We are a leading heavy civil construction project management business, specializing
in marine construction. We provide a broad range of heavy civil marine construction
services to federal agencies, state and municipal governments, and private commercial
and industrial customers.
We are headquartered in Houston, Texas, and provide our heavy civil marine
construction services on, over and under the water in the continental United
States (U.S.), Alaska, Canada, and the Caribbean Basin.
We provide heavy civil marine construction services through projects that are
obtained primarily through a competitive bid or negotiated contract process.
Our projects have similar cost structures, including labor, equipment, materials
and subcontractors. Our workforce is standard across our business and includes
pile drivers, equipment operators, carpenters, welders, barge crews, dredge
crews, supervisors and project managers. This allows our core resources of assets
and individuals to be deployed interchangeably to our projects. For example,
crews and equipment deployed to a dock construction project may be redeployed
to a bridge construction project and to a marsh creation project after that.
This allows us to deploy our resources based on availability across our business.
Similarly, basic materials such as concrete and steel are used in our projects,
which provides us with similar costs across our business. Additionally, we self-perform
most of our projects, which limits our use of subcontractors.
We execute our projects in a similar fashion with a centralized estimating,
project controls and management group, and the risks and rewards of project
performance are not affected by the location of the specific project, but on
our ability to compete on pricing and execute within our estimated costs. Because
our core resources may be deployed to various types of marine construction projects,
we have developed a centralized philosophy for operating our business. We utilize
the same technology across our business, including estimating and cost control
applications.
Our methods used to provide our services is similar. Our assets and labor force
are often interchangeable within the various types of marine construction projects.
This provides us with the flexibility to manage our business as one operating
unit deploying resources based on availability across our business.
We have the same customers with similar funding drivers and market demands
across our entire business. Our business-wide customers include the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, state transportation departments,
local port authorities and private customers such as petrochemical terminal
operators, private terminal operators and recreational waterside facilities.
We consider funding availability to be similar across our business, particularly
in the form of governmental budgeting (federal, state and local) and capital
expenditure and maintenance and repair spending by private customers.
Our business is primarily driven by macro-economic considerations including
increases in import/export seaborne transportation, development of energy related
infrastructure, recreational waterside expansion and operations, marine bridge
infrastructure development, waterway pipeline crossings and the maintenance
of our nation’s waterways. These macro drivers are key catalysts for future
prospects for work and are similar across our entire business.
Across our business, we comply with macro environmental regulatory environments
driven by federal agencies such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, as well as others.
We believe that our business is driven by similar economic characteristics
across our operating environment, including gross margins and other metrics.
In addition, the types of information and internal reports used by our chief
operating decision maker (the “CODM”) are similar across our business.