ManTech keeps $847M Army vehicle contract

ManTech International has kept the largest recompete in its portfolio by winning a potential five-year, $847 million task order to support the Army’s fleet of Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.

This award extends ManTech’s 14 years of operational, engineering and logistics services on MRAP vehicles that have been a key component of Army operations in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. ManTech will help sustain almost 25,000 MRAPs around the world under the Vehicle Engineering, Maintenance and Operations Support order.

The win keeps ManTech on course in its bounce back from the defense spending downturn over this decade so far. That turnaround comes off investments made over the last three years in people, processes and service offerings, ManTech executive Dan Keefe told me.

“These are contracts of scale and especially in the Army, you don’t see contracts of that scale so it was certainly competitive,” said Dan Keefe, president and chief operating officer of ManTech’s mission solutions and services group.

Work for the MRAP contract also includes an enterprise IT component, which ManTech has prioritized for growth and has “won a lot of work in,” Keefe said. The IT angle covers supply chain management functions that include information on items such as failure rates and procurement cost, he said.

The MRAP award follows confirmation of ManTech’s win of a potential 10-year, $817 million State Department contract for physical and electronic security services to protect personnel at 275 sites worldwide.

That State Department award helped ManTech book $1.9 billion in third quarter awards for a 4.5 book-to-bill ratio, both of which are the second-best quarterly figures on both fronts in ManTech’s 49-year history.

Last awarded in 2012, the Army took a different approach this time around for the MRAP contract and awarded it through the General Services Administration’s OASIS professional services vehicle. GSA’s FEDSIM office will manage the effort.

The predecessor MRAP contract contributed nearly $110 million in annual revenue to ManTech, analysts at Cowen and Company said in a research note to investors. ManTech is forecasting nearly 7.5-percent sales growth for this year to $1.72 billion, which should get an assist from the recompeted MRAP contract.

“This is a competitive industry, there’s no question about that and a lot of good companies that are out there so we have to sustain what we’re doing right now and (we’re) working hard to do that,” Keefe said.

Quarterly revenue has increased year-over-year for five consecutive quarters for ManTech and last year’s sales growth broke a four-year streak of declines. ManTech’s revenue shrunk by half between 2012 and 2016 amid lower defense spending because of force reductions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

ManTech’s stock traded up between 1 percent and 2 percent Thursday morning. Its shares have climbed 22.1 percent since the start of 2017.