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F500-2021-391-Booz Allen Hamilton Holding

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Booz Allen Hamilton provides management and technology consulting, as well as analytics, engineering, digital solutions, mission operations, and cyber and cybersecurity services to governments, corporations, as well as not-for-profit organizations in the United States and internationally. Founded in 1914, the consulting firm is headquartered in McLean, Va.

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Booz Allen Hamilton Holding (BAH): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Booz Allen Hamilton Holding

booz allen hamilton holding

Morning. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Booz Allen Hamilton's earnings call covering second quarter fiscal year 2027 results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, there will be an opportunity for questions. I would now like to turn the call over to the head of investor relations, Dustin Darensbourg.

Thanks, Carmen. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Booz Allen's second quarter fiscal year 2027 earnings call. We hope you've had an opportunity to read the press release we issued earlier this morning. We have also provided presentation slides on our website and are now on slide two. With me today to talk about our business and financial results are Horacio Rozanski, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Kristine Martin Anderson, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Troy Lahr, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. As shown in the disclaimer on slide three, some of the items we will discuss this morning are forward-looking and may relate to future events, and as such, involve known and unknown risk, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from forecasted results discussed in our SEC filings and on this call.

During today's call, we will also discuss some non-GAAP financial measures and other metrics, which we believe provide useful information for investors. We include an explanation of adjustments and other reconciliations of our non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures in our second quarter fiscal year 2027 earnings release and slides. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Horacio Rozanski. We are now on slide four.

Thanks, Dustin. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the call. Today, Kristine, Troy, and I will share Booz Allen's results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2027. The headline is this, Booz Allen is on track with the expectations we set for this fiscal year. We delivered strong profitability and cash generation while continuing to invest for the future. The amazing people of Booz Allen are executing exceptionally well, both operationally and by accelerating our strategic transformation to drive our next phase of growth. In just a moment, Kristine will discuss our business trajectory, and Troy will cover the detailed financial results and updated guidance. Ahead of that, I will focus my remarks on the broader forces shaping our market and the progress we are making in accelerating our cyber and defense tech growth vectors.

On our July earnings call, we said there would be some uncertainty around the federal budget process and funding as we approach the end of the government fiscal year. We did see those dynamics play out during the second quarter. At the same time, demand for advanced technology solutions and products remains strong, driven by the growing urgency to transform the nation's most critical missions. Ongoing geopolitical conflicts and the changing nature of warfare are increasing the need for advanced capabilities at the tactical edge. Artificial or now super intelligence, or SI for short, is powering more sophisticated cyber threats. Across the entire federal government, there is growing need to modernize critical systems and deliver better outcomes through technology. At Booz Allen, we are innovating and investing to meet these needs.

We are accelerating our cyber and defense tech products and solutions, applying SI and agentic across our work and building capabilities in emerging technologies like physical SI, quantum and 6G. Today, I'll focus on the progress we're making in two of these areas, cyber and defense tech. I'll begin with cyber. Agentic SI is fundamentally changing the cyber threat landscape, as you see in the news every day. Adversaries can now launch autonomous attacks with the speed, scale, and persistence that traditional defenses were not designed to defeat. As a result, we are seeing significant demand for advanced cyber solutions across government and commercial markets. Booz Allen is well-positioned to meet this demand. Our cyber capabilities span from cyber operations and zero trust to incident response and SI-enabled cyber defense. We serve all 16 critical infrastructure sectors, dozens of Fortune 500 companies, and of course, numerous federal customers.

We are building on these strengths with new products, including our Vellox agentic cyber product suite. Vellox combines our deep cyber tradecraft with our proprietary technology to help customers defend against evolving threats at machine speed. One notable example is our counter SI product we call Guile. Guile is designed to counter an SI-enabled attack in real time. In testing at scale, Guile reduced attack success rates by more than 95%, and it is currently in private beta with government and commercial customers. We believe the combination of established cyber capabilities and our growing product line positions cyber to drive significant top and bottom line growth. Shifting to defense tech. Across today's national security environment, sensors and systems generate vast amounts of data, while autonomy, SI, and other advanced technologies are transforming modern warfare.

Our customers need mission-proven products that turn data into actionable information to help war fighters make faster, better decisions all the way to the edge. To accelerate our ability to build and scale these products, we acquired Ultra I&C Mission Solutions in August. Ultra brings a portfolio of commercially proven software-centric, hardware-enabled defense tech products that are highly complementary to our own. Just as importantly, Ultra brings an established customer base already relying on these technologies in operational missions. Ultra and Booz Allen have partnered successfully for years. Now, as one company, we will integrate our technologies to address mission gaps faster and more effectively than each of us could do alone. I believe some of you had the opportunity to see both Booz Allen and Ultra products at last week's AUSA conference. There was very strong customer interest and engagement at both our booths.

We're excited about what's ahead as we integrate our products and pursue market opportunities together. One final thought before I close. Cyber and defense tech actually reinforce each other. Our world-class cyber capabilities make the defense tech products we bring to market more secure. At the same time, our defense tech portfolio creates new opportunities to strengthen and scale our cyber products for missions at the edge. Taken together, they expand what we can deliver to customers. The progress we are making across both areas gives me great confidence in our ability to accelerate our medium-term growth. With that, Kristine, over to you to discuss the trajectory of our business.

Thank you, Horacio. We continue to operate in a bifurcated market, and our second quarter performance reflects those dynamics. National security continued to grow while civil remained in transition. We see strong demand in our national security business, predicated on our ability to deliver innovation and new technologies to accelerate missions. We're ramping up new awards quickly, scaling our cyber and defense tech products, and continuing to help our customers transition to outcomes-based contracting. We're already seeing progress in that transition. Within national security, our firm fixed price contract mix has increased by three percentage points year to date. This shift is creating opportunities to bring more value to our customers and improve profitability over time. More broadly, we expect national security growth to accelerate in the second half. Turning now to civil. Our focus is on rebuilding the portfolio and gaining momentum.

We're seeing demand for agentic software development and SI-ready data platforms across multiple missions. We expect civil's year-over-year decline to moderate in the second half of the fiscal year as new work ramps up and additional awards come in. On whole, we remain on track with the expectations we laid out for the fiscal year. Heading into the second half of the year, our three operating priorities are delivering excellent outcomes for our customers, driving strong business execution, and transforming and investing for growth. Our goal is to bring our strategic efforts to fruition, leading us back to above-market top-line growth and even better bottom-line growth. With that, Troy, I'll turn it over to you.

Thanks, Kristine, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased with our continued strong operational execution, including capturing strategic awards, delivering profitability above our expectations, and generating robust free cash flow. Through our investments and operational discipline, we continue to position the company for durable long-term growth. Now, let me walk you through our second quarter performance in more detail. Second quarter revenue declined 3.9% year-over-year to $2.8 billion. The decline was largely due to a 10.6% decrease in billable expenses year-over-year. As a result, revenue ex billable expenses, where nearly all of our profit is generated, was down less than 1% versus the prior period. From an end market perspective, our national security business grew 1% year-over-year in the second quarter. However, excluding the impact of lower billable expenses, our national security business grew 6% in the quarter, reflecting strong customer demand.

We have significant backlog of funded work to execute on and have aggressively scaled up our hiring. We continue to see strong demand signals across the portfolio with our qualified pipeline and national security up more than 20% year-over-year compared to this time last year. Our civil business declined 15% year-over-year, slightly better than we guided to last quarter. This was primarily driven by the full quarter impact of some recompetes that have transitioned to follow on contracts with smaller size and scope, as well as fewer new program starts. Looking ahead for the rest of the year, pressure in the civil business is easing. We now expect revenue to be flat to slightly down sequentially for the third and fourth quarter as some of the first half dynamics gradually ease into the second half of the year. Turning to profitability.

In the second quarter, we again delivered results above our expectations. Adjusted EBITDA was $313 million at a margin of 11.3%, up 10 basis points year-over-year. The performance was driven by another quarter of strong contract execution. Adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 18% year-over-year to $1.76. This increase was driven by profit growth, a reduced share count, and a lower tax rate. Adjusted EPS also benefited from a $10 million earn-out from the DARPA divestiture. Our tax rate benefited from tax planning updates for the recent tax law changes. On cash flows, free cash flow for the second quarter was $263 million, driven by continued strong collections. From a working capital perspective, days sales outstanding, or DSO, was up 10 days year-over-year to 82 days.

As a reminder, we expect our DSO to remain elevated relative to our historical level due to the Defy acquisition. Excluding the impacts of both Defy and the Ultra acquisition, DSOs were slightly down year-over-year. Moving to demand and leading indicators, we had solid bookings during the quarter with a book-to-bill of 1.5 times, benefiting from a large classified award in the quarter. Our trailing 12-month book-to-bill was 1.1 times. Total backlog at the end of the second quarter was nearly $41 billion, up 2% year-over-year. Despite a funding environment that remains choppy, our funded backlog continued to strengthen, increasing 5% year-over-year to $5.7 billion. Funding started slowly in the quarter. However, we saw stronger funding activity in September to close out the government fiscal year.

Finally, on capital deployment and the balance sheet, we deployed a total of $965 million in the second quarter, which consisted of $729 million for the Ultra Mission Solutions acquisition, inclusive of certain adjustments, $66 million for strategic venture investments, and $170 million in shareholder returns through quarterly dividends and share repurchase. From a balance sheet perspective, we ended the quarter with $334 million of cash on hand and total liquidity of $1.8 billion. Our balance sheet remains strong and our robust cash flow generation gives us strategic flexibility to drive investments in the business and opportunistically deploy capital. Now turning to our outlook on slide seven. For fiscal year 2027, we now expect to deliver revenue between $11.3 billion and $11.6 billion, implying growth of 1%-3%.

As we enter the second half of the year, we expect an acceleration in our national security portfolio with mid-single digit growth for the full year. In civil, as previously discussed, we see some headwinds in the first half of the year easing into the second half. From a quarterly cadence perspective, we expect civil revenue to be flat to slightly down sequentially for the third and fourth quarter, implying a low double-digit decline for the year, slightly softer than our initial expectations. Our updated range also reflects the incorporation of Ultra Mission Solutions. We are excited about the acquisition and we are in the process of integrating Ultra with our broader defense tech business. We are raising the bottom end of our prior adjusted EBITDA guidance to now a revised range of $1.26 billion-$1.29 billion.

This implies a step down in margins in the second half, in line with typical second half seasonality and timing of investment spending. We are raising our expected adjusted EPS range meaningfully to a revised range of $6.50-$6.70. Our ADEPS guidance incorporates the impact of the CVC gain from the first quarter, the DARPA divestiture earn-out, and a lower expected tax rate for the rest of the year. Lastly, we now expect to generate free cash flow between $850 million and $925 million. This range reflects our strong year-to-date collections, a slightly lowered CapEx assumption, and incremental costs and interest expense associated with the Ultra acquisition. To summarize, I am proud of the team's continued strong execution and their unwavering commitment to delivering critical technologies for our customers.

We are investing in our growth vectors, accelerating our transition to outcome-based contracts, and as always, driving value for our shareholders.

With that, operator, let's open the line for questions.

Thank you so much. As a reminder, to ask a question, press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To remove yourself, press star one one again. One moment for our first question. It comes from Tobey Sommer with Truist. Please proceed.

Thank you. I wanted to ask you about the customer's propensity to convert work to fixed price and pursue OTAs from the onset to move more quickly. How do you see that shifting your portfolio by contract type in margin over a medium term amount of time?

Hey, Tobey. Good morning. Why don't I start? This is in line with what we've been talking all along, which is it is both good for the country and for the department, and frankly, good for Booz Allen.

The move to outcome space is something we embrace and something we've been pushing for a long time, and it's actually really happening. OTs are a piece of that. We are seeing strong growth in our OT pipeline. But importantly, across really all of our business, civil got there earlier, but across all of our business, the proportion of our contract that is going to be either fixed price or outcome base, we project to continue to grow for quite some time. And with that, our ability to change the way we deliver and our ability to grow our profitability, together with the fact that we're productizing a lot of our IP, we're launching things in the market, we're selling differently and the like.

When you put that all together, that is part of the story for why we're saying we're on track, why we're saying revenue growth in national security, if you take out the billable expenses, was about 6% last quarter. And profit growth has been strong, margins have been very strong in the first half, and execution has been great.

One moment for our next question that comes from Gautam Khanna with TD Securities. Please proceed.

Yeah, thanks. Good morning. Just curious on the big sequential increase in funded backlog, which is positive. I assume that was mostly in national security. If you could just elaborate on where you saw the big increase. Then secondly, how do you think bookings play out over the next couple quarters given what you have in the pipeline?

Yeah. So I can start. Thanks, Gautam. When you look at the backlog growth that we saw, again, total backlog was up 2% to about $41 billion. Saw good growth in the funded backlog, but even stronger growth in the national security funded backlog, which was up 10%. I think that that really gives us confidence in the back part of the year for the growth that we expect to see in the national security business. I will let Horacio talk a little bit about the environment around bookings and things like that. But overall, we are generally comfortable with what we are seeing from the customers right now and how they are seeing our advanced technologies provide value.

Yeah. Gautam, I would make the following distinction. First of all, I would characterize the demand environment, in both national security and frankly in civil, as strong. In national security, we have seen, as Troy said, a good increase in funded backlog, especially towards the back end of the quarter. We are now in a continuing resolution. We are still funding operations out of the base budget. So, how exactly that is going to play out in the next quarter or two, is something we are watching very closely, but it is embedded in the way we are guiding. Then on the civil side, again, we see strong demand, especially around super intelligence and agentic and using those tools effectively to code faster. We see huge demand across our portfolio, both commercial and government, for cyber.

But yet having said that, especially when you look at civil, there are procurements that are continuing to shift to the right, both in terms of when the procurement gets let out and sometimes the award timing shifts to the right as well. So exactly how bookings are going to play out over the next quarter or two is a little harder to predict. But overall, I think the trend lines and the positive outlook on demand is what we are focused on.

Our next question comes from Louie DiPalma with William Blair.

Good morning, and happy Friday. Horacio, you described your Vellox product line that utilizes agentic AI for cybersecurity, and there continues to be cybersecurity incidents regarding the SI platforms going rogue and the risk of adversaries exploiting the vulnerabilities. What has been the adoption of your Vellox product suite? Have agencies been incorporating Vellox into your existing large cybersecurity programs such as CDM DEFEND? Thanks.

Sure. Hey, Louie. I would say the following. First of all, if you look at our zero trust platform, because at the end of the day, while there's a number of things that you need to do to fight SI with SI, zero trust is a foundational capability because perimeter defense alone is wholly insufficient. Our zero trust work is growing significantly because it's such a big need. We have productized some of it, and we are changing the way in which we sell that, really not just to the federal government, but to a broader range of customers. On the Vellox suite in particular, recognize that we had a plan to launch the three or four products in Vellox over a two year period. We made the investment to push a lot of that into private betas a lot sooner.

We've gone to market with Guile on private beta in record time, but it's still early in those developments. I think the promise of those products will play out much more strongly over the next couple of years than over the next couple of quarters. The conversations with customers, especially in commercial, but also in federal have been tremendous. The excitement about Guile as being a one-of-a-kind type solution to where in our lab, even the most advanced models are stymied by Guile to the tune of 95% of the time. We don't know of anything else that can do that. So we're seeing a significant upside on top of a cyber business that is already growing very fast. We've been preparing for this. We've been investing on SI now for over a decade.

As you know, we have a huge cyber presence, and at the intersection of those two, Booz Allen both excels and sees huge opportunity for growth.

On the other side of the business for civil, Troy, you described the negative impact of smaller scope on certain recompetes, and I was wondering what type of scope has been removed or is being removed. Do you believe that process is largely complete as you guided for generally flat sequential sets of revenue versus last year, which saw a major step down in this coming December quarter?

Thanks, Louie. I'll take that one. In civil, when we talk about the recompetes being smaller duration and smaller scope, it's really just how much funding they're actually giving to the same activities rather than actually taking out large sections of work. It has to do, for example, if we're doing software development and they're funding a certain number of Scrum teams to push functionality just with the current pressures inside of civil, they might do that slower compared to how they've done that in past years. We're largely through those transitions. In terms of recompetes, as you know, a proportion of our business recompetes every year, and this year has been no different. Our recompete win rate has been high, and there are no significant recompetes remaining for the fiscal year.

We are seeing tailwinds around expanding the customer base, and Horacio mentioned our SI-ready data platforms and agentic development. We're seeing a lot of demand for that in financial integrity missions, public safety infrastructure missions, and also healthcare. So there is a strong pipeline. Again, that it comes down to conversion, how quick they'll do the awards, and that we can ramp up. So it has, as you know, been choppy, but there still is a very strong demand signal for secure agentic cyber development and data systems.

Excellent. Thanks for discussing those nuances, Kristine, and thanks, everyone.

Thank you. Our next question comes from John Godyn with Citi. Please proceed.

Hey, thanks for taking my question. I wanted to follow up on the trend in fixed price contracting and the impact on margins, kind of bigger picture. For a long time, EBITDA margins have been, let's say, 10%-11% or so. Obviously, the math of moving more toward fixed price contracts over time, if it's fast enough, introduces the idea of a breakout of margins. Horacio, I am just curious, for somebody that has a long-term view, a multi-year view on this stock, in our minds, should we be thinking about 12%-plus margins, like a new regime of margins? Is that possible the way that you guys see it, or is it not? Maybe we could just discuss that a little.

Thanks for the question. I think all three of us, we were pointing at each other trying to figure out, I think all three of us have something to say on this. I will start, and I will pass it over to my colleagues. I will say the following. I have been saying for a while that the nature of our business, as it changes, we expect profit to grow faster than revenue and therefore margins to expand over the next couple of years. If you think about it, the move towards outcome-based, in some ways for us, is a bet on ourselves and our ability to deliver excellent quality while continuing to drive the cost curve.

Again, our investments in SI that go back a decade create a tailwind there, and we are confident based on what we have already seen in terms of the performance of our fixed-price portfolio versus our cost-plus portfolio, that that is something that will realize and materialize. The other thing is we are selling differently, and so we have productized a lot of our IP, some of which is discrete, concrete product we are taking to market, like the Vellox suite. A lot of it is reusable technology that sells as technology inside existing programs. Some of the things that Kristine was talking about in terms of digital engineering, agentic data platforms, and the like, I think give us those kinds of opportunities. I do not think you are going to see a huge step-up in margin one quarter to the next.

I think you are going to see a steady growth.

But certainly, as we are planning the business, as we are executing the business, our goal is to expand margins for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, John, I will just add a little color there. I think Horacio just teed it up perfectly on the long-term trend is very favorable. There will obviously be variations quarter to quarter. Specifically, I called it out in the second half. When you look up at the margins that we are seeing, I think you do see some favorable benefits towards this fixed-price trend. However, there are lower fed civ volumes in the second half. There is some timing of investments, and there is normal seasonality. So just be mindful of that for the next few quarters. But I think you are thinking about it right from a long-term trend standpoint.

John, I will make one last point that I should have made earlier. We are growing margins while at the same time growing investment in the business. If you think about it, Vellox is a bit of a startup inside of Booz Allen. So, right now, you are investing for growth. That is one example of several. Yet we can do that at an increased pace, at an accelerated pace while continuing to grow margins.

I think that is fantastic. Appreciate it. If I could ask one of Kristine. Kristine, you had a phrase in the prepared remarks, something like, returning to above-market growth. This is not a gotcha question. I am not trying to wordsmith that. But what is the market growth rate that you guys observe? Because you have a business where there are some markets that are growing very quickly, and you are leaning into it, others a lot less so. How do we think about the market growth as you do so that we know what above market is?

Yeah, thank you for that. Certainly, it has been our goal to return to where we have been, with mid-single-digit growth year-over-year. Then even better on the bottom line even than we have in the past. So, we see the demand signals out there to get to that, and it is really a matter of making it happen with the conversions and continuing to lean in and build the momentum around our use of our technology and productizing our business and continuing to shift to outcomes-based. For what the market is demanding, we have a lot of it. So if you look across defense tech, cyber, SI, just pure strength areas for Booz Allen.

Thank you. Our next question is from Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies. Please proceed.

Thank you. Good morning, guys. Thank you for the time. I wanted to ask maybe two questions on the national security side. You highlighted that ex billables book growth was actually 6% versus the 1% reported in the second quarter. Maybe can you talk about what acceleration do you see in the second half and to hit the high end of the guidance, it is about mid-teens growth. How much of that is moving from just funding improving versus Booz's specific priorities that are being funded?

Thanks, Sheila. I think a lot of it has to do with the capabilities that we are bringing to market. There is great demand for our battle management solutions, and that ties into the Ultra acquisition. Lots of activity in space domain awareness. We are seeing a lot force readiness initiatives and our digital engineering, some emerging areas around autonomy and our mission autonomy software, quantum picking up. I think, in general, both between what we already have backlogged for, and what the pipeline looks like, which as Horacio said is, how that converts may be related to how the budget environment plays out. What we are telling you in our guide is that, we see enough in the business to continue to grow that strongly and have it strengthen in the second half.

Okay. Got it. Maybe if I could just ask about Ultra. Can you talk about how we should think about that in the second half and just how it is blending into your defense tech portfolio already and contributing?

Yeah. Thanks, Sheila. I will take that one. From a defense tech standpoint, look, we are very happy with how Ultra is going. We are integrating our defense tech business with Ultra, out having conversations with customers, and very excited about what these two businesses can do when we bring them together. We do still see Ultra growing strong top-line growth and then having margins well above 20%, which is what we have talked about. We continue to see good growth out of that business. We have rolled that into the guide, which I am sure a lot of people have questions about. Overall, the national security business is growing, and Ultra is a great part of that.

Yeah, especially, I will just add to that by saying—

—the core of what Ultra brings is additional strength to our C3BM portfolio, which is already growing very strongly, both in terms of traditional contracts and OTAs and new formats and B2B formats and things like that. That was the primary goal for the acquisition. It also brought with it a series of products that we believe are going to further enhance our position in autonomy, especially around their platforms. Because of their encryption business, that meshes really well with some of the things we are doing, both in autonomy and in cyber. We see really strong market opportunity and traction for our defense tech business. In totality, we would like to see it grow double digits, and certainly Ultra is a significant part of that.

The other thing I will say, having seen us do a number of acquisitions, and I caveat that this is very early days, from a cultural standpoint, this is one of the most compatible cultural integrations I have ever seen.

Thank you. Our next question is from Gavin Parsons with UBS. Please proceed.

Going back to the question on above-market top-line growth, I just wanted to think about how we should frame that or build up to that over time as you evolve the business model away from that historical headcount that we could use to drive revenue.

I will start, and then I will turn it over to Troy. In my mind, again, if you think about our business, we expect our cyber and our defense tech businesses to be the growth leaders inside Booz Allen. Those are attractive markets. We have unique positions, tremendous demand, and already a track record for above-market growth that we expect and intend to expand. Inside of that is where we are making also most of our investments in terms of productizing and bringing IP to market in a different way. That, to me, is going to be a core area of strength that will drive a lot of our business, both at the top line and at the bottom line.

Beyond that, SI demand, agentifying things both externally and internally create a significant tailwind for the business that we expect to see play out again over the next couple of years. I do not think there is a magical change where quarter to quarter you are going to see huge changes. I think the way we see it is steady improvement in the top line, steady improvement in the bottom line, and the ability to really continue to differentiate Booz Allen through the capabilities we are investing in and we bring.

Got it. On the civil side, appreciate the color on the downsize recompetes, but you mentioned the demand environment there is strong, so what kind of keeps moving to the right on you guys in this business?

Yeah, thanks for that. The pipeline itself has been strong. What we do see, and this happens a little bit in national security too, but it has happened more recently in civil, just where they are pushing out the, like there will be a recompete announced. You will see a couple of draft RFPs, et cetera. Then they will push it out further and extend the current contract and decide to do the recompete a little bit later, whether it is ours or somebody else's. That is what we are really talking about. Some of the larger bids are just pushing to the right. As they push to the right right now, they kind of push out of this fiscal year in terms of where you really see the value. The pipeline itself continues to grow. We are seeing awards.

It's just a little bit choppier than it normally would have been.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Matt Akers with BNP Paribas.

Hey, good morning, everybody. Thanks for the question. Could you touch on headcount a little bit? You've had pretty steady declines here for a while. It looks like maybe it's starting to stabilize. Are you starting to ramp back up in terms of headcount? And if so, are you finding that you're able to find the people that you need for that?

Yeah. Thank you. Absolutely. We are still focusing very strongly on hiring, and this is where it is bifurcated. It was another quarter down a little bit for Civil. But we added over 300 employees in national security this quarter. And we are rapidly building our technologies, and we will be decoupling growth from headcount. But yes, it is different across the businesses, and we are hiring.

Okay, thanks. Then, I guess maybe for Troy, just on the balance sheet, after Ultra, just how you are thinking about deleveraging and the capital allocation priorities from here.

Yeah. I would say if you look at the cash flows of the company, very strong. Really good cash flow performance and good collection. So, I think that gives us the ability to have a very balanced capital deployment strategy. We have talked deleveraging while we go through the integration of Ultra here. But that does still allow us to strategically look at some other opportunities, but we will still continue to pay the dividend and do modest share repurchase. So continue to have a very balanced approach is the way I would think about it.

Thank you. Our next question is from Scott Mikus with Melius Research.

Good morning, Horacio and Kristine. In the past, we would think about the organic growth algorithm as a function of headcount growth, wage growth, and book-to-bill. Going back to some of the earlier questions on the call about the shift to fixed price and outcome-based contracting, how relevant is that old growth algorithm today, and what's the strategy going forward to try and decouple your top-line growth from the overall budget cycle? Or at least make it more resilient when there's potentially administration changes and changes in priorities?

Yeah, I'll take that one here. I think when you think about the algorithm that you're used to, we are, I would say, migrating away from that. Kristine talked about the transformation and the technologies that we're building. As those take hold, especially in the cyber business, as we're productizing and the defense tech hardware really starts taking off in that business and the solutions that we're bringing to market, you're going to see further decoupling over time. Again, I don't think that this is going to be a one-quarter phenomenon or even a one-year phenomenon. This is a gradual journey that we're on. I think we're really bringing these advanced technologies to bear that allows for long-term growth and margin expansion.

I think you'll see a trend where you see good top-line growth and you could see faster bottom-line growth as the products and the solutions that we're bringing to customers have more value. Then we're really using our SI capabilities to bring those enabled technologies to bear, allowing us to execute more efficiently for customers. So it's a trend that will continue over time. We have good profitability that allows us to invest in these core areas. So that decoupling will continue over time, but it'll be a gradual effort year in and year out.

All right. Then one other housekeeping item, Troy. What were the acquired sales in the quarter and contemplated in the guide for the Ultra acquisition?

The acquired sales from the Ultra acquisition in the quarter and in the guide.

Yeah, I would say it's immaterial. Look, we rolled it in. There was modest impacts to the guide from Ultra. We saw some puts and takes on the revenue side. When I think about Ultra, I would say that offset the civil changes that we saw, and that allowed us to really hold the guide across the board.

Thank you. Our next question is from Seth Seifman with JPMorgan. Please proceed.

Hey. Thanks very much. Good morning. I guess, first off, if you can just talk about the orders in the quarter. Should we think about the same type of bifurcation in terms of the order growth? It seems like the orders were probably down kind of low double digits year-on-year. Should we think about were the civil orders down significantly more than that? Is that kind of factoring into the change in the outlook?

Yeah, I think that that's generally right. I think we're continuing to see good strength in the national security business. Again, national security-funded backlog was up nearly 10%. The national security pipeline is up more than 20%. That's really where you're seeing strength. Kristine highlighted some of the insights into the civil business. I think that some of those pressures are easing, and I think that that's reflected in the new updated guide for civil, where we're talking now about flat to slightly down, just given some of the macro environments that we see in the civil space. I think it continues to be bifurcated with national security being the strength of the company and the business right now.

Okay. Excellent. Maybe a little bit bigger picture, Horacio, and apologize, I know this sounds like a super basic question. But just in terms of cyber, I do not think anyone doubts that Booz Allen has some very superior cyber capabilities and also that there is huge demand for cybersecurity right now. But in terms of helping people understand, if you are an investor and you are looking at Booz and thinking about exposure to cyber, helping to dimensionalize what that means in the portfolio right now and kind of where Booz Allen fits into the whole cyber equation. There is a number of businesses in cyber, different stocks who are covered by software analysts who have very different growth structures and margin structures.

When you think, cybersecurity is an important trend and Booz Allen has a lot to contribute, but to make sure that people's expectations are properly capitalized or properly set about what that could mean for the financial performance of Booz Allen. How should they think about that?

It is a great question. Let me describe our cyber business as essentially our most rapidly transforming business across the portfolio. If you go back a couple of years, our cyber business was largely a cost-plus business, largely labor-based. It covered the spectrum from full-spectrum operations to cyber defense across the entirety of the federal government and a commercial business that was coming along, but that was not a large portion of our growth opportunity. If you look at our cyber business now and you take the snapshot now, this is a business that is already growing significantly, both at the top line and at the bottom line, because it is really fundamentally changing to be a business that is a technology-first business, a solutions-first business, if you will.

If you look at our large, for example, Zero Trust platform, we were originally an integrator, and we were building tech that was in the middle, was sort of closing gaps between the technologies we are integrating. If you look at our Zero Trust Business now, we are really an innovator. We are still building on best commercial technology in an open architecture where we can swap out technologies as they get better and worse relative to each other. But also, we are building on top of that a set of capabilities that allow us to almost sell that as a SKU, just about. That is a fundamental change to the way we can actually execute and scale that business beyond our federal customers, because it is very hard to sell it to anybody else the way it was sold to federal customers.

That is a big part of our cyber business. In addition to that, we are seeing all across our cyber portfolio significant opportunities to innovate, again, like I said, from full spectrum operations to the work that we do with the commercial markets, where Vellox is getting traction, where Guile, as part of that, is getting traction, and where customers are looking to us to really help them close the gaps that they have right now. We all have, including our own infrastructure, when it comes to defending against these AI power cyber attacks. So, we see huge growth, huge opportunity in a business that is fundamentally transforming. That at one level is an unrecognized world leader in cyber.

Part of what we need to do over the coming quarters and years is to be able to dimensionalize it better in a way that you all can understand its value better. That is in the cards. That is part of what we're working on. Part of the power of Booz Allen is that while we build these amazing businesses, we integrate them with each other so that they can actually create internal synergy. So I'll give you a great example. We're using what we know about cyber on both sides of the ball to really strengthen the products that we're building in our defense tech portfolio. Why is that important? Because if you're going to play at the edge, your products are going to get attacked by every adversary, even before they leave the factory floor.

Booz Allen Hamilton Holding (BAH) Q2 2027 Earnings Call Transcript

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