Venk Nathamuni
Chief Financial Officer at Jacobs Solutions
Thank you, Bob. Let me begin by summarizing a few of the financial highlights on Slide 7, and I'll then provide additional context and detail around our strong quarterly performance.
First quarter gross revenue grew 4% year-over-year and adjusted net revenue, which excludes the impact of pass-through revenue grew by 5% year-over-year. Q1 adjusted EBITDA was $282 million, growing 24% year-over-year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin during Q1 came in strong at 13.5%, which is an increase of approximately 200 basis-points year-over-year.
First-quarter adjusted EPS was $1.33, an 8% decrease versus the previous year, primarily due to an unfavorable tax comparison. As Bob mentioned in his prepared remarks, last year, we benefited from a discrete tax item that did not recur in 2025. Please also note GAAP EPS was impacted by a $145 million unrealized pre-tax loss associated with the mark-to-market adjustment of our investment in, which had no impact on adjusted EPS.
Finally, consolidated backlog was up approximately 19% year-over-year and remains near-record levels at $21.8 billion. Q1 book-to-bill of 1.0x was solid. Our trailing 12-month revenue book-to-bill ratio was 1.3 times with gross profit and backlog increasing 12% year-over-year during Q1, highlighting our strong trailing 12-month sales performance. Going-forward, we will focus our attention on trailing 12-month performance in our book-to-bill ratios as we believe this is a better indicator of future growth.
Regarding our performance by end-market in infrastructure and advanced facilities, let's turn to Slide number 8. Demand for our water and environmental services remains strong across all major geographies with adjusted net revenue increasing 11% compared to the same quarter last year. This momentum is expected to continue beyond fiscal '25 and is supported by our robust backlog and pipeline. We grew adjusted net revenue in our life sciences and advanced manufacturing end-market by over 1% in Q1 as life Sciences trend was largely offset by softness in advanced manufacturing. We expect life sciences growth to remain robust for the foreseeable future as we continue to ramp on new projects.
Additionally, we've seen a significant uptick in our life sciences pipeline. On the advanced manufacturing side, we expect growth to improve in the second-half of the year as new projects start to ramp. This combination leads us to forecast similar growth in Q2 relative to-Q1, followed by a pickup in the second-half of the year.
In Critical Infrastructure, adjusted net revenue increased 5% year-over-year with North-America outpacing total growth for the end-market. We are pleased with the sequential improvement in Critical infrastructure growth and our backlog and pipeline, particularly in transportation, underpin an encouraging outlook.
Moving on to Slide number nine, I will provide a quick overview of our segment financials. In Q1, infrastructure and Advanced facilities operating profit increased by 26% in total and 25% on a constant-currency basis versus last year. PA Consulting results reflect roughly flat revenue performance year-on-year, but very good execution on the bottom-line. Q1 operating profit increased 22.6% year-over-year and 19.6% on a constant-currency basis. We remain encouraged by recent bookings and anticipate revenue growth for PA Consulting will improve in fiscal '25 as the year progresses.
Moving on to Slide number 10, we provide an overview of cash generation and balance sheet data. For Q1, free-cash flow was healthy at $97 million and we repurchased $202 million in shares, a sequential increase of $145 million. This combination resulted in our net leverage ratio remaining relatively flat at 1.1 times on an LTM adjusted EBITDA basis as of Q1. I'd note this remains below the midpoint of our 1.0 times to 1.5x net leverage target.
As we look-ahead, we expect free-cash flow for the full-year to be similar to our previous expectation, but with a more back-half weighted cadence. This is a function of higher cash tax payments in Q1 and Q2, which we expect to step-down in Q3. Our balance sheet strength will enable continued investment in the business as well as returns to shareholders via share repurchases and long-term dividend growth. At the end of Q1, we had $271 million in remaining authorization.
Notably, we're pleased that our Board of Directors just approved a new $1.5 billion share repurchase authorization, which is the largest in company history. Our commitment to return capital to shareholders is evidenced by our $0.32 per share dividend, representing 10% year-over-year growth as well as our meaningful increase in share repurchase activity in the first-quarter. We plan to continue repurchasing our shares at what we consider to be an aggressive pace in Q2.
Additionally, in-line with my comments from last quarter, we continue to expect to disposition our stake in Momentum in the first-half of calendar '25, further aiding our financial position.
Finally, please turn to Slide 11. We reiterate our fiscal '25 outlook for adjusted net revenue to grow mid to-high single-digits year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA margin to range from 13.8% to 14% and reported free-cash flow conversion to be more than 100%. We are raising our adjusted EPS guidance range from $5.80 to $6.20 to a new range of $5.85 to $6.20 to reflect good first-quarter performance as well as our lower share count expectations. The midpoint of our guidance range for adjusted EPS would indicate over 14% growth year-over-year and the midpoint of our guidance range for adjusted EBITDA indicates approximately 15% growth year-over-year, highlighting our continued positive outlook for the business this year.
To assist with your modeling, I will quickly highlight a few items related to fiscal '25. We anticipate revenue will rise sequentially through year-end with a more pronounced step-up between Q2 and Q3. Regarding margins, we ended-up seeing a greater-than-expected benefit from the Christmas holiday timing that shifted some profitability forward. As a result, we now anticipate Q2's adjusted EBITDA margin to be below that of Q1. However, we continue to have good line-of-sight to reaching our 13.8% to 14% margin guidance for the full-year and expect to see a nice step-up in margins as we head into the second-half of the year.
Lastly, we are monitoring FX movement, particularly conversion rates for the British pound. We took a somewhat conservative view toward FX in our original forecast and as a result, we aren't seeing a significant incremental headwind today. However, should the dollar strengthen from here, that would have an adverse translation effect on revenue and operating income.
In summary, we continue to be excited about the future of Jacobs and expect fiscal '25 to be a strong foundation on which we can build.
With that, I'll turn the call-back over to Bob.
