Peter Gundermann
Analyst · KeyBanc. Please go ahead with your question
Thanks Debbie and good morning everybody. It is nice to have you with us. We’re going to talk through our first quarter results and what our expectations are in a little bit more detail than we normally do for the remainder of 2015. I’ll start with a brief review of the headlines as we see it. We feel that our first quarter was a solid start to the year. We had a reasonable range of expectations and our first quarter was in that range. And we think it sets us up well for the second quarter and the third quarter. That being said, it’s probably pretty apparent that our first quarter to be considered a tale of two quarters almost. Our Aerospace segment, the majority of our business had a very, very strong start to the year. We set new records in sales bookings and backlog in that part of our business. Our Test Systems segment did not have what would appear to be as good a start to the year. We’ve been talking about how that part of our business is relatively lumpy in nature compared to our Aerospace business. And as it’s grown affects our overall results more. And I think I look at the first quarter and I would say that we were on the tough side of lumpy in the first quarter. We had become somewhat accustomed to being on the positive side of lumpy through the second half of last year. So this was a little bit of a different appearance on our consolidated results. But and we’ll talk about this more specifically. Our plan is that we should see a very strong recovery in our Test business effective almost immediately in the second quarter and especially in the third quarter this year. So it’s not as though first quarter results were a surprise to us, it’s not as that wheels are coming off the wagon, it’s more just been kind of the predicted ebb and flow of our business in that nature, in that segment. Consequently kind of at the end of the day we’re leaving our 2015 revenue forecast in place, $680 million to $740 million, and again we’ll talk about how we expect that to play out in the coming quarters at the end of my little monolog here. So, getting into some of the more specifics of the quarter, revenue was $161.6 million that’s up almost 15% over the comparator quarter a year ago, the beginning of 2014 and down marginally 2.7% sequentially from the fourth quarter of 2014. There was some acquisition growth in there. The organic growth year-over-year as we calculated was just shy 10%. Bottom line results were as we would have expected on that revenue level. Net income was $10.7 million, 6.6% of sales, diluted earnings per share of $0.47 per share up from $0.33 in the first quarter of 2014. Our net income was 5.3% of sales in our year-ago period and 11.1% in the previous quarter and the fourth quarter of last year. And some of you may be inclined to compare our first quarter financial results to our fourth quarter and it would look at first glance that our profitability was down substantially. But it’s important to keep in mind some of the things we talked about in our fourth quarter last year and our last call. Specifically we had a substantially reduced tax burden due to the late passage of the R&D tax credit by our elected leaders in Washington which benefited us to the tune of $3.5 million almost in the fourth quarter. And we had what is called a write-down in fair value contingent consideration liability which means that we had to adjust down some of the expected earn-out payments from some of our previous acquisitions which actually benefited in the fourth quarter by a pre-tax level of about $4.5 million. So you add those two things together, and they pretty much explain the difference in margins from the fourth quarter of 2014 to the first quarter of 2015 on comparable sales. Our engineering and development expense, something a lot of people like to track was $22.2 million in the first quarter, that comes out to about 13.7% of sales which was a little higher than we’ve been seeing the last couple of quarters but still below our historical longer term norm of 15% to 18%. So, we continue to say that model makers should budget that number somewhere in the 11% to 13% range going forward. The highlight of to the first quarter was our bookings level. We booked at $158 million, which was our second best total ever. Only below $235 million which was the previous quarter, the fourth quarter of last year. So, we think that the strong bookings in the fourth quarter and the strong bookings in the first quarter sets us well for the rest of the year. Our ending backlog at the end of the first quarter was $378 million that’s our highest ever. Going into the segments briefly, I talked about a tale of two quarters. The Aerospace segment had record revenues of $142 million, up 16% from the comparative period a year ago and 88% of our total business. Our operating profit in the first quarter was $23.4 million or 16%. Bookings were not quite at the level of revenues but really close to $141 million that is the new record. And we ended the quarter with Aerospace backlog of $234 million which is also a new record, so record revenues, record bookings, record backlog, things seem to be well in this segment. Looking at some of our sales channels, we are - we continue to b heavily weighted towards commercial transports. I just said that 88% of our total business is in the Aerospace segment, 74% of our total business is in commercial transports. That number has grown and continues to grow. We’re relatively small in other parts of the Aerospace industry 5.7% in military aircraft at this point and 5% in business jets. When you cut our business by product-line, you see that our electric power and motion is about $70 million in the quarter up 5.7% over the comparator period a year ago and 43% of our total. In that number is our passenger power or In-Seat Power products and we’re not breaking these out separately anymore in our press release. But I know we’re going to get questions, I want to give you the numbers here. We had in the first quarter In-Seat Power sales of about $59 million, just shy of $60 million, $59.7 million. And if you go back and run the numbers that’s a 12.9% increase from the first quarter of last year and impressively a 9.7% increase in the sequential quarters from the fourth quarter last year. In that total, that $59.7 million just to be clear, we include $1.1 million, a relatively modest amount from our Armstrong acquisition of January. Armstrong sales are reported in three different areas in our product lines. But they do have some products related to In-Seat Power or passenger power I guess I should call it more specifically. So, we think it’s appropriate to consider to include that in this total going forward. Moving on to other product lines or lighting and safety $42.1 million up 20% and 26% of total and Avionics $17.4 million up 36% and 10.7% of total. So, a lot of growth across our major product lines, and a new product grouping, you’ll notice if you looked at table in the press release, you’ll see something called Systems Certification. This is a majority of where we’re going to be reporting our Armstrong sales going forward because of a lot of what that organization specializes in, is certifying systems for clients ranging from ISE systems to connectivity systems, the seating systems, so there are various things that suppliers want to put on airlines. Those systems need to be certified, that’s something that Armstrong helps with them since it doesn’t really fit into other product groupings that we normally report we’re creating a new one to capture that effort. We had two significant Aerospace customers in the quarter, our practice as of this year or as of last year I guess is not to name significant customers in the Qs but name them in the Ks. But you can guess who they are if you followed us. One of them was 0.4% of sales and the other one was 15%. So, our traditional two big Aerospace customers continue to be our two big Aerospace customers driving our results. With a couple of announcements in the Aerospace segment, just in the last 24 hours, we announced participation in the Pilatus PC-24. That’s a new twin-engine jet being developed by Pilatus in Switzerland. And what’s exciting about it for us is that it just flew yesterday and we’ve been working on it for quite a while now putting a new what we call an EPDS system, Electronic Power Distribution System, primarily in the secondary power system in that airplane, not the primaries. And also for the first time putting on our starter generators, so we have been developing for some period of time. As many of you know, a solid state starter generator which we think offers substantial performance and reliability improvements over traditional systems. This is the first paying customer so to speak to plan a system around this technology for us. So, we’re excited about that. Pilatus has not been a long-term customer of ours but we’ve enjoyed working with them and we’re excited to sharing their success on their first flight, just in the last few hours. The other announcement we made recently in the last quarter was something that is, at first appeared to be a little bit out of our typical sweet-spot and that’s the joint venture with a company called SmartTray International. And if you’ve read that release you might be a little puzzled, it’s basically a modified trade table for commercial transport airplanes that is specifically designed to accommodate personal electronic devices like tablets or phones. And the simple situation here is that people are bringing more and more devices on to airplanes. I’m sure everybody on the call here has noticed that. And there comes a question as to where you’re going to put this device on your allotted space in an airplane seat. And the idea with the SmartTray development is to provide a stand or a mounting point where people can easily mount their devices in a kind of ergonomically friendly and convenient way. And this, we tend to be a company that gravitates towards higher technology and kind of complex systems. So this may appear at first not to be something that would be well suited for us but we’ve come to be convinced that this is an opportunity for us because of our market presence, we’re obviously involved in what people do with their personal electronic devices in airplanes. And we touch a big part of the potential market for this product. We’re one of the unique companies that deals basically with all the OEMs who make airplanes. We deal with the vast majority of airlines around the world who fly and operate the airplanes. And we also deal with the vast majority touch the vast majority of fleet manufacturers who put tray tables on their seats. So, that combination of market presence and kind of product area interest we think suits us well. And we think we’re reasonably excited about how this product will be received in the industry. So we’ll talk about it more as appropriate. But it was one of the developments of our first quarter here. Test Systems segment. Revenues in the first quarter were $19.3 million up from $18.7 million in the first quarter of 2014. That would appear to be an 11.9% gain in sales but you need to keep in mind that in the first quarter last year, the major acquisition we had in Ervine from EADS was with us only for four weeks in the quarter. So, our first quarter sales look higher than the first quarter last year but its 13 weeks compared to four weeks. And when you at that that way, the company was obviously operating at a much higher level in the first quarter of last year. In the first quarter this year we reported an operating loss of $2.2 million, we feel that was driven mostly by the low volume and the adverse mix. Essentially the company is sized for a breakeven of about $100 million to $110 million in revenue. And when we take the revenue levels that we had in the first quarter, we wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be profitable. But we have a backlog at the end of the quarter of $144 million, and majority of that or much of that will ship in the second quarter and third quarter. So, we expect to be again on the positive time of lumpy going forward here in the second quarter and third quarter. Bookings in the first quarter were $16.8 million, and again, if you talk about lumpy, fourth quarter bookings the end of last year in our Test Systems segment was $105 million, that draft the $17 million in the first quarter. So, it’s just the nature of this business, it’s the way things are going to work. And again, we don’t view the first quarter as any indication of substantial problems in the business but kind of a predictable result of how customers want their deliveries scheduled. We did announce a couple of new wins in our Test Systems segment. One is, a VIPER/T, some of you have followed our business may recognize that term, that was something that was part of our business for the U.S. Marines a few years ago. Saudi Arabia has decided that they want in on that technology and we are basically developing and delivering an upgraded and modified version of that Test System for forward deployed situations. It’s a relatively limited initial contract with a value of $3.6 million, we do think there is, will be ongoing potential when the time comes. And we think that some of the insertion, the technology we’re putting into this new system will be desirable to other potential customers of the VIPER program. So we’re excited by that win. The other win we announced was something RFDACS or RFDACS stands for Radio Frequency Distribution and Control System. This is not so much a Test System as much as part of a digital communication system for modern submarines, the Virginia and Los Angeles class of submarines. This is an IDIQ contract with the Navy. Stated value is $36 million performance period is 5 years. And it’s a continuation of a contract that we’ve been working on in the past. So, it’s kind of a newer word for a continued project which we of course are happy to get. So, these are programs that we’ve been pursuing for some time. I think it’s important to keep in mind that they didn’t come out of the blue. And we don’t necessarily feel like this represents any substantial change in climate with our government and their funding priorities as much as they eventually the programs that they talk about actually come true. So these are two of those and we’re happy to have them. Our balance sheet at the end of the first quarter, we feel, continues to be healthy. Cash at $22 million, total debt of $216 million which is up a little from the fourth quarter primarily driven by the Armstrong acquisition, so, net debt of $194 million, we think that’s comfortably in our covenants and adequate for the task we have ahead of us as a company. So, looking forward, our 2015 beginning backlog was $371 million. I mentioned a few minutes ago that at the end of Q1 it had risen a little bit to $378 million. We are maintaining a revenue guidance of $680 million to $740 million for the year, the mid-point of that range would put us at about 7.5% growth over 2014. We continue to believe that Aerospace will be in the $550 million to $580 million range and Test Systems will be in the $130 million to $160 million range. Given the lumpiness of our Test business, we’re going to deviate from our traditional pattern of being somewhat vague about our quarterly revenue expectations and be a little bit more specific. We expect second quarter revenues to be modestly up from the first quarter. There is going to be some mix changes going on underneath the surface. But we’re expecting Q2 to be somewhere in the $165 million to $170 million range. We are expecting Q3 to be for our company a blockbuster. We’re expecting revenues in excess of $200 million in Q3, which will be a new record by far our previous record, or current record is $179 million. And that was achieved in the third quarter of 2014. So, we’re expecting increases in revenue in Q2, a big increase in Q3. Q4 is a little bit fuzzier but obviously with the guidance I just gave, it’s easier to kind of zero in where we think Q4 is going to be also. So, I guess that’s it for my prepared comments. And we’ll take questions at this point.