CSRA Wins Deal Worth $115M, Domain Expertise Key Catalyst

CSRA Inc.’s (NYSE:CSRA) subsidiary, SRA International, recently won a contract worth approximately $115 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Environmental Information (OEI).

CSRA is the largest pure play government IT service provider. Almost 90% of the company’s revenues come from sales to the U.S. federal government, either as a prime contractor or subcontractor. The contract win reflects strong preference for the company’s IT services by federal departments.

Notably, CSRA provides support to EPA through more than 20 prime mission and IT contracts and independent task orders, including recent contracts award to support EPA's High Performance Computing ($58 million over five years) and Infrastructure ($266 million over five years).

Frequent Contract Wins: Key Catalyst

Recently, the company announced that the U.S. Navy has permitted it to conduct Field Test 1 of the Navy's new integrated pay and personnel system as part of the Manpower, Personnel, Training and Education (MPT&E) transformation efforts.

The trial will conducted on a remote accessed Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Services (AWS) environment and will be tested against appropriate security protocols. Notably, CSRA will be the first company in the industry to conduct a cloud-based test for the U.S. Navy.

Moreover, CSRA recently became the first systems integrators to add Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure products and services under General Services Administration (GSA) IT Schedule 70. Further, the company’s CSRA LLC division recently won a $59-million task order from the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). The award supports NAVSEA’s Research and Systems Engineering Directorate (SEA 05).

We note that CSRA’s deep domain knowledge and expertise in next-generation IT services is helping it to win new federal contracts on a frequent basis. Moreover, partnerships with the likes of ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW) , Microsoft and Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) have expanded the company’s product portfolio.

At the end of first-quarter fiscal 2018, the backlog of signed business orders was $15.6 billion, of which $2.5 billion was funded. Moreover, CSRA stated that its new business win rate has been 39% over the trailing 12 months. Re-compete win rate over the last year was 80%.

Improving Spending to Help Shares Rebound

Notably, CSRA has lost 2% year to date, as compared with the 21% gain of the industry it belongs to.

The underperformance can be attributed to near-term uncertainty over the renewal of Greenway contract and delay in the TSA contract. Moreover, lower recompete win rate is a concern in our view.

Management believes that revenue visibility has improved since the end of the fourth-quarter fiscal 2017. CSRA believes that the passing of the Modernizing Government Technology Act, which establishes a government-wide technology modernization fund worth $500 million, indicates a favorable spending environment.

We believe that improving federal spending environment along with frequent contract wins will help CSRA’s shares rebound, going ahead.

Currently, CSRA carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 (Strong Buy) Rank stocks here.

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