moving forward, we are tendering for multiple battery and wind farm developments across Australia and expecting to announce further battery projects this year. In line with our strategy, we are considering acquisition opportunities that will add capabilities in high-voltage and low-voltage power infrastructure and overhead lines works. Now turning to electrification on Slide 18. Outside renewables, SCEE has multiple other exposures to Australia's energy transition, which requires electrification of many activities by 2050. This particularly includes the electrification and decarbonization of existing industries, transport networks and the built environment. SCEE offers services across a huge range of electrification initiatives, including decarbonizing client operations such as refrigeration power efficiencies for supermarkets, store metering rollouts, electric vehicle charging systems, lighting upgrades and solar-powered electrical equipment and for building developments, where stricter building codes will drive increased electrical density and complexity of buildings. As I've said on previous investor calls, it's a great time to be an electrical contractor. I'll now briefly touch on a couple of points on the next 4 slides, starting on Slide 20. The key point on this slide is that our raised FY '26 underlying EBITDA guidance to at least $72 million represents a 31% growth on the FY '25 EBITDA. This is on top of the strong growth over the last 5 years as shown. Now turning to Slide 21. The key point on this slide is that consistent with our strategy, we have delivered a strong track record of recurring revenues growth over many years and that in the first half, 27% of our revenues were recurring. Now turning to our final slide and in conclusion, our underlying EBITDA of $35.4 million was up 30.8% on the record prior corresponding period. Our underlying EBIT of $29.1 million was up 25.5% on the record prior corresponding period. The WestConnex arbitration was settled during the half with the resulting NPAT loss. Our cash ended the period at $58.8 million. The order book of $710 million was up 6% on the prior corresponding period. And as Chris said, just short of our record order book at $720 million. A fully franked interim dividend of $0.025 per share has been declared. Going forward, there is an unprecedented pipeline of data center projects being tendered for commencement in calendar year 2026 and beyond. Pleasingly, our multidisciplinary offerings are gaining traction with clients, and we have several projects to showcase our multidisciplinary success. A number of acquisition targets are being explored that will offer further geographic and disciplinary diversification. And due to our strong operational performance, our underlying FY '26 EBITDA guidance has been raised to at least $72 million, and we're expecting further growth beyond. So on that point, I'll open it up for Q&A.

Okay. So we've got quite a few questions in. A lot of them are all on the same topic. So I'll deal with the first one. And everyone is asking the same question just in slightly different ways, but it's around what is the gross margin -- what drove the gross margin result in the half? And then what is the outlook for gross margins? So I come back to, in the half, we had a very good gross margin percentage of 18.9%, very much driven by a good outcome at Collie BESS. We finished one of the largest projects we've ever done. We had a better commercial buildings mix with the Heyday business that was a bit of a drag in the prior corresponding period. And the Force Fire business is now in the group for the whole half, and they're a bit more profitable than the rest of the group. So that is really the reasons for the outcome. Looking forward, not all of those factors are sustainable going forward. So we would expect in the second half, margins might drop back to, say, 16% to 17%. And then the longer-term underlying margins that we expect we have talked in the past about being at 13% to 15% range, and we sort of got to the top of that range in recent periods. And then going forward, again, I guess, with the Force Fire business in the group and generally good markets across most of the group, 15% to 16% could be a good underlying number going forward. So that was the gross margin questions. I'll turn to you now, Graeme. So we've been asked about, we've sort of sharpened our commentary on data centers and what is giving us that confidence?

Yes. So I guess we can all read in the papers the capital that has been allocated to data centers and raised for various data center providers. I guess we then, at a construction level, have been working with Tier 1 builders, working with these clients over the last 12 to 18 months to develop electrical and building solutions to them. So we just get that extra clarity on where these projects are by being involved with ECI, early contractor involvement on some of these projects, understanding where tendering is up to. And I guess that's why we get the additional confidence in the data centers. I think overall, you can just look around at AI and you look at the influence that that's having. And if you delve into the real nuts and bolts of AI, you can then see what amount of processing power you need to continue the AI growth, and that's going to lead to much larger data centers than we have currently created here in Australia. So we probably started 20 years ago on 1 megawatt data centers. In recent times, we've been building things around the 50 to 70 megawatt data centers. And the ones that we're pricing now are the sort of 350 megawatts. And in the future, you're getting up to 500 to 600 megawatts. So there's more of them, and they're much larger as well and very electrically dense. So that's where we get our continued confidence in the data center market.

So then the follow-on question from that Graeme is when will we see these data center orders start to roll in?

Yes. So it's through calendar year 2026. That's the best I can say at this stage. We work on them for a while. There's always planning approvals, those sorts of things that the clients have to get. So I can't call it out any more than that, but certainly in calendar year 2026.

Thanks, Graeme. So next question was around which segment or segments drove the guidance upgrade. I mean across the board, everything is performing pretty well. If there was one specific thing was really around, I guess, it's the DigiCo Data Centre job we announced just before Christmas. That would not have been in our guidance at the start of the financial year. It was just something in the bid list, but we won the job, and it's a job that the client wants to be performed quickly and it's going well so far. So that's the basis really probably the single swing factor that led to the upgrade. Next question, I'll hand over to you, Graeme. How easy is it for you to hire skilled staff?

I guess it's one of our IPs as a business that we've been doing electrical contracting for nearly 50 years across the group, a bit more in some parts of the business. So we have very good relationships with a lot of people that either have worked for us, currently work for us or are looking to come back and work for us. So we have a long list of people available when new projects come up. We have -- in the SCEE electrical business, if you look at the Collie BESS project, we were able to ramp up from 0 people living in Collie to over 400 and then to ramp back down to probably 20 or 30 in a 12-month period. So it's not necessarily easy, but it is what we do across the business is how I would look at it. That's probably the best way I can answer that, Chris.

Thank you, Graeme. Next question is around, will resources ever pick up? It was flat half-on-half.

Yes. I guess the basis of that question is why we've diversified the business so much outside of just resources that we were 10 years ago. Having said that, resources is another key market for us. We really track the Rio Tintos, the BHPs as they're doing their bigger projects. That's what we look for the greenfield developments. Every 3 or 4 years, we'll get a series of big projects. But in the meantime, in between those large CapEx, we continue to do a lot of sustaining capital projects. And with iron ore around $100 a tonne, there's lots of extra sustaining capital projects.

Okay. So there's a question here about examples of recent cross-selling wins or opportunities. So I guess this is one of the themes we're trying now to get across very much in this investor presentation is the multidisciplinary nature of the group, which we now have this whole range of businesses, providing adjacent and complementary disciplines to the historic original electrical contracting business. So I could refer you back to Slide 13. We've given some examples there. In those recent awards we announced over the last couple of months, the 3 announcements of various jobs. A very good example is that Steel River Battery on the Ausgrid network. SCEE Electricals go in as the lead head contractor, if you like, but then they're subcontracting out to Trivantage Manufacturing for the switchboards, MDE for the communications, SEME for the security systems, and Force Fire to do the fire work. So that's a great thing. That could -- some very rough rules of thumb. We'd probably be now avoiding subcontracting out 20% of the value of the contract to external third parties. We're effectively retaining that within the group. The DigiCo Data Centre that we mentioned a little bit earlier. Again, Heyday is the lead contractor there, Trivantage are supplying switchboards, Heyday will subcontract to MDE, and Force Fire have been there demolishing the fire system and then putting in the new one. So those are some of the examples. And we think that will, over time, be a growing part of the business. And very importantly, we think that some of our competitors are not able to match that, and that will give us a competitive advantage. Graeme, what are the worries you have for the next 12 months? I put you on the spot.

Yes. No, I didn't see that one roll up, Chris. Thanks for that. No worries. Look, the way I always answer this is, as a contractor, we can control the microeconomic sort of things, and that's what we concentrate on. We concentrate on safety, productivity, all those sorts of things, winning work. What we can't control are the big macro black swan events. So I wouldn't say I worry about them, but they're the things that can destabilize the business. But the micro ones, I still sleep pretty well because I've got a lot of very good people that work for me. I've got good businesses. We're in good markets, et cetera. So hopefully, that answers the question.

Okay. Thanks, Graeme. I'll deal with the next one. Question is, has the cash impact of the WestConnex settlement had a material impact on our mergers and acquisitions time line? So I would say, it doesn't. Clearly, it's unfortunate that the money we had to pay out on WestConnex could have been deployed on acquisitions, and we no longer have that. However, it was always the case in our acquisition strategy of funding that we would have multiple sources to draw on. So that comes from the surplus cash on the balance sheet, which is now clearly reduced, will come from bank borrowing, and we could go to the market if we needed to raise capital for it. So it hasn't affected the time line of what we're interested in. Clearly, it just means we've got less to start off with, but we're still as interested in M&A as we have been before. And that was the last of the questions. So unless anyone else has any more?

No others have come through. So on that note, thank you for everyone listening, and thank you.

Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.