Fluor Corp.’s Profit Up 15% for Fiscal Year : Earnings: The Irvine builder sees rewards of recent global emphasis and internal cost cutting.

Fluor Corp., demonstrating the benefits of aggressive expansion overseas and corporate restructuring at home, said Wednesday that it earned a record $192 million on sales of $8.49 billion in its fiscal year ended Oct. 31.

The earnings were 15% higher than last year’s $167 million, and sales totaled 8% more than the $7.85 billion generated in fiscal 1993.

Les McCraw, chief executive of the Irvine-based engineering, construction and mining company, attributed the strong showing to Fluor’s emphasis on doing business in the Pacific Rim and Latin America. It was a watershed year, he said, during which international pursuits for the first time outweighed domestic business.

“We have been on a strong globalization strategy and it is now paying off,” McCraw said. “We are very optimistic about the opportunities we see . . . especially in the Asia-Pacific and Latin American regions. . . . It’s an incredibly large market.”

A drive to “re-engineer” Fluor by developing cost-cutting procedures and improving flexibility by moving decision-making processes further down the management ranks also paid off. As much as 15% of the profit gain for the year can be traced to that internal effort, McCraw said.

Analysts expressed optimism about Fluor’s prospects for the year ahead.

“Because Fluor works on projects with such long lead times, it can sustain earnings improvement like this for the foreseeable future,” said Kemp Fuller, managing director of Commonwealth Associates, a New York investment bank and brokerage. He estimated Fluor’s fiscal 1995 earnings at $220 million.

“Everyone who works in global business sees greater growth opportunities in the international arena than nationally,” Fuller said.

For its fourth quarter, Fluor earned $52.4 million, up 16% from $45.2 million for the 1993 fourth quarter.

Fluor had posted a gain of $3.1 million for the final quarter of fiscal 1993 from a pension fund credit in its A.T. Massey Coal Co. mining unit. That boosted net income for the three months to $48.3 million. Revenue for the latest quarter climbed 9%, to $2.39 billion from $2.19 billion.