The federal government, slow to return to normal contracting operations after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, was largely to blame for continued operating losses at Perma-Fix Environmental Services during the second quarter of 2022, CEO Mark Duff said in the company’s latest earnings call with investors.
For the second quarter, Perma-Fix reported a net loss of around $1.4 million, or around $0.11 per share, according to the company’s Aug. 5 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s a drop of about 150% compared with a profit of roughly $3 million, or $0.25 per share, in the year-ago quarter.
Earnings at Perma-Fix in the second quarter of 2021 were helped along by a roughly $5.4 million federal Payment Protection Plan (PPP) loan the company received from the U.S. Small Business Administration. PPP loans were part of the U.S. coronavirus bailout bills in 2020.
Duff during an Aug. 5 earnings call said that government agencies such as the Department of Energy have “been quite lethargic in distribution of task orders … due to the impacts of the pandemic.”
“We are hopeful the federal government will be awarding additional projects in the third and fourth quarters,” Duff said.
Despite pains in the contracting arena, revenue was up at Perma-Fix during the second quarter. The company reported around $19.5 million in revenue, an increase of around 20% year-over-year from roughly $16.1 million. Perma-Fix credited the revenue hike to recovering business in its waste treatment and services sectors that had been previously impacted by the pandemic.
The company’s services segment, which provides waste management, nuclear decommissioning and site remediation services, posted quarterly revenue of around $11.1 million, up from $8.4 million in the second quarter of 2021 — an increase partly driven by resuming work under existing projects that had been delayed by COVID-19, the company said.
As for Perma-Fix’s waste treatment business, revenue for the second quarter was around $8.4 million, an increase year-over-year from $7.7 million or so. According to the company, that gain was due to improvement in waste receipts from customers that had delayed shipments as a result of the pandemic.
Atlanta-based Perma-Fix provides nuclear and mixed-waste management and treatment services for private partners and federal agencies such as DOE and the Department of Defense, and has contracts at cleanup sites including the Richland, Wash., Hanford Site and New York’s West Valley Demonstration Project. Perma-Fix processes waste at four treatment facilities: two in Tennessee, one in Washington, and one in Florida.
