Profits at Jacobs Engineering, Dallas, fell 3% for the fiscal year ended Oct. 1 as revenue rose by proportionally the same amount, the company said Tuesday morning in its latest earnings release.
Net earnings for the year were about $477 million, or $3.20 a share, down from more than $490 million, or $3.71 a year ago, the company wrote in its latest 10-K filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Revenue for the year rose to a little more than $14 billion, compared with a little more than $13.5 billion for the 2020 fiscal year.
Excluding discontinued operations, however, the earnings picture looked much better, with earnings from continuing operations up about 30% to $467 million from some $354 million. On a per-share basis, earnings from continuing operations rose to $3.12 from $2.69.
Jacobs is a team member at numerous Department of Energy defense nuclear sites, including the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada National Security Site and the Office of Environmental Management’s Idaho Site. Jacobs acquired CH2M in 2017 and the John Wood Group of the U.K. in 2020.
Also in the 2021 fiscal year, Jacobs booked a $38.5 million charge on the nationalization of the United Kingdom’s nuclear weapons complex earlier this year.
The company has a 24.5% stake in AWE Management Ltd., an industry team including Jacobs Engineering, Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Britain’s Serco Group that until July managed the U.K.’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE).
In its latest 10-K, Jacobs said the Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense in November 2020 “unexpectedly announced plans to change its current operating agreements with AWE that would result in the early termination” of AWE Management contract. The U.K. government said in that announcement that it had been weighing nationalization for about a year.
The U.K. awarded AWE Management’s contract in 1999 and could have kept the pact in place into 2024.