Peter Gundermann
Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Debbie, and good morning everybody. We're going to talk about our first quarter which was an interesting quarter and from our perspective, a reasonable start to the year. I hope to explain that statement because the numbers don't always line-up the way we would like them to on any individual period. But the highlights for the first quarter are first of all, very strong revenue and bookings especially for our aerospace business which saw once again record sales, record bookings, and ended the quarter with a record backlog. The bad news for the quarter of course was that we faced a lot of margin pressure from a lot of different direction. So we're going to spend quite a bit of time on this call talking through the issues but they have to do with certain acquisition-related and legal expenses. Certain of our operations had a difficult quarter or difficult start to the year and the reality is that even though we had pretty strong revenue for our history of $179 million, our company today is sized for something greater than that. Luckily, we think that most of these margin pressures are going to take care of themselves, be moderated as we work through the year, and again, we're going to spend quite a bit of time talking about why we think that's the case. But long story short, we think our second quarter sales are going to increase pretty dramatically, that's the quarter we're in right now from $179 million to something close to $200 million. We expect our Test business to more than double in sales and we think the weaker parts of our Aerospace business are making substantial progress in terms of minimizing the losses that we've been incurring over the last couple of quarters. So we'll talk about that and finally the acquisition and legal expenses which definitely impacted our first quarter are going to drop to less than half in the second quarter and drop again in the third quarter such that in the second half of the year, they will become relatively modest. So the first quarter, revenue strong at $179.1 million, that's our highest revenue in over two years above our comparative period of the first quarter of 2017 by over 17%. Our acquired businesses since the first quarter of last year primarily Telefonix, PDT but also CCC added $25.1 million in revenue through the first quarter results. Our organic growth on the other hand was therefore pretty modest at only about 1%. Our Aerospace sales in the first quarter were $164 million just shy of $165 million; up 20% from the comparative period when we had sales of $137 million that is a new record. Test sales were only $14.5 million. Our Test segment had a difficult quarter that's down 7% from last year and down pretty dramatically over the last couple of quarters and down quite a bit from where we expect them to be going forward. It's really just an issue of program timing, customer orders, and we expect these problems to resolve themselves naturally as we kind of move through the year. I already said we expect our Test business to more than double their sales as we in the second quarter. Again consolidated our bookings were strong at $196 million that's another positive book-to-bill of 1.1 and left us with a backlog of just shy of $400 million at the end of the first quarter, that is a new record for the company. But of course the bottom-line results were like; we ended up with net income of $3.3 million, 1.8% of sales down substantially from $11.6 million or 7.6% of sales in the first quarter of 2017. Diluted earnings per share of $0.11. Our margins struggled under a range of pressures. I talked about the Test business that had a operating loss of $1.9 million largely due to the Telefonix acquisition we had purchased accounting expenses of $4.7 million in the first quarter and that is made up of intangible asset amortization of $3.4 million and inventory step-up expense of $1.3 million. So the total again there in the quarter was $4.7 million that number is going to drop as we go through the year and we'll talk about that in a minute. We also had a legal reserve in the quarter of $1 million due to a longstanding dispute that we have been kind of working our way through. It's been something that's happened -- been happening both in the U.S. and in Germany and we've been very successful in the U.S., we've not been as successful in Germany, and our advisors have suggested that we're facing -- likely to face a $1 million penalty at some point probably next year and that litigation continues. So we will see how it ends up at the end of the day but we did take a $1 million reserve in the first quarter. And then we have three struggling aerospace operations. We talked about these three in the last call a little bit, they are companies we refer to as CCC and AeroSat and Armstrong. Consolidated those three put up an operating loss in the neighborhood of $8.9 million in the first quarter. We expect that to lessen going forward and we will talk about that in a minute also. And finally, again volume of $179 million though it's one of our highest revenue quarters ever, our company is biased to do something greater than that and we would expect to be much closer to $200 million on average over the course of the year for 2018. We think our margin profile will look substantially different at $200 million. Going into our segments in a little bit more detail, aerospace first revenues of $160 million, just shy of $165 million, up 20% from the comparative quarter of $137 million, that is a new record. Operating profit was $13.1 million or 8%. I already talked about most of the negatives there. The things hurting us were purchase accounting, legal accrual, and three struggling business units in particular. Bookings however were really strong $181 million that is our strongest aerospace quarter ever and continues an encouraging trend. Our book-to-bill for the quarter of 1.1 and leaving us with a backlog of $306 million also a new record. So again for our aerospace segment, record revenues, record bookings, record ending backlog. Moving to our Test segment quickly, revenues were $14.5 million that's down 7% from last year and well below where we expect our Test business to be for 2018. At that volume, the operating profit was a loss of $1.9 million. Bookings however were positive $15.3 million in bookings, book-to-bill of 1.06, leaving us with a backlog of $92.3 million. And the real issue with our Test business very simply was just the scheduling of deliveries and some orders that we expected to get or still expecting to get kind of a long frustrating story, but we think our Test business is in pretty good shape for the year. We just need to get some of the schedules to cooperate and align. So looking forward, what do we expect to happen the rest of this year and what do we expect to happen for margins, in particular. We are largely maintaining our initial guidance which we released back in January but we're bringing up the low end a little bit based on our booking success. So today, we're saying that we are forecasting consolidated revenues of $765 million to $815 million for the year, that's an increase of about 26% over last year. We expect Aerospace to be $650 million to $680 million the mid-point would suggest growth of about 24%. In Test, we expect to be $115 million to $135 million that's the same range as before the mid-point would suggest growth of just shy of 40% over where they were last year. And again we believe these ranges capture the reasonable estimates but there is some upside potential, of course there is always downside potential to it. But we can pretty confidently say based on the bookings we've received and the things that we're anticipating that there is upside potential to those stated ranges. Looking a little closer, we expect second quarter revenues to be above $200 million. We expect the third quarter to show or turn in another jump equivalent to what we're expecting from Q1 to Q2. So that put us in the $220 million range. So let's talk a little bit about margins and try to explain why we think, as we said in the press release, that we think our margins in the second half of the year as we get to the end of the year will be somewhere in the mid-teens our operating margins, that's well below where we were in the first quarter obviously and has been common and concern on our margin structure in general. And I think the best way to do this in a short period of time would be to look back at first quarter and place them, if, then kind of gains, particularly looking at Aerospace, we're going to look at our Aerospace segment specifically because that's where most of the noise is, we think our Test business again is going to end up at a pretty reasonable volume and be a solid contributor by the end of the year. So it will take care of itself but 80%, 85% of our business is Aerospace and that's where most people pay the most attention. So first quarter Aerospace sales from the 12 months and numbers here were about $165 million and our operating profit was about $13.1 million that's 8%. We had, what I would call, some legal or acquisition-related expenses, most of which is going to drop off over Q2 and Q3, and that total which will be gone by the time we get into Q3 is about $4.1 million. So if you take the $4.1 million, that's going to drop off and you add it back to the $13.1 million we had in Q1, our operating profit goes from 8.0% to 10.4%. And then, we have the three operating units in our Aerospace segment which have been causing us a fair amount of pain, I talked it about it before CCC, AeroSat, Armstrong and the good news is that we feel we've got line of sight to bring their performance collectively as a group, up pretty strongly as we move through the year, not such that they're going to be incredibly profitable, but at least we will start to eliminate the operating losses or we'll work towards that substantially. And to give you an order of magnitude or to sort of frame again, in the fourth quarter of last year these three came in with an operating loss collectively of $27.3 million that was largely weighted by a $16.2 million impairment charge at Armstrong. So $27.3 million in the fourth quarter, so that number was reduced effectively to $8.9 million in the first quarter of this year, the quarter we're talking about today. That $8.9 million includes $2.1 million adjustment for a completion requirement on a program at CCC that we are very involved and very engaged in. That would be the second estimate to complete adjustment for that program. We took a similar size one in the fourth quarter; we believe we are through that process now. I'm sure we'll get questions on that. But this is a company we bought in April of last year and this program that we're describing or talking about or referring to somewhat briefly is something that's been growing and getting a ton of attention from around the company. We think we've got our hands around it now and we think this estimate to complete will be the last one. So that $8.9 million this year, for this quarter, we expect to drop to about $4.5 million in the second quarter, and we expect that number to drop again to somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million in the third quarter. So it's a little bit of a leap, but let's say that we get to the end of the year and we take that $8.9 million operating loss collectively for those three companies in the first quarter and we were to turn it to breakeven that would be an addition of $8.9 million back to operating profit which would bring us up to 15.9% in the first quarter. Again looking at the purchase accounting adjustments and legal accrual and assuming we can get those three operating companies back to breakeven or close to it, we end up with operating margin in the first quarter of 15.9%. In the first quarter, our Aerospace sales were $165 million, in the second half of the year we expect them to be up about 15%, 20%. So the combination of those things on the Aerospace side combined with the pending backlog that we have to deliver again on the Test side, give us reasonable confidence that we're going to have a much stronger margin profile as we work through the year. I think that's my prepared remarks little bit shorter than normal but it's the first quarter, so always a little less to talk about. Rob, we can open it up for questions now.