Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation (NASDAQ:GLDD) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 14, 2024 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Tina Baginskis - Director of IR

Lasse Petterson - President and CEO

Scott Kornblau - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Adam Thalhimer - Thompson Davis

Joe Gomes - Noble Capital

Jon Tanwanteng - CJS Securities

Brian Russo - Sidoti

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q4 2023 Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corp. Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Ms. Tina Baginskis, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Tina Baginskis

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2023 conference call. Joining me on the call this morning is our President and Chief Executive Officer, Lasse Petterson, and our Chief Financial Officer, Scott Kornblau. Lasse will provide an update on the events of the quarter and the year, then Scott will continue with an update on our financial results for the quarter and the year. Lasse will conclude with an update on the outlook for the business and market. Following their comments, there will be an opportunity for questions.

During this call, we will make certain forward-looking statements to help you understand our business. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. Certain risk factors inherent in our business are set forth in our earnings release and in filings with the SEC, including our 2022 Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

During this call, we also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, which are explained in the net income to adjusted EBITDA reconciliation attached to our earnings release and posted on our Investor Relations website, along with certain other operating data.

With that, I will turn the call over to Lasse.

Lasse Petterson

Thank you, Tina. As expected, 2023 was a year of positive transition from the difficult 2022, and we ended the year strong with improved performance, stronger financial results and a record backlog of $1.04 billion, which does not include approximately $179 million of low bids and options pending award and approximately $44 million of performance obligations related to offshore wind contracts. The bid market gained momentum throughout the course of the year in our preferred port deepening and coastal protection markets. We ended the year with 71% of our backlog in capital projects with four major awards, including the Freeport Deepening Project, the Sabine-Neches Waterway Channel Improvement Project, and two large port deepening projects related to Liquified Natural Gas, LNG, projects, the Port Arthur LNG Phase 1 and the Next Decade Corporation's Rio Grande LNG projects. The latter is the largest project that were undertaken by Great Lakes. These two projects are not impacted by the recent White House announcements regarding a pause on new LNG export projects permitting.