Sterling Infrastructure Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Record Backlog Growth and Margin Expansion Drive Upward Guidance

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Sterling Infrastructure 1st quarter webcast and conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press 0 for the operator. As a reminder, this call is being recorded on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Noelle Dilts, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy. Please go ahead.

Noelle Dilts, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy, Sterling Infrastructure: Good morning to everyone joining us and welcome to Sterling Infrastructure’s 2026 1st quarter earnings conference call and webcast. I’m pleased to be here today to discuss our results with Joe Cutillo, Sterling’s Chief Executive Officer, and Nick Grindstaff, Sterling’s Chief Financial Officer. Joe will open the call with an overview of the company and its performance in the quarter. Nick will then discuss our financial results and 2026 guidance, after which Joe will provide some additional commentary on our markets and outlook. We will then open the call up for questions. As a reminder, there are accompanying slides on the investor relations section of our website. These slides include details on our full year 2026 financial guidance. Before turning the call over to Joe, I will read the Safe Harbor statement. The discussion today may include forward-looking statements.

Actual results could differ materially from the statements made today. Please refer to Sterling’s most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings for a more complete description of risk factors that could affect these projections and assumptions. The company assumes no obligations to update forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Please also note that management may reference EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted operating income, adjusted net income, or adjusted earnings per share on this call, which are all financial measures not recognized under US GAAP. As required by SEC rules and regulations, these non-GAAP financial measures are reconciled to their most comparable GAAP financial measures in our earnings release issued yesterday afternoon. I’ll now turn the call over to our CEO, Joe Cutillo.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Thanks, Noel. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Sterling’s first quarter 2026 earnings call. Sterling is off to a fantastic start, delivering strong revenue growth of 92% and adjusted diluted EPS growth of 120%. Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled, with margins expanding over 150 basis points year-over-year to reach a new first quarter record of 20%. During this period of unprecedented demand, our focus remains on pursuing projects that offer the most attractive returns. We’re not looking to win all projects. We are looking to win the best projects. Signed backlog at the end of the quarter totaled $3.8 billion, a 78% year-over-year increase, and combined backlog grew 131% to reach $5.2 billion.

Additionally, we have visibility into high probability future phase opportunities that now total over $1.3 billion. Together, our signed backlog, unsigned awards, and future phase opportunities provide visibility into a total pool of work approaching $6.5 billion. This has grown by approximately $2 billion since year-end. Notably, during the quarter, we were awarded the first phase of a multi-phase semiconductor fabrication campus. This first phase, which will be executed under a joint venture, totals over a half a billion dollars and is expected to be completed in late 2027 or early 2028. The campus build is expected to span a multi-decade period and presents opportunities for additional scopes of work through 2027 and beyond.

The growth in our backlog and future phase work in the quarter, combined with our visibility into our customers’ multi-year plans, strengthen our confidence in our outlook. We believe we are perfectly positioned to continue to deliver strong earnings growth and return for our shareholders for many years to come. The Sterling Way, which is our commitment to take care of our people, our environment, our investors, and our communities while we work to build America’s infrastructure, remains our guiding principle as we execute our strategy and grow the company. Now I’d like to discuss our segment results for the quarter in more detail. In E-Infrastructure, first quarter revenue grew 174%, including organic growth of over 100%. The data center market was again the primary growth driver in the quarter.

E-Infrastructure adjusted operating income increased 177% as margins expanded despite the dilutive impact of the CEC acquisition. Revenue for our site development operations more than doubled and operating margins expanded both year-over-year and sequentially. Margins continue to benefit from our strong execution on large, time sensitive, mission critical projects. CEC delivered 78% revenue growth compared to its prior year first quarter, with margins performing in line with our expectations. The Texas market remains exceptionally strong with robust award activity in early 2026. During the quarter, CEC secured several large project wins, contributing to a $1.2 billion increase in its combined backlog since year-end 2025. We continue to see tremendous opportunities ahead for both electrical and site development.

In aggregate, our E-Infrastructure signed backlog, unsigned electrical awards, and future phase site development opportunities now exceeds $5 billion, representing an increase of $2 billion since year-end. Mission-critical work, including data centers, large manufacturing projects, and semiconductor, represented over 90% of E-Infrastructure signed backlog at the end of the quarter. Future phase work is predominantly related to mission-critical projects. Moving to Transportation Solutions. First quarter revenue grew 10%, driven by strong activity in the Rocky Mountain region, which benefited from favorable weather conditions and some earlier than anticipated project starts. adjusted operating income grew 26%, reflecting strong execution and mix shift towards higher margin projects. We ended the quarter with Transportation Solutions backlog at $1.04 billion, a 20% year-over-year increase. Shifting to Building Solutions.

In the first quarter, segment revenue grew 3%, driven by a pickup in home builder activity and adjusted operating margins were 8.7%. While we’re encouraged by the slight revenue increase in the quarter, we continue to anticipate that the residential market will face strong headwinds throughout 2026. The strength of Sterling’s diversified portfolio and strategy to focus on high growth and high margin end markets enabled us to deliver another fantastic quarter. With that, I’d like to turn it over to Nick to give you more details on some of our financial metrics and 2026 guidance. Nick?

Nick Grindstaff, Chief Financial Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Thanks, Joe. Good morning. I’ll begin with our consolidated backlog metrics. Our first quarter backlog totaled $3.8 billion, a 78% year-over-year increase, or 51% excluding CEC. Combined backlog of $5.2 billion increased 131% or 46% excluding CEC. First quarter 2026 book-to-burn ratios were 2.1 times for backlog and 3.5 times for combined backlog. Moving to our cash flow metrics. Cash flow from operating activities for the first quarter of 2026 was a strong $166 million. We expect continued strength in operating cash flow for the full year. Cash flow used in investing activities included $20 million of CapEx. For 2026, we are forecasting CapEx in the range of $100 million-$110 million, which is unchanged from prior guidance.

Cash flow from financing activities was a $27 million outflow, including share repurchases of $12 million at an average price of $305.14 per share. Remaining availability under the existing repurchase authorization is $362 million. We will remain opportunistic in our approach to share repurchases. We are in great shape from a balance sheet perspective. We ended the quarter with $512 million of cash and debt of $287 million, for a cash net of debt balance of $224 million. Additionally, our $150 million revolving credit facility remained undrawn during the period. Given our strong liquidity, we are in an excellent position to continue to take advantage of both organic and inorganic growth opportunities in the years ahead.

Our current backlog, visibility, and strong market tailwinds position us for an even better year than we originally anticipated. We’re increasing our guidance ranges for 2026 as follows: Revenue of $3.7 billion-$3.8 billion, which at the midpoint is a 20% increase over previous guidance and represents more than 50% growth over 2025. Diluted EPS of $16.50-$17.15. Adjusted diluted EPS of $18.40-$19.05, which at the midpoint is a 36% increase from previous guidance and represents 72% growth over 2025. EBITDA of $801 million-$831 million. Adjusted EBITDA of $843 million-$873 million. Now I will turn the call back to Joe.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Thanks, Nick. For quite some time, we’ve been communicating a bullish view on our markets and outlook. As we sit here today, that outlook is stronger than ever and continues to surpass our expectations. Customers are continuing to ask for more, with projects growing in size, complexity, and duration. At the same time, we’re being pulled into new geographies with urgency. As customers prioritize alignment with partners who have the capability and capacity to execute over long term. Together, these dynamics reinforce our conviction in the multiyear opportunities across our markets. Moving to our segment expectations for 2026. In E-Infrastructure Solutions, we anticipate that the current strength in data center demand will continue for the foreseeable future. We continue to have conversations with our customers regarding how we can best support their strong multi-year capital deployment programs.

As part of this, we are getting pulled more rapidly into new geographies, including Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and the Midwest. In the semiconductor market, our industry-leading capabilities enabled us to be selected as the site development partner for a mega fab semiconductor campus. This award highlights how Sterling’s highly differentiated capabilities make the company the partner of choice for large mission-critical projects in the U.S. We believe that this is just the beginning of a wave of semiconductor fabrication activity that will begin to accelerate at the end of the decade. In addition, there are still several opportunities in the broader manufacturing market that we believe could be awarded in 2026 or early 2027. We’re gaining meaningful traction in our cross-selling efforts between site development and electrical services.

We are currently in active construction on two data center projects where we are executing both services in an integrated capacity. These joint awards have materialized approximately 6-8 months ahead of our original expectations. For the full year 2026, we expect to deliver E-Infrastructure revenue growth of 80% or higher, including the full year contribution of CEC. We anticipate that the legacy business will grow at rates approaching 60% or higher as several of our larger projects accelerate. Adjusted operating profit margins for E-Infrastructure are expected to be in the mid 20% range. In Transportation Solutions, we’re in the final year of the current federal funding cycle, which concludes in September of 2026. We have built over two years of backlog and continue to see good levels of bid activity. For 2026, we anticipate continued growth in our core Rocky Mountain market.

The downsizing of our low bid heavy highway business in Texas is progressing according to plan, resulting in some moderation of Transportation Solutions top line and backlog, but should continue to drive margin improvement as we move through the year. We expect Transportation Solutions revenue to grow in the low to mid-single digit range in 2026. After the strong 1st quarter, we anticipate a moderation of growth rates in the remaining quarters. This is driven by 3 factors: the early start of projects in the 1st quarter that we originally expected to start in the 2nd quarter, the allocation of resources towards the E-Infrastructure projects, and the final wind down of our Texas low bid work. In Building Solutions, we believe the business is well positioned for growth over a multiyear period.

Our key geographies of Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Phoenix are expected to see population growth driving new home demand. Additionally, there is an opportunity for share gain coming out of the down cycle. We anticipate that Building Solutions revenue will be modestly down in 2026, and that adjusted operating margins will be in the low double digits. On the acquisition front, we continue to look for acquisitions that are the right strategic fit to enhance our service offering and geographic footprint. We are seeing more high-quality acquisition targets in the market today than a year ago. Our significant balance sheet firepower positions us to take advantage of these opportunities. Moving to our full year 2026 guidance. The midpoints of our guidance ranges would represent a 51% revenue growth, a 72% adjusted EPS growth, and a 70% adjusted EBIT growth.

With that, I’d like to turn it over for questions.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: Your first question comes from Sangita with KeyBanc. Please go ahead.

Sangita, Analyst, KeyBanc: Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Maybe, Joe, you can help us understand what you think went a lot better in 1Q versus expectations, maybe on revenue and margins, since usually we consider 1Q to be a seasonally slower quarter?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Yeah, sure. Yeah, Q1 is historically and will probably be consistently our lowest quarter. Couple things helped us. We certainly had some very good weather through the Rocky Mountains and some of the other regions which enabled us in the Transportation Solutions to start some projects a little earlier and execute projects through the winter months when we normally shut down. That definitely helped us. More importantly, as we look at the infrastructure, we’re really starting to see the impact of the new projects that are coming in larger and more complex, and what the added values of our vertical integration are adding to the margin profile and productivity through the build of these projects. We’re far enough along. Again, a little bit of history.

You know, we started this journey when data centers became really data centers, data campuses and hit 100 acres. We’re doing projects that are north of 1,000 acres, and the future projects coming out look like they’re multi-thousand acres. The larger they get, the more complex they get, the more we can leverage our vertical integration, and our size and our scope, which drives more productivity. That’s why we’ve said all along, and we feel even more confident as we’re executing, we’ll continue to see nice margin growth in the infrastructure.

Sangita, Analyst, KeyBanc: Great. If I can ask a follow-up on the comment you made on M&A targets and the fact that you’re seeing better targets now. Can you tell us how you define these targets as being better than what you saw before?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: You know, we have some significant criteria that we look at. You know, we always say we buy people, we don’t buy businesses. It’s absolutely critical on the caliber of the talent and the willingness of the key team to stay. Our primary focus is in the infrastructure. If we take a look in kind of a couple different areas, either geographic expansion of capabilities that we have, more focus on the site development from a geographic expansion standpoint, and then on the electrical side, a combination of geographic expansion and incremental services or products that we can offer. I’ll tell you, we’re looking beyond electrical as well, we’re looking at the whole portfolio.

We really spend a lot of time with our customers and understand what are their needs and what are driving the success or the complexity of these projects. We’ll constantly look for those services to add to our portfolio. It’s how we moved into electrical.

Sangita, Analyst, KeyBanc: Appreciated. Thank you.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: Great. Thank you. Your next question comes from Louie DiPalma with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Louie DiPalma, Analyst, William Blair: Joe, Nick, and Noelle, thanks for taking my questions. Great quarter.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Thanks.

Louie DiPalma, Analyst, William Blair: You highlighted a robust bidding environment in Texas. Can you walk us through your current presence in that state as it relates to capacity, project manager availability, and how you would characterize Texas’ data center market today versus where, say, the Atlanta or Greater Georgia market is at today and your ability to gain share over there in Texas?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Yeah. So our approach in Texas is, you know, we have CEC located up in Dallas. We’ll call that North Central Texas. We’re attacking Texas from the west, and we’re attacking Texas from the east. We’re using our Rocky Mountain assets and businesses to come from the west to hit western Texas even into New Mexico. There’s a little bit of activity there. Then we’re leveraging the Atlanta folks and southeast team to come east. They’ll make it all the way to Dallas, and both of those teams will kind of meet in the middle. So we’ve got current capabilities and capacity to do that.

We’re constantly looking for acquisitions that could be in the upper Pacific Northwest, also in Texas, that we can add capacity as we move along the way. We’ll continue to do that. If I look at the market, I would tell you that the Atlanta Southeast market is more mature, has a longer runway, and today is probably a larger market. As I look forward the next 4 to 5 years, I think people will be shocked with the size and scope and quantity of data centers, along with some other stuff being built in the Texas market. We’re in the early innings, but the projects are extremely big. They’re coming out extremely quickly.

We see not only this year, next year, but what our core customers and key customers are talking about starting 2028, 2029. These projects, on top of being large, will obviously take longer in timeframe to complete. A typical project today is more like 3 years. These will be pushing out more like 4- and 5-year projects.

Noelle Dilts, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy, Sterling Infrastructure: One other thing, Louie DiPalma, just to add here is, you know, we’re getting pulled into these new geographies by our customers. You know, it’s not like we’re just going into these new geographies cold. They’re looking for partners that can support their builds in these in these new areas, and that’s really a continuation of the geographic expansion strategy we’ve had since the beginning. It’s just kind of taking that one step further.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Yeah. Just to add to that, I think that’s a great point. you know, our customers, if you look at our geographic expansion from the beginning of this, going back to when we started this, we’ve let the major hyperscalers pull us into new markets. I will tell you know, we generally take our time to do that. They’re more than pulling now. They’re kind of screaming to get into these markets faster with what they see coming in capital spending they’re going to do. It’s really, it’s exciting times for us. our challenge is how do we grow as fast as we can and then still deliver at the same levels and caliber.

It also allows us to be extremely picky on the projects we decide to do and the projects we’re not gonna do. That only helps us long term on margins and capacity planning.

Louie DiPalma, Analyst, William Blair: Fantastic. That was great color. Then just a follow-up. As it relates to CEC, can you walk us through your current level of integration with the business as it relates to what you’re seeing with revenue and cost synergies? You mentioned the two active projects that are involved or are involved in both the legacy site development work with CEC’s electrical. How much of their collective bidding pipeline is collaborative with this cross-selling? Then what’s the progress on CEC’s margin expansion opportunity? Thanks.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: We call it assimilation, not integration. We’ve been really happy with the progress made with CEC. As I said, on the call, we’re 6 to 8 months. We really didn’t think we would see a joint opportunity or joint effort take place until late second quarter, early third quarter of this year. We started those in the first quarter, which is fantastic. We’ve got great reception from the hyperscalers, and they were quickly and are seeing the benefits of combining these two together and what it does to the cycle time of the build process. We’re really happy with that. integration is going great.

On the margin and expansion piece, we’re still extremely bullish that we’re gonna see 300 to 500 basis points of margin in really 12 to 18 months. One of the things that people need to realize with CEC is there’s a two end markets and products that we knew they were doing that have much lower margin. We are exiting those, and as we exit those margins will come up. I will tell you on the core business, ex those markets, we saw a really nice margin expansion in the quarter. I would tell you that it was actually ahead of what we anticipated.

We’re very confident in where those margins will go over the next 12 to 18 months and feel really good about what the business is bringing to us and what we can do jointly with that business as we go forward. In addition, you know, it’s taken off so quickly, we talked about expanding or growing our modular capabilities. We just locked down a lease to triple the size of our modular build capabilities. We’re building a world-class manufacturing site to do that, and we think we’ll ultimately expand that to other locations in the U.S. over the next 18 months. We’re excited about it. Feel very good about what it’s bringing. I just wish I had 2,000 or 3,000 more electricians, and we would grow it even faster.

Louie DiPalma, Analyst, William Blair: Great. Thanks so much for the color and congrats again on the quarter.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Thank you.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: All right. Thank you. Your next question comes from Manish with Camper. Please go ahead.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Manish? We lost him.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: All right, Manish, if you’re still there, please call back in. Otherwise, I’ll go to the next caller. Your next question comes from Brian with Stifel. Please go ahead.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel: Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Congrats on a great quarter here. Just a follow-up on Texas, in your traditional site development business. How much do you expect Texas to account for as a percentage of revenue there, kind of putting CEC aside? Can you remind us whereabouts it was last year? Is there any notable differences in margin profile in the site development business in Texas relative to some of your other regions? Thanks.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Yeah. It’s really hard to say where Texas will be as a percent of revenue. I will tell you it is growing extremely quickly. But so is, you know, people forget the Southeast is still growing incredibly fast too, right? And we just got pulled into the Midwest by one of our customers, and so there’s another market there. It’s hard for me to, I’ll only be wrong and if I try to give you an answer. Margin profiles, as long as these things are getting bigger and more complex, margin profiles will be fine. You know, we certainly have seen in some of the Far Pacific Northwest projects early on, where we’ve got a little smaller equipment group and we’re not as fully vertically integrated as we are in the Southeast.

Those margins are a little lower, but they would be margins everybody would love to have. We’re not worried about that. Part of our acquisition strategy is to look at how do we start putting in those elements or even organically adding those elements of vertical integration. We are really seeing the benefits of these ancillary goods and services, not only from time reduction of the project because we control more of it, that’s what’s really helping drive these margins. Everybody keeps asking us if we’re getting more price. The answer is no, we’re not getting more price. This is all around effectiveness and efficiency and what we’re able to drive through the execution of these projects for our customers.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel: Yeah, that’s great. Just to follow up on CEC. In the release, you guys talked about $600 million-ish contribution to backlog, but a $1.9 billion contribution to combined backlog. Can you help us understand the delta here? Is that some underground electrical work that you won that hit RPOs?

Maybe some of the inside-

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Yeah.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel: work is coming later? How should we think about that?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Combination. It’s a combination. It’s both external and internal electrical work, and that will be on upcoming centers and existing centers. You know, the contracts with CEC are very similar to what we’ve talked about in our site development, where this stuff is phased. They’ll release a small phase. We know the scope of the project. You know, internal electrical package is $300 million-$500 million generally. We know kind of the total scope of the project. They’ll release those in small pieces along the way. That’s why you see kind of some in backlog, some in that future phased work. Those are projects that we’re either actively working on or getting ready to work on.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel: Understood. Appreciate it. I’ll pass it on.

Noelle Dilts, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy, Sterling Infrastructure: Brian, this is just one thing to add. We’ve actually, within some of that work that fell into combined backlog, they have, and again, the terms and conditions are kind of already finalized on that piece of the contract that it may be unsigned, but would fall into combined backlog. Some of that has subsequently moved into signed here as we’ve moved into the second quarter. A pretty big chunk of it.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel: Understood. That is very helpful. Thank you.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: All right. Thank you. Your next call comes from Alex with Texas Capital. Please go ahead.

Alex, Analyst, Texas Capital: Thank you, and good morning. How should we think about your new work being competitively bid versus negotiated? How has that changed or how might that change?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: In theory, everything’s bid. The question is, you know, in certain instances, we’re asked to go work on specific projects with a customer. I guess you could consider that negotiated. Our pricing You know, what people don’t understand, we’ve done a tremendous amount of work for these customers in the past, so it’s not like we can raise our prices 20% or 30% even if we’re negotiating it. They know what the, what the price range is gonna be. It’s our ability at the end of the day to execute this stuff faster than anybody else and be on time every single time with our customers that gets us pulled into these, into these jobs. That’s really where we’re at.

I think as we, as we go forward, you know, we’re looking at these multi-year programs of our core customers and the size and scope of these, it’s really causing us to look harder at those. We’ll be passing up on more jobs as we go forward that may be smaller in size or scope, or may have lower margin profiles because they’re not as complex as some of these bigger jobs. We’ll just keep moving assets to where the most money is. I will tell you, with the combination of electrical and the site side, it really gives us a whole other avenue on some of these extremely large projects coming out in the future.

Alex, Analyst, Texas Capital: Congratulations on the mega fab campus. Sounds real exciting. Do you see other opportunities developing sort of outside the data center market this calendar year, or is that more of a 2027 event?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Let’s talk about the semi fab for a little bit. You know, here’s a job that’s gonna be one of the bigger jobs in the U.S. It’s the biggest semi fab plant in the U.S. I will tell you, it was fun. We actually participated in the process, and I say we, so I’m mostly corporate, because we didn’t know if we wanted to do the project or not, to be honest. We went through the process, and it was really fascinating to see the differentiation that we had over anybody else that spoke to the customer about being in this project. It was just so blatantly evident. There was no one else in the room that was going to have a chance at this.

More importantly, it’s the first semiconductor project we’ve done. It’s not a market we’ve been in in the past. It’s not a market that’s really existed in the U.S. A lot of the GCs in that space, the engineering firms in that space are not people we deal with every day. Now we’re dealing with them every day. When we show them the capabilities of what we’re able to do, we feel very confident that just like in data centers, we will be the supplier of choice for every chip plant that comes out in the future. We don’t see the huge rush of chip plants coming out till 2029, 2030, kind of looks like the timeline, but we’re positioned perfectly for that as we go forward with that. I’m sorry, what was the second part of the question?

Alex, Analyst, Texas Capital: That covered it. Thank you very much.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Great.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: Okay, thank you. Your next question comes from Julio with Sidoti. Please go ahead.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel0: Thanks. Hey, thanks. Hey, good morning. I wanted to ask about how your competitive positioning is evolving due to these shifting and increasing customer needs. As you said, these customers are no longer asking you to scale, but kind of screaming for you to go into other geographies. As they ask with more urgency, are you realizing, you know, a better pricing environment? Are you negotiating better payment terms? Kind of related to that, how do you maintain risk discipline and essentially not allow these large customers to force your hand, for lack of a better word, into taking on more work than you would typically handle?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Yeah, I think, you know, if we were gonna get criticized for something, it would be that we’re probably not aggressive enough on price. We just have a philosophy that we have a fair price, and we make our money on execution. If we take care of the customers, they’ll have us back. There’s no reason for us to try to take advantage of a situation. My history says at some point in time, that comes back to bite you. If somebody wanted to be critical of us, it would be that we’re probably not pushing price hard enough, but we will keep growing margins with vertical integration and productivity.

On the risk profile, you know, the beauty of all of this stuff coming at us is we’re not afraid to say no. Sometimes our biggest customers may not like that. There may be a geography or something that takes place. It could be a real small job that, frankly, just for the time, effort, and energy, would take away significant capacity from doing their bigger jobs. What we try to do is work with them and say, "Here’s the jobs we’re gonna do. Here’s the jobs proactively we’re gonna pass on." We’ll even help them in some cases if they need help trying to find somebody to get that done. That’s, that’s where we go. On the risk profile, we are incredibly risk-averse. It’s another reason why our margins are where they are.

We won’t take on high-risk jobs, that are gonna get us in trouble. We don’t see that as an issue. Right now, you know, our biggest challenge is they would like to have us in 2 or 3 or 4 new markets tomorrow. We really have. Some days it kills us because we’d like to be in all those markets, but we’ve just had to say no. Over the long term, that enhances or continues to build our credibility with them because we’ll never let them down. That’s important to us.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel0: Very helpful. That kind of dovetails into my next kind of question is, you know, about expanding production capacity. I know you discussed earlier, you know, expanding your modular build capabilities. I think last call we talked about, you know, AI deployment internally to improve production capacity for product managers. Then you obviously, you have a joint venture with the first phase of the semiconductor facility project here. How would you kind of rank order the levers you have to pull to expand production capacity to continue to grow, both in the near term and in the longer term?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Well, I think it’s different in each area. Electrical is very different than site development. Electrical comes down to electricians. It really does. You know, as we said before, we’ve got the university. It’s great. We’re graduating people as we speak. The downside of the university is, you know, it’s a four-year program to get somebody from start through apprenticeship into a certified electrician. That doesn’t mean they can’t work along the way as an apprentice, but it’s a long, lengthy process, and we can’t put out thousands of people a year. That’s one avenue.

Second avenue is, as we get these larger, multi-year jobs, you can actually attract electricians from smaller shops, that may be on small jobs that are moving every 3 or 4 months, to where they can be someplace for 18, 24, 36 months, depending on the size and scope of the project. There’s an attractive piece of that. The third piece is acquisitions. That’s a combination of can we buy something somewhat larger, that gives us a nice geographic expansion element? Are there some small tuck-in, smaller shop electrical contractors that don’t have the size and scope to do data centers or large mission-critical projects, but they’ve got 150 or 200 electricians? We can buy those, and we can convert those electricians to work on mission-critical stuff.

That’s kind of how we’re going at it in the electrical space. The last piece is the modular, which is anything I can build in a factory where I don’t have to have a certified electrician doing 100% of the work, saves me that electrical work in the field. Okay? Plus there’s some added quality and other advantages of doing it in a factory, quite frankly. We have that. On the site development side, we have a waiting list of operators. It’s really about project managers. We’ve talked about that in the past. The AI project we did first was focused on project managers, and we picked up about 15% capacity in project managers. We’ve got the apprenticeship program or internship program, I should say.

We’re literally hiring people in their sophomore year. We run them all through college, and then we got a program that they go into right after that. We’re graduating 4, I think a year, 4 or 5 a year right now, that are not only through college, but through the program itself and are becoming real project managers in the field for us. We’ll continue to do that. We’re looking hard for acquisitions. It’s challenging on the site development side, candidly, for us to find the right acquisitions for 2 reasons. One, the size and scale that we have is so much bigger than anybody else. There’s a lot of small players out there. They tend to have either small equipment fleets or most of them have no equipment at all. They rent and lease it.

I will tell you that the rental and lease market right now is extremely tight. They’re gonna be highly limited on capacity and capabilities. We’re looking hard, and if we can find the right ones, we will buy them. It’s just hard for us to find that. That’s our strategy on that front, on top of, I’ll call it the internal development side.

Manish, Analyst, Camport: Helpful. Thanks for the color. I’ll pass it on.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Thanks.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Adam with Thompson Davis. Please go ahead.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel1: Hey, good morning, guys. Congrats on putting up one of the best earnings reports I’ve ever seen.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Thanks, Adam.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel1: You, you had some large awards, you said recently for CEC. What should our expectation be for continued awards from those guys? As they get out of some of their lower margin ventures, you talked about that, does that free up electricians that you can move back in?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Yeah.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel1: to take on more mission-critical work?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Yeah. We get kind of a double benefit from the low-margin stuff we wanna exit. You free up people, and your margins move pretty significantly when you do that. We get 2 benefits of that as we go forward. We have, you know, we have more opportunities than we have capacity to get to with CEC. Just like we’ve talked about with everything else, we’d like to focus more on where we get joint opportunities, because we can really lever that on the total project scope, and take out some significant time and drive some significant productivity, our net margins will go up as well. That’s kind of where we’re focusing their growth activities on as we go forward.

We’ll continue to look at You know, it’s been really fun to watch, you know, we’ve had CEC for, I don’t know, 8 months now or so, watching them kind of transform as well from where they were, which is a great business, to with all these opportunities and what’s happening to have these joint opportunities, watching them quickly trying to shift and move more and more resources, assets, and capabilities there, because they really see the benefit of what that brings to them as well. It’s fun to watch. Like I said, if I had 2,000 more electricians, I can tell you we can put them to work in a quarter for sure, out there right now.

It’s a really good time on the electrical and E-Infrastructure side.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel1: On the M&A side, Since your electrical deal has worked out so well, you said that you would go to where they’re asking you to add scope. I guess my question is, where are they asking you to add more scope? Could that include maybe something just purely on the manufacturing side?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Well, it’s interesting you say that because there’s a lot more to these projects than people realize. You know, there are underground components that are manufactured by others that we purchase and put in that may make sense for us to do. As we look at this modular capability piece, you know, we’re kind of starting out with the basic stuff, there’s no reason that we can’t go to whole modules of these being built in a factory and put on site. We see that expanding and growing very rapidly as an opportunity and for two reasons. One, just pure electrical capacity. Two, it could open up other end markets for us that we’re not in today.

Brian, Analyst, Stifel1: Thanks, Joe.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: Okay, thank you. Your next question comes from Manish with Camport. Please go ahead.

Manish, Analyst, Camport: Good morning, guys, and congrats again. Joe, 2 questions for you. 1 is on E-Infrastructure. The margins that we’re seeing, are they structurally sustainable? Should we think of them as peak margins, or is there more room to be had?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Well, when you ask if they’re sustainable, I will tell you, if you consider them going up higher than they are now, then they’re not sustainable because they will continue to go up. Our margins will improve, and they will improve for a couple reasons. As these jobs become more complex, we drive better productivity. As we vertically integrate through the Rocky Mountains, and add larger equipment suites, they will get further productivity. Those will both drive margins. As we combine the electrical packages and the site civil packages, there’s another element of productivity that we can drive, which helps the margins. The inherent margin of that is actually better for our CEC business on top of it.

When you couple all those together, on top of the end markets that we’ll get out of with CEC, what that does to the margin profile, we will continue to see margins tick up in E-Infrastructure as we go forward. We’re very bullish that we’re certainly not at the top and feel like we’ve still got a long way to go before we’re peaking out on this thing. You know, you may see some variability quarter over quarter because of volumes, but if you take the trend line of margins, we’ll continue to grow.

Manish, Analyst, Camport: Joe, how should we think about margins risk profile between data center and advanced manufacturing work?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Fundamentally the same. you know, margins are again, size matters to us. So, you know, I’ll tell you a, you know, 50-acre data center is not gonna have the margins that a 1,000-acre data center has. just like a 50-acre mission-critical plant is not gonna have the margins a 1,000-acre mission-critical plant is. but I will tell you there’s opportunity for some large manufacturing projects, either late this year or early next year that we’re on top of, and they will have similar margin profiles.

Manish, Analyst, Camport: Uh, and then if I could just please-

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: The only, uh-

Manish, Analyst, Camport: Yeah.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: The only variation-

Manish, Analyst, Camport: No, go ahead, Joe.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: that we see is that, you know, if you look geographically, historically, our northeast region has had lower margins than the others. The driver to that is size of their projects is generally smaller. Some of their projects mandate vertical integration more than others with the union base. Other than that, really not a big differentiation. Think of it as size, not end market.

Manish, Analyst, Camport: Right. Okay. That’s super helpful. Then Joe, one last question. Residential and transportation segments, you know, we don’t really talk about those two segments a whole lot. Obviously all the punt that is on E-Infrastructure for all the right reasons, how should we think about those two segments long term? I mean, are they core, non-core? You know, would you monetize them if you found a bigger acquisition that gives you more scale in E-Infrastructure?

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Well, let’s start with transportation. You know, if you asked me 7 years ago, I probably would’ve answered this differently. Today we’ve turned transportation First, transportation is, it’s like the Rodney Dangerfield of our business. They don’t get enough respect. If you take a look at their margins, they are now almost 2x better than best in class in margins. They’ve got great margins. They’ve done a phenomenal job. We’ve turned that into a cash cow that really we work off customers’ money, and that throws off great cash for us that we can then use to grow our high margin, high growth project product lines, E-Infrastructure and at one time it was residential. When we look at it, great solid business today.

In addition, what we’ve been able to do is start shifting those assets towards E-Infrastructure. I’ll give you 2 perfect examples. We started with a pilot with Meta, as a matter of fact, who asked us to go to the upper Northwest, Pacific Northwest. We used the yellow iron and assets out of our highway business in Utah with our project management teams and stuff out of Atlanta. They executed at a project levels. They’ve got 5 or 6 projects out of that between the customers and the GCs with their ability to execute. We continue to shift assets there. We’ve talked about closing down our low bid, heavy highway business in Texas. We’re coming into the final innings of that.

What we’ve been able to do is we’ve started shifting their underground assets to E-Infrastructure. Now we’re helping with underground utilities and some of the underground duct bank work by leveraging those assets and converting them into E-Infrastructure. We’ve taken lemons, and we’re making lemonade out of it. The lemonade keeps getting better and better. There’s not really, one, a reason for us to do anything different with Transportation Solutions. Two, it would be really hard even if we wanted to, because it’s now so intertwined with our E-Infrastructure business. It’s not an easy thing you can break out, okay? That’s where we are with that. Building Solutions. You know, it’s been a great business for us. It’s been a great cash cow business for us. We’ll continue to look for opportunities to grow it.

We look at everything every day. Is it or is it not a strategic fit for us? Right now, we believe it’s still got long term, great long-term growth potential. We’re in the best three markets in the U.S. We have no different plans for Building Solutions, but to grow it out as we move forward.

Manish, Analyst, Camport: Thank you. Thank you, Joe, for that clarity.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: All right. Thank you. Your next question comes from Louie with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Louie DiPalma, Analyst, William Blair: Good morning, Joe, Nick, and Noel. Following up, is your large semi fab project for your Petillo division? Secondly, what is the timing for the expansions into the Northwest and the Midwest? I think you just referenced how you were doing a trial project with Meta in the Northwest, has that already started? Thanks.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Let’s talk about the semiconductor fab. It is being done in the Northeast, and it is being done by a union operation. That would be Petillo, that’s doing that. That’s an exciting project for us. It’s right in our backyard. It should be a great project. The Pacific Northwest, Louie, I confused everyone. That’s one we did, we started 2 years ago. That was our foray into kind of transitioning RLW into E-Infrastructure site development. We’ve got multiple through there. What we’re seeing is we believe based on conversations with our customers, in 2027, 2028, there will be some nice projects coming out in the Pacific Northwest.

Believe it or not, the Pacific Northwest and Western Texas are a lot closer than people think. Our Salt Lake City office to our West Texas job is ±200 miles difference than us driving from Houston, right? Texas is a pretty big state. It goes pretty far west. We’re using those resources to come further east as well. We believe in 2027, 2028 is going to be the start of some really nice projects in the Pacific Northwest. You’ll see us adding capacity and capabilities in that area over the next 6 to 12 months. We’ll be able to talk more about that probably in the second or third quarter.

Louie DiPalma, Analyst, William Blair: Great. Thanks, everyone.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Julio with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Julio, Analyst, Jefferies: Hey, thanks for taking a quick follow-up here. You guided to legacy business E-Infrastructure growth of 60% for 2026. I think that implies some moderation of the year-over-year growth rates above the 102% of this quarter. That makes sense. Just given the larger order intake this quarter, which I assume has some timing variability, how would you have us think about the year-over-year legacy growth rates expected in the E-Infrastructure over the remaining three quarters of the year to get to that 60%? Thanks.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: I haven’t laid it out in that level of detail. The question around the big wins and all that, it’s timing, right? It’s when do these kick off? When do they start? How fast do they go? If we get great weather through the rest of the year and projects kick off earlier, we’ll be really happy, and we’ll beat those numbers. There’s just a lot of variables left from now till the rest of the year. Julio, we can lay that out exactly for you, and talk more about what that does quarter by quarter. I just don’t have that.

Julio, Analyst, Jefferies: All good. Worth a shot. Thank you.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back over to Joe Cutillo. Please go ahead.

Joe Cutillo, Chief Executive Officer, Sterling Infrastructure: Thank you, Melissa. I wanna thank everybody again for joining today’s call. We’re off to a great start. We’re gonna have an amazing year. If you have any follow-up questions or wanna schedule further calls, feel free to contact Noel Dilts. Her contact information is in the press release. Hope everybody has a great day. Again, I thank you very much.

Melissa, Conference Call Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.