FTI Consulting, Inc. Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-03-02 12:54:13.0

Tags: R&D, Call Transcript, Earnings, Pricing Strategy, FTI Consulting Inc., Success Fee, Research & Development, Pricing, Data Management, Marketing Research, Business Operations, Marketing, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first call comes from Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank.

Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank

Could you maybe break out the difference in tech between sort of pricing and investment on the margin?

Dennis Shaughnessy

You mean the impact of pricing costs into margins, I'd say the majority would be pricing and a significant minority would be R&D spend.

Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank

Then R&D spend is not going where, I think you've gone through some investments.

Dennis Shaughnessy

Yeah, we were very happy to announce at the Legal Tech the successful integration of the Attenix Ringtail platforms and we are continuing that spend rate in order to add what we think will be dramatic increases to the efficiencies of that new platform over the next 12 months.

Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank

In the fourth quarter, was there any significant success fees in your corp restructuring practice or what that mainly just ongoing business.

Dennis Shaughnessy

There were success fees, but business as usual.

Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank

I know there was one high profile where the creditors pushed back on some success fees in retail you're trying to get. Is there any issues with getting success fees in the cycle?

Dennis Shaughnessy

Not so far.

Operator

Your next question comes from James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus.

James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus

As a follow up to the tech margin question, you had talked about getting back to the low 30% margins over time, and you had also talked about some momentum with some recent wins in cases. Do I assume those revenues do come on line, that we would have more natural margin expansion despite the pricing pressure and the continued spend on R&D?

Dennis Shaughnessy

We will see margins move back up even though we have made a conscious decision to continue the spend rate of R&D. As Jack had enumerated, we are being brought into very large, complex challenges with a global reach and the pricing pressure tends to abate the more complex the issues, and a lot of the ones you've either been reading about or heard about are extremely complex, require very sophisticated data management collection and analysis. So we would definitely expect to see some margin expansion, especially in the second half.

James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus

And some of these larger cases that you've won recently, you talked about Maddoff and Dryer, are they flowing through multiple segments within the company?

 

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