ARC had its 4Q 2013 earnings call on Feb. 25. To read the entire transcript, click here.
Here are some key excerpts:
David Stickney, VP of Corporate Communications:
Overall Success
"The company reported annual revenue for 2013 a $407.2 million, a year-over-year increase of $1.1 million representing annual growth for ARC for the first time in five years. The increase was driven primarily by sales in on-site services and color. Our annual gross margin was 33% compared to 30.4% in 2012."
Suri Suriyakumar, CEO:
FMs
"Our management services ... comprises 30% of our overall sales and we are now the largest provider in the AEC space."
Digital Document Access
"We’re also introducing new technology to enhance the consumption of data on the job site. We are doing this, we’re doing things like providing hyperlink digital drawing sets as well as supplying large touch screens to view and markup two dimensional plans and three dimensional BIM models."
Disruption from Polar Vortex
"In terms of looking ahead we see construction activity gaining some speed in the foreseeable future but our relatively optimistic views for 2014 has been tempered by weather related events in January and February. Unfortunately in the early part of the year impacted businesses of all kinds and in every area of the country. The business closures indeed the closures of whole cities has had an impact on our business like any other. Our estimate so far is that we have lost more than $2 million due to the temporary closures of our service centers and of our customer’s officers in the East Coast in the South and in the Midwest."
John Toth, CFO:
Model Retention Policy for AEC Firms
"We have just put the finishing touches on a proprietary document that is the model retention policy, document retention policy for the AEC industry. We hired experts, we did a survey of our customers, we collected the data and we assembled it into a 50 page document that is ours and it outlines how companies should save documents, where they should save them, for how long, by type, helps them organize and we’re just releasing this document next week to some of our select customers to help them sort through the mountains of data that they have and we look forward to that release and it's really beginning to set us up as an expert in archiving almost as a consultant. So we’re very excited about the progress we’re going to make this year."