Granite continues buying spree as backlog hits $6.1B
Granite Construction continued paving a profitable path in the second quarter while racking up a record amount of backlog and buying two aggregate suppliers.
The Watsonville, California-based road builder, materials supplier and infrastructure firm purchased Hattiesburg, Mississippi-based Warren Paving and Arroyo Grande, California-headquartered Papich Construction for a combined price of $710 million.
Granite's continued investment in material suppliers reflects the firm's bullishness on both public and private infrastructure work, along with the booming data center market. Those facilities, along with computer chips and racks of servers, need roads and parking lots to access them as well.
Two aggregate purchases
Warren Paving, which owns a quarry, 11 aggregate yards and three asphalt plants along with 170 owned and leased barges on the Mississippi River system, will expand Granite's materials business in the Southeast, while building on its buying spree in the region.
In late 2023, Granite scooped up Lehman-Roberts and Memphis Stone & Gravel, both of Memphis, for a combined $278 million. Then last year, it acquired Brookhaven, Mississippi-based aggregate supplier Dickerson & Bowen.
On an earnings call Aug. 7 to discuss the firm's second-quarter results, CEO Kyle Larkin said Warren Paving will complement those previous purchases.
'Warren Paving's logistics expertise should allow us to supply materials to certain Lehman-Roberts and Dickerson & Bowen asphalt plants and positions us to expand the distribution network as we continue to grow our Southeast platform investment,' Larkin said on the call.
He also highlighted opportunities to supply data center jobsites in the region, which has been attractive to owners looking for cheap land, plentiful power and water and a robust labor pool.
'We believe private investment will ramp up in the region, whether through data centers or other large commercial developments.'
In California, Papich will expand Granite's operations along the state's Central Coast and Valley, an area where it currently has less of a presence. 'It's complementary to our current footprint,' Larkin said.
The addition of the two businesses will add approximately $425 million to Granite's revenue annually, the company said. It raised its revenue guidance for 2025 accordingly to between $4.35 billion and $4.55 billion and anticipates approximately $150 million in revenue from the units in the remainder of the year.
By the numbers
The deal was the highlight of a quarter that also saw Granite grow its backlog — which the company calls Committed or Awarded Projects — to $6.1 billion, a company high. That's $488 million more, or 9% higher, than a year ago.
Revenue of $1.13 billion increased 4% from $1.08 billion a year ago. The company also grew profits to $71.7 million, nearly doubling the $36.9 million of net income it reported for 2024's second quarter.
Larkin attributed the higher revenue, backlog and profits to a robust bidding and funding environment, particularly in the company's core infrastructure markets, as well as more efficient operations and integration within the company.
'In California and across our footprint, we continue to see a healthy list of project bidding opportunities in both the public and private markets,' Larkin said. He also said money from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed in 2021, hasn't reached its apex, which he expects to come in 2026 or 2027.
'IIJA funding continues to be strong,' Larkin said. 'I think that's pretty universal in all the markets that we're in. And just as a reminder, the spending to date on the IIJA is still less than 50%. And so we haven't seen, in our opinion, that peak yet.'
Recommended Reading
Granite JV lands $158M missile defense project
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
These Gen Z and millennial founders dropped out of college, took $200,000 from Peter Thiel, and have now built companies worth over $100 billion
Peter Thiel's fellowship is offering young entrepreneurs $200,000 to skip or leave college and build their own billion-dollar startups. The program launched in 2011 has since generated more than $100 billion in business value, with notable alumni including Figma CEO Dylan Field and Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo. While Gen Z questions the value of a college degree amid rising loans and limiting job opportunities, Thiel and his fellows agree that true education comes from real-world experiences rather than a classroom. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel will give you $200,000. He only asks that you have a great idea and fully commit to it—and the $26 billion tech entrepreneur thinks the only way for young, aspiring entrepreneurs to go all-in is by dropping out of college. Since 2011, the Thiel Fellowship has been equipping young people with money and an influential business network. So far, the program's fellows have founded over 11 unicorns with a combined worth of over $100 billion. While not every college drop-out entering the program has been successful, it's launched the likes of Ethereum and Plaid into industry stardom. Figma cofounder Dylan Field and Scale AI creator Lucy Guo—the youngest self-made female billionaire—are just two of the influential names that got their start from the Thiel Fellowship. It may seem daunting for young professionals to ditch their Ivy League schools after being promised six-figure salaries after graduation. But Thiel actually created the program out of a deep cynicism toward the traditional education system for 20-somethings, which he has often called a 'corrupt institution.' 'Higher education is the worst institution we have,' Thiel said in the release of this year's batch of entrepreneurs. 'For these exceptional fellows, we are providing an alternative.' These ex-fellows prove that dropping out can result in serious success. Dylan Field, cofounder and CEO of $40 billion company Figma Sitting in a Brown University dorm room just a decade ago, then-19-year-old Dylan Field conceived Figma, a company offering a collaborative design tool that now rivals Adobe. However, things didn't get off the ground until he dropped out of the prestigious college after less than two years in order to receive a Thiel fellowship. His mother told CNBC in 2012 that she 'wasn't thrilled about it,' concerned about the long-term impact of not having a college degree on his future career prospects. But after Figma's breakout success, she shouldn't be so worried anymore. Last month, Figma's triumphant IPO made Field a billionaire; He went from being a college-dropout with just $100,000 in his pocket from the fellowship to amassing a net worth now standing at about $5 billion. Aside from an eye-popping net worth, Field said that the fellowship gave him something far more valuable than what a college degree would provide—uninterrupted time to focus entirely on building his idea. With time and mentorship, they send you off: 'Go build something amazing,' Field said in that same 2012 interview. And he did. 'Here was this 19-year-old, who had a lot of clarity about what he wanted to do—democratize the world of design, and provide tools to everyone,' Danny Rimer, an early Figma investor, told Fortune last month. Lucy Guo, cofounder of $29 billion tech company Scale AI Before Lucy Guo became the youngest female self-made billionaire, she was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon unhappy with what she was learning at school. Guo told Fortune that, while at the Pennsylvania college, she felt days-long coding competitions taught her more than the professors did. So she dropped out in 2014 and soon after came up with the idea for Scale AI—a data labelling startup— with her cofounder, Alexandr Wang, whom she met while working at Quora. Meta recently acquired the company in a $14 billion deal that valued the company at over $29 billion. Guo left the company in 2016, and her 5% stake made her the youngest self-made female billionaire, dethroning record-holder Taylor Swift. Looking back on her success, she called the Thiel Fellowship the best thing that has ever happened to her. 'You're the average of the five people you hang around the most, and the Thiel Fellowship surrounds you with ambitious, smart people that are all a little crazy.' Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha, cofounders of $2 billion AI company Mercor One of the biggest AI successes bolstered by the Thiel fellowship is Mercor, an AI hiring platform that is attempting to transform the candidate-matching process. The business ballooned to a $2 billion valuation in February of this year, due to big demand for AI-powered recruitment. All three members of the cofounding team—Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha—were recipients of the billionaire's fellowship funding. As AI advances at dizzying speed, the founders felt it was unwise to stick it out through four years of college and delay building their startup. Midha, cofounder and COO of Mercor, told The New York Times that he felt both an 'extreme urgency' and 'existential dread' about letting the AI boom pass by him. Adarsh Hiremath, cofounder and CTO of the AI business, also said he was receiving diminished returns from the Harvard University experience after his first year at the Ivy League. Instead, he chose to take the fellowship opportunity to 'give it [his] all.' Massive student loans and lack of job opportunities are diminishing college returns Silicon Valley has always idolized the high-achieving college dropout, from Mark Zuckerberg to Larry Ellison. The fellowship is responsible for the billions in business value its alums have created. Thiel's blessing gives a startup founder credibility that college just can't. Beyond the entrepreneurial sphere, Gen Z has been grappling with the diminishing returns of a degree, and are looking for alternative ways to establish a career. The price of U.S. college tuition has increased to an average of $38,270 a year, making the cost unmanageable for the nearly half of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck. Plus, for some, the career edge may be gone; for men with a degree, the unemployment rate is the same as it is for men who did not attend college. About 38% of graduates feel like their student loans have limited their career growth more than their diploma has accelerated it, according to a recent survey conducted by Indeed. Thiel has echoed that sentiment, saying at the inception of his program that college has become a distraction 'because young people coming out of college are saddled with student loans, which start tracking them into careers that pay well but are ultimately not going to help our country.' This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
UnitedHealth Group shares climb as Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway discloses stake in the insurer
Shares of UnitedHealth Group are surging before the market open Friday as Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it recently purchased shares of the beleaguered insurer. Berkshire Hathaway bought around 5 million shares of UnitedHealth last quarter, according to a regulatory filing. The stake was valued at about $1.57 billion. Buffett plans to retire as CEO at the end of the year after six decades of building Berkshire Hathaway. Many investors comb through Berkshire's filings every quarter because they like to follow Buffett's moves. The filing doesn't make clear who at Berkshire handled the investment. Besides Buffett, Ted Weschler and Todd Combs also pick stocks, but they generally handle smaller portfolios and Combs also serves as Geico's CEO. Besides stocks, Berkshire owns dozens of companies in a variety of industries including Geico insurance, BNSF railroad, several major utilities and an assortment of manufacturing and retail companies. The Omaha, Nebraska-based company's holdings include many well-known brands like See's Candy and Dairy Queen. UnitedHealth has been dealing with a series of difficulties. Last month the company said that it was cooperating with federal criminal and civil investigations involving its market-leading Medicare business. The health care giant said at the time that it had contacted the Department of Justice after reviewing media reports about investigations into certain elements of its business. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal said federal officials had launched a civil fraud investigation into how the company records diagnoses that lead to extra payments for its Medicare Advantage, or MA, plans. Those are privately run versions of the government's Medicare coverage program mostly for people ages 65 and over. The company's UnitedHealthcare business covers more than 8 million people as the nation's largest provider of Medicare Advantage plans. The business has been under pressure in recent quarters due to rising care use and rate cuts. The Journal said in February, citing anonymous sources, that the probe focused on billing practices in recent months. The paper has since said that a federal criminal health care-fraud unit was investigating how the company used doctors and nurses to gather diagnoses that bolster payments. UnitedHealth Group Inc. runs one of the nation's largest health insurance and pharmacy benefits management businesses. It also operates a growing Optum business that provides care and technology support. UnitedHealth's stock has mostly shed value since December, when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in midtown Manhattan on his way to the company's annual investor meeting. A suspect, Luigi Mangione, has been charged in connection with the shooting. In April, shares plunged some more after the company cut its forecast due to a spike in health care use. A month later, former CEO Andrew Witty resigned, and the company withdrew its forecast entirely, saying that medical costs from new Medicare Advantage members were higher than expected. UnitedHealth's stock jumped more than 12% in premarket trading on Friday. Still, the stock has lost roughly half its value in the past year. Chapman writes for the Associated Press.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
SDSU named one of Princeton Review's ‘Best Colleges' — and among top ‘green' campuses
SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — San Diego State University is once again making national headlines — this time for its academic strength, student life, and sustainability efforts. The university has been named to 'The Princeton Review's' 2026 list of the Best 391 Colleges, and once again earned a spot among the Top 50 Green Colleges. The recognition places SDSU among the top 15% of four-year colleges in the United States, out of nearly 2,400 evaluated. The university was also featured on 'The Princeton Review's' Best West list, which highlights standout colleges across seven U.S. regions. High marks in key categories According to the report, SDSU earned top-tier scores across several key categories (on a scale of 60 to 99), including: Professor Aaccessibility: 90 Green initiatives: 97 Quality of life: 89 Financial aid: 89 Admissions selectivity: 88 Fire safety: 96 These scores are based on a combination of institutional data and student feedback, with students offering insights into their academic and social experiences on campus. More information on how these scores are determined can be found here. USS Sterett returns to San Diego after 9-month deployment Sustainability in the spotlight For the second consecutive year, SDSU claimed the No. 42 spot on 'The Princeton Review's' Top 50 Green Colleges list, making it the only California State University campus to appear in the ranking. The sustainability recognition reflects SDSU's commitment to environmental practices, sustainability education, and overall campus livability. The school's impressive 'green' score of 97 is based on both student surveys and data provided by the university. Support for student success In addition to academic accolades, 'The Princeton Review' highlighted SDSU's career development resources, including Handshake, a job and internship platform, and the Aztec Mentor Program, which pairs upper-level students with professional mentors from the SDSU alumni network. 'SDSU has outstanding academic programs, and the feedback we received about SDSU from its students was very impressive,' said Rob Franek, Editor-in-Chief of 'The Princeton Review.' 'We are delighted to name SDSU one of our Best Colleges for 2026.' With strong momentum across academics, research and sustainability, SDSU continues to raise its profile as one of California's most dynamic public universities. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
