Peter J. Gundermann
Analyst · Sidoti & Company
Thanks, Debbie, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. We're going to talk today about our first quarter results. And then if you've seen the news, you know that our first quarter was a pretty strong start to 2013. We're pretty pleased with it. In many respects though, the events of the first quarter were pretty basic. It was kind of a straightforward, logical extension of many of the things that we've been experiencing and talking about for the last few quarters. So from our perspective, it wasn't really much of a surprise and we -- but it was very good. We set a number of records, and I'll probably refer to a number of them through the course of this phone call. Revenue in the first quarter, just shy of $74 million, a new record, up to 13.6% over the similar comparator quarter from 2012. As in recent quarters, we were dominated by our Aerospace segment. 97% of our revenues are Aerospace; 3%, a little bit more, Test Systems. Pumping that kind of volume through our cost structure does good things to the -- as you move down the income statement. Jumping to the bottom, net profit for the quarter was $8.6 million, up 11.6% -- excuse me, 11.6% of sales, which is also a new record, up 40% over the comparator period from 2012 when we recorded $6.1 million net income. Our earnings per diluted share was $0.56, up from $0.40 a year ago. Finally, bookings, the other kind of big metric that I look at every quarter, were $78.5 million, another new record. That's a book-to-bill ratio of 1.06. So just a quick recap of the first quarter. When we have record revenues, record profits and record bookings, to me, that's the big 3, and it doesn't get a whole lot better to start off a new year. Looking a little bit below the surface, our engineering and development expenses for the quarter were $12.8 million. That's an increase of $2.8 million over the same period from last year, and we are restating our range for that expenditure this year to $48 million to $53 million as a total for 2013. That's a little bit higher than what we said last quarter. We are just that much further into the year, and we realize the work we have ahead of us. Based on projects we've signed up for and the rate that we experienced in the first quarter puts us at the lower end of that range, so we expect some level of increase in our quarterly rates as we go forward. Looking at our Aerospace segment. Revenues of $72 million, up 15% from the first quarter last year. Again, 97% of our total revenues. Aerospace contributed all of the margin. Our markets, Commercial Transport sales continues to be our biggest market, 70% of our total and up 15.5% over the first quarter last year. It's always good when your biggest market is showing strong growth. Our Business Jet market is 12% of our total and was up 30% over last year. That's in part due to new programs that are starting up and in part due to the inclusion of Max-Viz, which we bought in, I believe, in June of last year. So the first 2 quarters will show Max-Viz in the current periods but not in the comparator periods. Military sales were down marginally in the first quarter, $8.6 million, 12% of our total. We think everybody asks questions about sequestration and the effects on our business, and we believe that in our Military Aerospace business that we're going to be pretty stable for a while. We're on high-priority programs generally or we sell spare parts that keep airplanes flying, and we don't sense much of a pullback in those particular areas. So we expect our military sales in the aircraft -- or the Aerospace segment to hold up reasonably well. Looking at our product lines. Our 2 biggest product lines are doing pretty well, that is -- they are cabin electronics, which is our code for in-seat power, and our aircraft lighting product line. Those 2 together are about 80% of our sales. The larger of the 2, cabin electronics, about 54%, 55% of our consolidated sales, was up 15% in Q1 compared to Q1 in 2012. And our aircraft lighting product lines, which are about 25% of our consolidated sales, were up almost 7% for the first quarter. So that's pretty good performance from our biggest product lines. And then when you move to our smallest product -- smaller product lines, we see some pretty strong growth. Also, our avionics product are only 7% of our total but up 70% year-over-year. And again, part of that's due to the inclusion of Max-Viz this year when we didn't have them in the earlier period last year. And our airfield lighting product line is up 50% -- 47%, 48%, but is only 4.5% of our total. That is primarily due to timing on sales to the FAA. For those of you inclined to model our future results, I wouldn't necessarily go and extend that growth rate indefinitely for that product line. But we do expect reasonable growth out of our avionics product line going forward. Our airframe power product line was down marginally in the first quarter, down 3.6%, 6% of our total. But again, we talk a lot about our capabilities and our investment in that particular part of our business where we have pretty high expectations for the longer-term future. Some details. Everybody is always curious about our sales to Panasonic in the quarter. They were $24.7 million, and I expect some people would want to know what our 787 sales were for the quarter, they were relatively light at $2 million. Moving to our Test Systems segment. Revenues were $2.3 million. That's down from $3.1 million in the comparator period a year ago, about 3% of our consolidated sales. Our business is not profitable at that level. We did take some significant steps during the quarter to tear our cost structure down to our expected activity levels. Those changes should lower our cost structure there about $2 million on a rolling 12-month basis. So for the remainder of the year, we expect our cost structure to be reduced by about $1.5 million in that segment. Bookings were $2.3 million for the quarter, leaving us a backlog of $3.6 million. And we'll talk about forecasts here in a little bit, but we're expecting revenues to be in about $10 million for the year for that part of our business. Turning to our balance sheet. We continue to be pretty conservatively financed. Cash on hand at the end of the first quarter of $17.8 million, total debt of $28 million, leaving us a net debt of about $10.1 million. Compared to companies in our space, that's a very conservative capital structure. Looking forward, we initial -- we released initial guidance for 2013 of $275 million to $310 million in revenue. Our rolling 12-month shipments at the end of the first quarter put us at the low end of that range, about $275 million. Our rolling 12-month bookings at the end of the first quarter were about $289 million, more towards the middle of the range. Our first quarter shipments annualized put us at about $300 million, slightly above the middle of the range. And our first quarter bookings of $78 million, $79 million annualized would put us at about $314 million, which is beyond the range. So we, at this point, are leaving -- are tightening up the bottom end of our range slightly. We're going -- instead of $275 million to $310 million, we're going to $280 million to $310 million. We're expecting $270 million to $300 million out of our Aerospace segment. We're expecting about $10 million out of our Test Systems segment. Qualitatively, I will tell you from my perspective, I think we have more upside potential to push the upper limits or exceed them in that range than we do face a downside risk that would put us towards the lower end of the range. But we don't feel we have enough insight into how the year's going to shake out to modify that range substantially at this point. So we're just tightening up a little bit on the bottom side. And of course, we'll continue to watch it and report on it as the quarters go by. So I think that's my -- those are my prepared comments. Latonya, let's open it up for questions, if there are any.