Don Young
Analyst · Canaccord. John, your line is open
Thank you, Shawn. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our Q2 2015 earnings call. I will provide about comments about the business and our performance and John Fairbanks, our CFO will present the financial details of our second quarter and update guidance for 2015. We will conclude the call with a Q&A session. The biggest change to our performance in the second quarter was enabled by the successful ramp up of our third manufacturing line. Output from Line 3 was strong, however, our yields were few percentage points lower than planned. We attribute the lower-than-planned yield to normal shakedown issues associated with brining a substantial new piece of equipment into operation and are confident that yields will match our existing product lines during the second half of the year. Importantly, the robust Line 3 output provides the opportunity to perform maintenance on lines one and two that had been running full out for five quarters in order to minimize the impact of our capacity constraints. In addition, the strong performance of Line 3 supports our confidence that we will meet manufacturing output and revenue guidance for the year. Product revenue resumed its growth with the addition of Line 3. Q2 product revenue grew by 15% compared with Q2, 2014 and 28% compared with Q1, 2015. Shipments were particularly strong to Asia and Europe offset by previously anticipated weakness in the Canadian oil sands and Latin America. In addition, our U.S.-based business and our subsea work remain robust during the quarter. Our lead times remain high, which when combined with our commercial pipeline provides high levels of confidence for 2015 and the first half of 2016. As I’ve emphasized in the past, our business is well diversified across all major refinery and petrochemical companies in many facets of the energy infrastructure market, including upstream and downstream, hot and cold, maintenance and projects in all geographic regions. This diversity is core to our strategy and we believe that provides a buffer against both specific local or regional issues and larger macro events, such as low oil prices and the strong dollar. With the completion of Line 3, we met several key objectives, including delivering the project safely, on schedule and on budget. We had also set post start up goals, which included building an optimal level of inventory to support our own operating efficiencies, replenishing our distribution channels and lowering our lead times to a more customer friendly level of four to eight weeks. The continued to high level of demand for our products may inhibit our ability to reach supply and demand equilibrium and prevent the full achievement of these goals in the near-term, even with strong contributions from our new manufacturing lines. Continued solid demand for our product despite to lower energy price environment and the strong dollar is a testament to the compelling value proposition offered by our products. Approximately 80% of our revenue is derived from the downstream market, where critical reliability and maintenance work is essential to safety and high utilization rates for our end-users. This revenue is derived for refinery, petrochemical and LNG work and these markets remain strong. Many of these end-users stay where lower oil and gas prices especially if it ultimately provide stimulus to the economy. In addition, our Pyrogel and Cryogel products are valued because they offer us superior ROI when compared to incumbent materials. Our products reduce corrosion under insulation, increase reliability, save space, install rapidly, and are more industrially robust. These factors are important to our end users whether oil prices are $50 or $100 per barrel. Next I’d like to provide in update on our plant II capacity expansion project. The objective of the project is to build a new production facility to diversify our manufacturing sites, to keep pace with growth in demand for our products and to increase our profitability. The first line of this second plant is expected to increase our total capacity by approximately 50%, to begin operations in late 2017 and to deliver a significant contribution in 2018. As we previously announced, we’ve decided to build our second plant in the United States for the following reasons: stronger raw material supply, lower relative energy costs, reduced risk profile of building and operating a major manufacturing facility, better intellectual property protection, and a broader array of financing alternatives. We have now narrowed our selection process to a single site in the Southeastern part of the United States. We will announce this specific location upon completion of site due diligence and final negotiation of government incentives. Delivering Line 3 in our East Providence facility in a safe and timely manner and on budget, gives us confidence and our expectation that we will be equally successful with plant II. As we announced two weeks ago, Kevin Schmidt, our Vice President of Operations will leave Aspen to service as Chief Operating Officer of a private company. Kevin has been with Aspen for over 11 years and has made many important contributions to the organization. Importantly, he build strong manufacturing, supply chain, and engineering teams which are fully capable of delivering strong operating results in 2015, and sustaining solid progress on our plant II imitative. Overall, we continue to be cautiously optimistic. We consider this second quarter to have been one of transition from a two-line operation to a three-line operation. We believe the financial performance in the second half of the year will demonstrate the importance of leveraging our scale in terms of growth in revenue, gross margin and adjusted EBITDA. Demand remains at record levels. We recognize fully that some aspects of our market, in particularly the oil sands, Brazil and eventually subsea are vulnerable to low oil prices. However, we are confident in our ability to execute our penetration strategy and to continue to operate at high capacity utilization rates in the near-term even when considering the contribution of our new manufacturing line. We believe our opportunity to continue to gain market share is significant. Now, I’ll turn the call over to John for a review of our financial results. John?