NOC
#Sure.
I commented a little bit on that earlier in terms of some of the burn-down of advances that we've seen on a couple international programs, and also, I think as we've had a few contractual delays that have impacted the timing of cash flows and the working capital as well, as I mentioned, the DFAR clause in terms of limitation on performance based payments.
Largely I don't think we see anything in there other than timing for the most part.
If you look at our historical timing of cash flows, we're much stronger in the fourth quarter, just in terms of how our business flows through the year.
We're much stronger in terms of in-flows in the fourth quarter.
And we expect that to be a continued trend this year.
We'll have a strong finish to the year and we're confident that we'll be within our range from a free cash flow perspective.
That cash flow will come out of those receivables and drive the working capital down.
So I think at the end of the year you'll see that we're at a level of working capital that's about, more consistent, with where we normally are by year-end and then we'll continue to focus on this as we move forward.
We are working with our customer on the impact of the DFAR clause on working capital and how we manage that going forward.
I think they recognize that that's important to both parties in terms of an appropriate level of cash flow for the type of contract and for the cost profile that's incurred on that contract.
So no issues in terms of overall collectability or any significant change in our ability to manage the working capital.
I think we've just got to work through these couple things and we'll see our cash flows start to increase as we grow the business as we look forward.
<UNK>, I'll just ---+ I'll say that in terms of backlog, we did make a change in terms of our quarterly disclosure of it this year, and I wouldn't be able to say much more than the trend data that we've got in the document.
Both AS and MS are up from the year-end and TS, we disclosed, was down slightly from last year.
And largely what I'll tell you is that the quarterly impact of awards we view as kind of, sure, it has some lumpiness to it, and looking at this over the longer term we think is the more appropriate way to think about awards.
And at year-end we'll endeavor to provide the level of backlog detail that you all will be looking for and I think that's probably the most information I can give you at this point in time.
I would say that we undertook an effort to buy back 25% of the outstanding shares of the Company in 2013.
We worked that through the system through the fourth quarter of last year and that resulted in a significant amount of capital deployed in excess of free cash flow.
I wouldn't necessarily expect that to continue.
As you look forward, we would expect to be essentially deploying cash in a manner that says, look, we're going to invest in the businesses, as <UNK> mentioned.
We're investing higher in terms of CapEx.
We pay a competitive dividend.
You saw we increased our dividend again in May.
And then excess cash we tend to deploy through share repurchases.
We take a pretty consistent approach to share repurchase.
We're not speculative.
We set a plan and we go after it.
In terms of maybe what you're seeing is we finished the 25% repurchase in the fourth quarter of last year.
We have a little bit of a slower first part of the year this year in terms of cash generation, so we spend a little bit more than 100%, but as we generate the cash in the fourth quarter, I think you'll start to see that normalize a bit.
Robin, I think that's all the time we have for right now, so I'm going to turn it over to <UNK> for final comments.
All right.
Thanks <UNK>.
Let me wrap up by thanking our team.
We are just so fortunate to have an amazing group of people across our Company who are focused on performing for our customers and our shareholders, and I sincerely appreciate all that they're doing.
Thanks to everyone for joining us on our call today and thanks for your continuing interest in our Company.
