Pete Gundermann
Analyst · CJS Securities. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Debbie and good evening, everybody and we would first like to thank everybody for tuning in on a Monday night. It's not our favorite time to do it either. We appreciate you making time. So the headlines for our third quarter, which was a colorful quarter in million any respects, first and foremost, we saw very strong topline performance across the company setting a new sales record of $212.7 million. Second headline, bookings were strong also exceeding shipments at $233.8 million up 10% over shipments. Our bottom line was solid, largely aided by a change in our estate tax filing position which we'll talk a little bit more about as we work our way through this call. On the negative side, we continue to see some poor results from three struggling businesses we own that we've talked about before. We'll talk about that also more as we work our way through the call. And finally, we're narrowing and slightly adjusting our final 2018 topline forecast, which now calls for midpoint consolidated sales of $795 million. If we achieve that, we'll be up about 27% over where we were in 2017. So we're going to jump through a summary of the third quarter. We're going to do a year-to-date summary, go through our segment, we're going to go with Dave on a couple of the finer points on the economy [indiscernible] and our balance sheet and on this state tax situation and then I will take it back for a forecast discussion and questions at the end. So third quarter summary, revenue as I said, pretty strong at $212.7 million. It's a new all-time high and up 42% over the comparator period of a year ago. Acquisitions contributed about $21 million of the $63 million growth. Organic growth explained the remaining $42 million that's up about 28% organically over where we were last year. Our aerospace segment had a particularly strong quarter spilling another record revenue at $170 million, up about 30%, 32% over our comparator period of a year ago. Test also had a strong quarter of $43 million, doubling the comparator quarter of a year ago and continuing the strong performance that it had in the second quarter. But bottom line, net income ended up okay but was heavily influenced by some puts and takes. We ended up with net income of $17 million about 8% of sales, up substantially from $6.1 million and 4% of sales in the comparator period of a year ago. The biggest take was the change in our state tax position, which had the end of fact of netting up a $4 million credit in the quarter. Our biggest put was the continuing losses of three of our struggling aerospace businesses we've been talking about this for a few quarters now, companies that we refer to CCC [ph] aerostat and Armstrong, which turned in a combined operating loss in the quarter of $11.2 million. That includes $3.9 million program charge for an estimate to complete increase at CCC. These were a negative surprise to us and not what we expected. We'll talk about a little more when we get into the aerospace segment in a moment. Bottom line, we ended up with a diluted earnings per share of $0.52 for the quarter, up substantially from $0.18 a quarter one year ago and as I said earlier, bookings were very strong also at $234 million, our second highest quarter ever just barely behind our fourth quarter of last year, a book to bill of 1.1. That booking total does not include a noticeable of a large letter of intent I should say; that we announced in early October on a pending order that we are in negotiations on in the transportation industry for Test that we expect depending on options could be an additional $30 million to $50 million. So if you factor that into the bookings that the firm -- hard bookings that we also reported, it was a very active quarter in the marketing front for company. Our aerospace bookings were $197 million. That's a book-to-bill of 1.16 even on a record shipping quarter. Test bookings were a little bit lighter up $37 million, a book-to-bill of 0.86 leaving us with a backlog of just shy of $400 million at the end of the quarter, which was a record and very strong by historical norms. Summarizing the first three quarters on a year-to-date basis, revenue year-to-date was just over $600 million up 32.5% from where we were two or three quarters in 2017. That's total growth of $147 million, roughly half of which came from acquisitions and half was organic. Net income, the bottom line $34.3 million, 5.7% of sales, up again about 35% from where we were in 2017 through three quarters only a net income of $25.3 million. On a per diluted share basis it's a $1.04 this year versus $0.74 last year, Net income again was positively impacted by the change in tax position and negatively affected by the combined operating losses of what we're referring to in this call as our struggling three companies of cumulative or a combined I should say $28.3 million over the course of the year. And booking two, three quarters are strong aided no doubt by the last couple quarters in particular. 2018 bookings year-to-date are $617 million a book-to-bill of 1.03. Aerospace book-to-bill is the better of the two at 1.07. Test book-to-bill was a little bit lighter two or three quarters at 0.81. Turning to the segments, aerospace first, revenues in the quarter were just shy of $170 million up 32% over the comparator quarter of a year ago and as I said, a new record for the company. Operating profit was $16.2 million or 9.6%, that's lighter than we would like to see, but it is after operating losses from our three struggling companies of $11.2 million if you could consider the company's results, if we can get those three companies to breakeven, our operating profit for aerospace would have been up at 16% -- over 16%, that doesn't assume any contribution from those three companies all those that eliminate the losses that math. Bookings for the quarter were our highest ever for aerospace at $197 million, that's a book-to-bill of 1.16. Year-to-date book-to-Bill of 1.07 and our ending backlog for aerospace of almost $326 million, our highest ever setting us up we think very well for a strong close to the year and a strong expectation for 2019. Year-to-date aerospace revenues of $500 million is up 27% from last year and 83% of our total revenues. So we continue to be aerospace company first and foremost. Operating profit of $47.5 million or 9.5% of sales is up marginally from $46.7 million last year. Again last year we started strong and our aerospace results in particular weekend is the year went along, this year, it's just the opposite. We are getting stronger and stronger as the year progresses on the aerospace side in particular. Bookings two or three quarters of $536 million, so even on record revenues that's a book-to-bill of 1.07. just a couple brief comments about our markets and I'm referring in the press release to the two tables on Page 10. The top table on Page 10 of our press release is titled, Sales by Market, and the most significant thing there it seems to me is a commercial transport continues to be our dominant aerospace market 67% of total revenues and year-to-date revenues up 31%. Those are the two numbers in the top right corner of that table. The 31% is best understood by recognizing that most of our acquired businesses revenues go into the commercial transport area, particularly at Telefonix, not so much as you see. The bottom table has a couple of relevant points I think too, the first way, the bottom table is the one titled, Sales by Product Line. If you look way over on the right, one important thing to recognize the way the company is evolving is that we have pretty good balance among our major aerospace product. 2018 year to date electrical power and motion is about 36%, 37% of our total revenues. Lighting and safety is about 21%, 22% and avionics is 17%. So there was a time when we were much more heavily weighted towards electrical power and motion. I think the diversification serves us well in terms of stability and reach in the market. You can see that electrical power and motion also for the year is up 10% and for the quarter up 22.9%. So we are having a strong second half as we expected in electrical power and motion. Electrical power and motion is mostly, but not exclusively, made up of our [indiscernible] power and product line. The other number that jumps out at page is the 219% growth in avionics year-to-date. That again is mostly where the Telefonix product get categorized. So that explains the larger growth of $31 million in sales last year to $100 million two or three quarters this year. Just a few comments about our three businesses; Aerostat, CCC and Armstrong. We started talking about these businesses a few quarters ago, not necessarily to throw them under the bus, but to help the investor community in particular understand what our margin structure is in our aerospace business and to help reassure or help people understand that it's not due to some -- our margin pressures were not due to some global price pressure or some kind of competitive threats or something like that. They are very much isolated and localized in these three businesses and while we're not happy with the losses, we continue to believe that we've got pretty good opportunities in each of these three businesses and despite the losses, I feel we're making pretty good progress in the development of the businesses and the execution of the opportunities in front of them and it's a little early to talk about it, but I wanted to give one piece of data that out is evident from the budgeting exercises that we're going through right now internally, trying to figure out what our expectations are for 2019 and the tidbit is this. Collectively, the revenues from those three operations we expect to pretty much double next year. So volume as you can imagine will go long ways towards raising or minimizing some of the losses we guide here. Collectively it's not clear that these three companies are to be strong profits contributors next year, but if the plans that we have in place come about and we obviously believe they are going to come about, doubling our revenues will certainly go a long ways towards minimizing the drag and we won't have to talk about this anymore, which I'm looking forward to in 2019. Turning to our test business, excuse me, revenues in the third quarter were $43 million, another strong quarter compared to last year, more than double where we were on the comparator period a year ago and operating profit of $5.8 million for Test or 13.5% of sales. So they solidly contributed second quarter in a row. Revenue year-to-date is $100 million up 72% from $58 million two or three quarters in 2017. Our operating profit year-to-date is $10.1 million or 10.2% of sales. The improvement was largely driven by pickup in semiconductor demand in particular and bookings in late 2017, our bookings this year have not kept up with shipments. We get bookings two or three quarters of $80 million versus shipments of $100 million. That $80 million booking number again does not include the LOI that we announced in early October. If and when we can close that, we'll close that gap pretty rapidly and we have a number of other prospects in place that we think will [boy] [ph] the business quite well in 2019. In fact we think 2019 promises to be a pretty exciting year. We often talk about how shipments and revenues in our Test business are lumpy and from period to period, seems to be a little bit unpredictable. Bookings are even more so. The bookings are even lumpier than the shipments. So we aren't panicked by any stretch at $80 million in bookings on $100 million in shipments. We still have a backlog at the end of the third quarter of $72 million. We think that's pretty good for what we're expecting or hoping to do with that business going forward. So I am going to turn it over to Dave now for a discussion of the balance sheet and the tax situation.