CRA at Noble Capital Markets: Strategic Growth and Challenges

On Wednesday, 08 October 2025, Charles River Associates (NASDAQ:CRAI) presented at the Noble Capital Markets Emerging Growth Virtual Investor Conference. Celebrating its 60th anniversary, CRA highlighted its substantial growth from a $22 stock price to over $190, while emphasizing its strategic focus on economics and regulation. The company showcased strong revenue growth and a commitment to shareholder returns, but also acknowledged challenges in a competitive environment.

Key Takeaways

• CRA has grown its stock price nearly tenfold over the past decade.
• The company maintains an 8% revenue growth rate, aligning with its 2025 guidance.
• CRA focuses on returning half of its adjusted cash flows to shareholders through stock repurchases.
• The company is open to inorganic growth, seeking opportunities that add depth to its portfolio.
• CRA’s talent acquisition strategy is highly selective, with low turnover among top contributors.

Financial Results

• Revenue Growth: CRA has consistently expanded its revenue by approximately 8% annually over the past five years. The firm aims to maintain this trajectory, aligning with its 2025 revenue guidance.
• Capital Allocation: CRA returns about half of its adjusted cash flows to shareholders, predominantly through stock repurchases. Dividends have more than tripled since 2016, reaching $0.49 per share in 2025.
• Adjusted EBITDA: The company emphasizes adjusted EBITDA, which includes non-cash amortization of forgivable loans, as a key profitability metric.
• Shares Outstanding: Over the past five years, CRA has reduced its share count by 13% at an average price of $88, with a 30% reduction over the past twelve years.

Operational Updates

• Talent Acquisition: CRA invests significantly in talent, spending $185 million to achieve a $230 million revenue expansion. The firm is highly selective, accepting less than 2% of applicants, and boasts low voluntary turnover among top revenue generators.
• Inorganic Growth: The company is open to investments across its portfolio and geographies, focusing on adding depth rather than breadth.
• Capital Expenditure: Capital expenditure remains in the mid-single-digit range, supporting strategic growth initiatives.

Future Outlook

• Guidance: CRA aims to sustain its revenue growth and shareholder returns in the second half of the year, contingent on its guidance holding true.
• Talent Investments: The company is prepared to invest in talent across any part of its portfolio or geography, provided it enhances depth.

Q&A Highlights

• Inorganic Growth: CRA is actively seeking opportunities for investment in practice areas and geographies, with a robust talent pipeline.
• Impact of External Factors: The company monitors regulatory, macro, and sector uncertainties, including H-1B visa orders, which are considered secondary impacts.
• Nvidia Investments: Recent Nvidia investments may lead to increased antitrust and competition work, with CRA’s energy practice involved in data center negotiations.
• Competitive Environment: CRA has not observed new entrants in its market space.
• M&A Appetite: The company maintains a healthy pipeline and sees numerous opportunities for mergers and acquisitions.

In conclusion, CRA’s presentation at the Noble Capital Markets conference underscores its strategic growth and resilience in a competitive market. Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Noble Capital Markets Emerging Growth Virtual Investor Conference:

Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Noble Capital Markets: Morning and welcome to the Noble Capital Markets Virtual Equity Conference. I’m Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Noble Capital Markets. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing CRA International, Inc., also known as Charles River Associates. Following the presentation, we will have some time for Q&A. Charles River Associates is a leading global consulting firm that offers economic, financial, and strategic expertise to major law firms, corporations, accounting firms, and governments around the world. With us today from CRA is Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer. The floor is yours, Paul.

Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer, CRA International, Inc.: Great, thank you, Joe. I apologize, everyone, for keeping you waiting for a couple of minutes. Surprise, surprise, my Zoom was not cooperating this morning. I will try to get us back on schedule. Back in June, I had the honor to ring the bell on behalf of CRA, celebrating our 60th birthday. It’s not the first time we’ve had an opportunity to ring the bell over at NASDAQ. We did that at year 50. What I thought was an interesting foundation for today’s call, right before, right after you ring the bell, the folks at NASDAQ ask you, "Clap like crazy, clap like crazy," because that enthusiasm will drive the price up. When we were celebrating our 50th, about 10 years ago, we were clapping like crazy, trying to get that price north of $22. Thankfully, that has changed.

We have expanded that price almost tenfold over the past 10 years. What has not changed is the foundational elements that drive CRA’s excellence. What I hope to try to share with you today in about 15, 20 minutes is some of those pillars. CRA has long operated at the intersection of economics and regulation, bringing quantitative tools and microeconomic analysis to our clients’ most important challenges. Our areas of focus by no means have remained static. They evolve as the needs of our clients evolve. The services that we provide fall into two main buckets: legal and regulatory consulting, which makes up roughly 80% of our portfolio, and more traditional management consulting, which makes up the remaining 20% of that portfolio. As with any consulting company, the quality of our services begins and ends with my colleagues.

We hail from over 70 countries, collectively speak more than 35 languages, and hold advanced degrees in more than 60 fields. This uniqueness, this heterogeneous set of incredible colleagues, is what creates the innovation and is why clients come back to CRA time and time again. It is also the reason why individuals want to call CRA a professional home. We have the privilege and the honor to be highly selective for our applicants. As you can see there, if CRA was a university, it would be the most selective university in the world, accepting less than 2% of our campus applicants. A statistic that I wanted to highlight for you because it speaks to why we’re successful at CRA. It’s the statistic in the upper right-hand corner that reads less than 10% voluntary turnover amongst top revenue generators over the past five years. What is that statistic?

Every year, I present to our Board of Directors the top 30 revenue generators of Charles River Associates. We look at the composition, the distribution of those contributors on it. Over a five-year window of time, we ended up getting a union of roughly, say, 55 different colleagues on that. When I say less than 10%, that’s not 10% per annum. That’s 10% in total. We lose probably less than one of our top generators per year. The reason we highlight this is these individuals can go anywhere they want, but they are choosing to make Charles River Associates their professional home. We benefit from this dedication, and we work very hard to try to prove them right in that decision. We’ve talked about the two lines of business.

The antitrust and competition economics practice, which resides in the legal regulatory side of the house, makes up roughly about 45% of the company’s total revenue. The top three practices that are comprised of antitrust and competition economics, life sciences, and forensic services make up roughly 70% to 75% of the total revenue of the firm. The management consulting side is made up of life sciences, our energy practice, and the maritime practice, in addition to the auctions and competitive bidding practice, which make up that 20% earlier referenced. If you haven’t heard about Charles River Associates, I think you clearly have heard about who our clients are. This is just a compilation of different logos for clients we have worked with out of the Fortune 100 over the past two years. That’s not during our history.

Just during the past two years, Charles River Associates has worked for 85 of the Fortune 100 companies. We are not a subscription-based business. We do not have long-term contracts with clients. This is on a project-by-project basis. We’re quite proud that these clients continue to come back to Charles River Associates time and time again for their most important challenges. On the legal regulatory side, we often have a middleman retaining us on behalf of these Fortune 100 companies, and that is these law firms. If I look at the AMLAW 100 law firms, just again, just the past two years, we have worked for 98 of the top 100 law firms. If you wanted to go back four or five years, look at these statistics, 10 years, look at the statistics, and you’re going to get the same kind of numbers.

CRA is a go-to provider of the services that we provide. I’ll try to do that better next time. The composition of these services, the quality of these services is what results in really consistent and strong performance here. Whether you want to look at how we did this past quarter in Q2, whether you want to look at full year 2024, or the past five years, what you’re going to see is very consistent growth. We’re growing the top line. We’re growing it profitably as we’ve been able to expand margins over this same window of time. Not only are we growing and growing profitably, we are able to return a substantive amount of capital back to our shareholders. We aim to return roughly half of our adjusted cash flows back to shareholders. The majority of that redistribution is in the form of stock repurchases.

What you can see is we’re just not buying stock because we have excess cash. We’re buying stock because it is an attractive investment that has yielded really nice returns for the firm. I haven’t checked. I guess the market hasn’t opened yet. The last I checked, we were trading north of $190. Every one of these average prices on our buybacks has already yielded an attractive return. Over the past five years, the average purchase price has been $88. If I look at just the 2024, $162. Hopefully, if I’m talking to you this time next year, you’re going to see the same kind of separation from the purchase price of $187 for our buybacks during Q2. Our investment thesis is really quite simple. It’s to maximize long-term value per share. We are value-based decision-makers in every aspect of what we do at CRA.

That’s how we allocate our capital. We’ve done a pretty good job at enjoying attractive returns there. It’s the long-term value. If we don’t have the appropriate reinvestment opportunities into the business or in terms of lateral revenue contributions, here, we’re going to give the money back to our shareholders. That’s our model. It’s really quite simple, but it has proven to be successful over an extended window of time. We talked about the consistent revenue expansion. Right now, the past five years, around 8%. If I look at the midpoint of our revenue guidance for 2025, we’re on that track to continue that ascension. The other thing that’s denoted in the blue box that is worth noting here is these aren’t easy comparables. We’re on a streak right now of seven record quarters, record years, one after the other.

We’re always going comparing ourselves relative to a peak, and we’ve been able to still enjoy those attractive growth rates through that period of time. The one thing I would ask all of you to take a little closer look at, and then I’ll try to explain it in the next handful of slides, is the idea as we talk about revenue growth, but what about profitability? You mentioned that we’re expanding margin. Yes. What is the best profit measure to look at? We use a measure internally. Our banks use it in determining our borrowing capacity. Our board uses it to determine as a key component to how to compensate the executive officers. It’s a measure called adjusted EBITDA. It’s the EBITDA as reported on our financial statements, plus you add back a non-cash amortization of forgivable loans.

Forgivable loans are a vehicle that we use in inorganic pursuits of talent and revenue at CRA. It’s because the accounting records do not allow us to use or put these amortizations within G&A or to place it in our balance sheet as you would for a traditional purchase price acquisition. We have this large non-cash item that is used to fuel our growth flowing through our income statement. The SEC, we used to provide the sum of these two numbers, called it adjusted EBITDA. The SEC doesn’t like that addition. They say, "I can provide you the two components, but I just can’t add them up." If you really wanted to look at the ascension or the movement of our profitability through time, I would encourage you to look at EBITDA plus non-cash amortization of loans.

A lot of people will say, "Well, Paul, isn’t this just smoke and mirrors? Aren’t you double counting on that?" My answer is really simply no. In the next handful of slides, all I’m trying to do here is demonstrate that the cash we have coming in equals the cash we have going out to it. We have no debt. Everything is funded from internal operations. We have a line of credit that we access for working capital needs. The uses of our capital over the past five years can fall into three main buckets, that being for talent, acquisition, and maintenance of that talent, the redistribution back to shareholders, and a very small component goes into what I would call more traditional CapEx. For the talent, we have increased our revenue over this window of time by greater than 50% and for $230 million.

We are spending $185 million for talent acquisition and maintenance and enjoying an expansion of that revenue of roughly $230 million. About one-third of our total revenue growth is inorganic. The rest is organic. You need that healthy organic base in order to have a model that produces these kinds of economic returns year after year. The CapEx, what do we go to? It’s sometimes for leasehold investments, expansion of our real estate portfolio, computer needs on it. What we’ve been paying out in the previous five years probably won’t look a whole lot different than what we expect to pay in the coming five years, right? It’s right in that mid-single-digit range there. We talked a little bit about the redistribution to shareholders.

Here, you can see the majority of that redistribution is coming in the form of share repurchases, about 75% of the total redistribution, and about $48 million coming from the dividends. Even though the dividends are a smaller share of our redistribution, they have been growing quite substantively, which when we launched our dividend back in 2016, it was at $0.14 a share. Throughout 2025, we have been enjoying $0.49 a share. You see a more than tripling of that per share dividend over that window of time. The other part is our share repurchases are really putting a dent in the shares outstanding. Over this window of time, we have reduced our shares outstanding by 13% with an average share price of $88. That ends up resulting in a yield relative to our average market capitalization of roughly 6%.

This is just a simple depiction of the reduction of the shares outstanding. If you look at over the past dozen years or so, we’ve reduced share count by more than 30%. Joe, I think I’m going to pause here to see if there’s any questions. Hopefully, I didn’t ramble through any of the important sections.

Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Noble Capital Markets: No, Paul, that was fantastic. I’ve got a couple of questions here from the audience. We’ll hit those first. One was, what are your thoughts on inorganic growth inside and outside the U.S.?

Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer, CRA International, Inc.: Sure. If we have any part of our portfolio, if CRA has a practice area or has a geography, we have those components of the portfolio because we are willing and seeking opportunities for continued investment. Our talent pipeline is rather full right now. We’ve added quite a few new Vice Presidents thus far in 2025. The key right now is making sure we’re adding key assets that fit the portfolio and that add depth to it. The investments have been largely to add depth and haven’t really expanded the breadth of that portfolio. If I’m saying for the next five years, I would say the composition of the inorganic growth will probably be consistent with what you see in terms of the composition of our existing services. The same probably holds true geographically.

Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Noble Capital Markets: Great. Now, I’m going to take a step here for a second. You just talked about your investments in talent. One of the things you obviously want to do is get them up and utilized. How are the current set of regulatory, macro, and sector uncertainties, such as the federal government shutdown, affecting the business today?

Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer, CRA International, Inc.: are some direct impacts, which are minimal, but probably more of the impacts that we’ve had have been what I would call secondary in nature. We do have a few contracts that are on behalf of U.S. regulatory agencies. On some of those, we’ve been given instructions to continue to work by the regulatory bodies. On some, we’ve been asked to pause. That doesn’t necessarily make up a large component of our revenue. It’s a direct impact, but not one to substantively change our productivity levels there. Other things that we’ve been having to look very closely at are immigration, exactly what the impact is going to be on the H-1B visa orders that have been put out recently. That’s another direct impact into CRA. All the other executive orders, at least for the time being, have been secondary impacts. What impacts do they have on our clients?

What impacts do they have on their willingness to pursue the matters currently at hand?

Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Noble Capital Markets: Okay, thanks for that.

Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer, CRA International, Inc.: Sure.

Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Noble Capital Markets: Another question from the audience was some of the recent investments that NVIDIA has made in companies like Intel, OpenAI. Could that possibly lead to incremental antitrust and competition work for your experts?

Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer, CRA International, Inc.: Yes, yes. It’s driving demand right now across a number of different forays. Our energy practice has been working on behalf of utilities, on behalf of these larger tech companies, on data center negotiations in terms of needs of power with the various grids or utilities in that arena. That has been a nice wind in the sail of our energy practice. There’s already been a number of intellectual property rights litigation going on right now with how these various AI tools are using the IP rights of various holders.

Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Noble Capital Markets: Okay. Has there been any changes to the competitive environment? Are you seeing any big differences there?

Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer, CRA International, Inc.: If I look at it from an individual standpoint, the main individuals who are our competitors in the previous five years are the same individuals that are our competitors today. I haven’t seen a new entrant. There are some competitors that are operating under different trade names, spin-offs, creation of new entities, PE shops that are doing roll-ups. Those are really changes of composition as opposed to new competitors that we face in the marketplace.

Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Noble Capital Markets: Okay. Now, Charles River Associates has reported the best first half in the company’s history this year. Can we expect more of the same in the second half of 2025?

Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer, CRA International, Inc.: If our guidance holds true, you’re going to see the same in the second half of the year. We are scheduled to report their quarter earnings in about three weeks. On that, we’re really happy with how the first half went. The updated guidance, the increase of guidance that we provided at the end of Q2, I think clearly shows that we are bullish, cautiously optimistic of what lies ahead for CRA.

Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Noble Capital Markets: Great. I’m going to try and sneak one more in here. Appetite for mergers and acquisitions, and if so, what areas would the company target?

Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer, CRA International, Inc.: Do you want to speak a little bit, Chad, cover that?

Chad, CRA International, Inc.: Sure. As Paul described, the company is blessed with wonderful cash flows, and we’re looking always to plow those dollars back into the business where we can find good reinvestment opportunities. We are willing to put money behind opportunities that align with our existing service lines and across our existing geographies. With that as our guiding light, our pipeline is rather full. We are seeing lots of opportunities. I think that market participants see the success and strength that the Charles River Associates platform has exhibited. That gives us the financial firepower to chase opportunities, and we’re looking. We keep our standards high and our discipline to add only high-quality, appropriate assets to the platform. That’s what we’ve done over the last five years. I would expect the coming five years to be of a similar vein.

Joe Gomes, Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Noble Capital Markets: Great. Paul and Chad, we’ve come to the end of our allotted time. We covered a lot of ground today and got significant insight into what Charles River Associates does, its markets, and opportunities. We appreciate you taking the time to participate in our conference, and we wish you and the company the best in the future. Thanks again.

Paul Maleh, President and Chief Executive Officer, CRA International, Inc.: Thank you, Joe, and thank you, everyone, for listening in. I appreciate it. Thanks.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.