Fluor Corp. is scheduled to release its second-quarter earnings numbers after market close on Thursday. A conference call on the latest figures is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. EDT, featuring Chairman and CEO David Seaton and Chief Financial Officer Biggs Porter.
In the first quarter, Fluor brought it $61 million in net earnings, $0.43 per diluted share, on total revenue of $4.8 billion. The earnings numbers were down sharply from first-quarter 2016 numbers of $104 million, $0.74 per diluted share. At the time management attributed that primarily to “the decline in year-over-year results is the progression of our current projects from higher margin engineering activities to lower margin construction activities.”
However, the company’s government branch — home to its contracts for Department of Energy cleanup contracts — increased earnings nearly 70 percent to about $30 million, on revenue of roughly $765 million. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, management attributed the gains largely to “increased contributions from project execution activities for the Idaho Core Project and the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant Project.”
The Portsmouth contract, held by a Fluor-BWXT joint venture, is worth about $3.5 billion over 10 years, including options; it runs through March 2021. The Idaho contract is worth $1.5 billion over five years and runs through May 2021.
Meanwhile, enriched uranium fuel supplier Centrus Energy will issue its second-quarter numbers after market close on Wednesday, and follow with a quarterly conference call at 8:30 a.m. EDT the next day. The company in May recorded a 92 percent drop in first-quarter revenue, to slightly more than $7 million. However, year-over-year earnings spiked significantly: from a $14.6 million loss in 2016 to a $7.6 million gain this year, which Centrus credited to “gains on early extinguishment of long-term debt.”
Centrus spent about $5.4 million in the first quarter on decommissioning and decontamination of its American Centrifuge advanced uranium enrichment technology demonstration plant in Ohio, which it closed last year after the Energy Department cut off funding.
