BWX Technologies is among the companies in the hunt for high-dollar Department of Energy contracts, president and CEO Rex Geveden said in a conference call this week with financial analysts.
“We now have four large DOE proposals submitted and anticipate three of those contracts to be announced sometime later this year,” Geveden told Wall Street analysts during a conference call Tuesday to discuss first quarter financial performance.
By year-end, DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration should award a massive new contract for the combined management of the Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, the chief of the Lynchburg, Va.,-based nuclear company.
Geveden also anticipates new agreements will be awarded in 2021 for cleanup of the Idaho National Laboratory as well as liquid waste management at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
In October 2017, a BWXT-led group initially won a $4.7-billion liquid waste contract at Savannah River but the award was vacated following a contract challenge to the Government Accountability Office. BWXT remains a minority member in the incumbent Savannah River Remediation.
During the call, Geveden also said a BWXT venture is one of the groups pursuing an environmental remediation contract for the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee. The final request for proposals for Oak Ridge cleanup was issued by the DOE Office of Environmental Management in December and the BWXT CEO did not include it among his list of likely 2021 awards.
In addition, the CEO touted a recent two-year, $690-million contract extension for a Fluor-BWXT team doing environmental work at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio. The DOE formally awarded the deal only last month, more than a year after announcing plans for a one-year extension along with two six-month options that could keep the incumbent around until March 29, 2023.
Meanwhile, BWXT’s quarterly profit and revenue fell year-over-year.
BWXT ended the 2021 first quarter with revenue of $528 million, a 2.6% dip from the $542 million taken in during the first quarter 2020, the company said this week in its earnings release.
Net income for the period was $69.7 million, or $0.73 per diluted share, down from $75.4 million or $0.79 a share, for the period ended March 31, 2020.
The dip was attributed in a combination of COVID-19 related absences early in the year along with lower long-lead material production, according to the release. Also, BWXT had a “robust” first quarter in 2020 before the pandemic firmly took hold, Geveden said in a Tuesday morning conference call with financial analysts. There were times when BWXT’s largest plant in Virginia had 10% absenteeism, the CEO said.
Like the rest of the country, “we hope to get out of the woods on this [COVID],” soon, Geveden said.
The BWXT Nuclear Operations Group, which includes the company’s naval business, brought in $402 million during the quarter, down from $424 million in the first quarter of 2020. Its segment income was also down from $90 million to $74 million. The company’s operations segment did announce a big win last month in the form of $2.2-billion in additional business for making naval reactor parts and fuel.
Despite the Biden administration’s plans to boost domestic spending at the expense of the defense budget, Geveden has remained optimistic that key Navy shipbuilding programs will continue more or less as envisioned in the latter days of the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, BWXT’s Nuclear Services Group, which coordinates business involving Department of Energy nuclear sites, saw first-quarter revenue drop to $25.4 million from $36.7 million in the year-ago quarter. Likewise, segment income fell to $5.7 million from $6.4 million.
The Nuclear Power Group, which deals with the civilian reactor business, provided some better results. Its revenue was $107 million in the latest quarter, up about $20 million from the $88 million in the first quarter of 2020. Segment income also rose to $10.3 million from $8.4 million, year over year.
