Peter Gundermann
Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions
Thank you Debbie, and good morning everybody. Thanks for tuning into our call. I'm going to open the conversation here with a high level summary of our first quarter and an outlook for our markets and turn it over to Dave for a more detailed financial summary and a review of our banking arrangements and then we'll close with questions and answer as usual. When I look at the first quarter, to me there are, kind of two headlines, one is that we had obviously low sales by historical norms, not a real surprise there given the ongoing effects of the pandemic and where we are in the recovery cycle, the second headline looks more positive and that is that bookings have been showing steady and consistent improvements over the last few quarters and we're going to dive into that in a little bit more detail. Specifically, the relationship in our company between bookings and shipments, which we think, it tends to be pretty strong and pretty close, especially given the way that we measure bookings and we talk about them pretty regularly in our quarterly reports and in these calls. In our business, there's generally a two to three quarter lag between bookings and shipments. In other words, bookings today influence shipments, two to three quarters out, or look at the other way shipments today, are heavily influenced by bookings two or three quarters ago. We just finished the quarter with revenue of $105 million, again, very low by historical norms. You've got to go back to like 2013 to find that level consistently and it's no coincidence, in our view that bookings two to three quarters ago were anemic and highly influenced by the onset of the pandemic at that time. I'm talking about the second quarter of 2020 and the third quarter of 2020 specifically. Our bookings in the second quarter if you were to look back, we're totaled about $61 million on a consolidated basis for the company and in Q3 last year, $82 million, so on average of $72 million, that compares to a quarterly average in 2019 of $176 million on average in 2019, which was actually not a very strong booking year for us for a number of other reasons, for the $176 million average dropping to $72 million in the second and third quarter average of last year, is obviously a substantial drop. The good news is that bookings since then, have shown a pretty good come back, pretty solid come back. Our fourth quarter last year was $116 million and our first quarter, the one just completed, was $120 million. So on that two-quarter period or six-month period, we averaged $118 million in bookings per quarter. So we've bounced up from $72 million on average in the second and third quarter last year to a $118 million in the fourth quarter and the first quarter this year, really good progress. Looking at the segments. Most of the improvement is on the aerospace side. If you look at our quarters consecutively, and these numbers are spelled out on the table on the last page of the press release. Since the second quarter last year, bookings have gone from $43 million, to $65 million, to $74 million, to a $100 million. That's just aerospace bookings. Now $100 million, that progress, if you look at it on percentage terms, can look pretty good. But, of course, in 2019, our aerospace quarterly average was about $160 million. So even at our first quarter level of a $100 million, we're still a pretty far ways off from where we were in pre-pandemic times when we were averaging about $160 million in Aerospace bookings per quarter. So what's driving the improvement? If you look into our Aerospace group, most of you know this, we have two smaller business units and one larger one. The two smaller ones are military aircraft and what we call business jet or general aviation, and both of those tend to be in pretty good shape. Pre-pandemic, they were about - each about 10% of our total business, and we expect them to be at higher percentage this year in part or largely due to the lower expectations for commercial transport, which I'll get to in a minute. I'm not going to take everybody through the different dynamics in military aircraft, in general aviation, most of the people who follow our company, follow the industry and you're probably well aware that military aircraft has been largely unaffected by COVID, certainly no demand effect, and if anything business jet demand has bounced back strongly, which we expect will result in increasing unit demand as time goes on here and that's important to us because most of our business jet sales, are line fit and not aftermarket, so production rates are important. So long story short, if you look at aerospace, military aircraft, and business jets are both in relatively good shape. The commercial transport side is the big issue. Again, no real news here. In the quarter just finished we had commercial transport sales of $38 million, which was down from $103 in first quarter of 2020 and that's a significant drop. We are encouraged however, by the narrow body side where domestic flying is increasing dramatically where and when the pandemic is under control. Recognizing the wide body remains under significant pressure, so a reasonable question might be, what is our split between narrow bodies and wide bodies historically and how are we positioned for today's world where a narrow bodies are expected to recover relatively soon and wide bodies may lag quite a bit. And these are numbers that we have not typically talked a whole lot about in this setting, but we've done some analysis to nail this down and it might seem like an obvious thing, but actually the way our business is structured, it's not always obvious where our products end up. So it's been a little bit of an effort, but the safe way to think about our business up to today is that, our commercial transport business has almost a 50-50 split, between narrow bodies and wide bodies. And also if you cut it a different way, almost a 50-50 split between line fit and aftermarket I don't think I said that very clearly, both the narrow-body and the wide-body revenue that we have a split almost 50-50 line fit and aftermarket. So you can almost think of our commercial transport business if you picture a 2 by 2 matrix with wide body on one-axis and wide-body, narrow-body on one-axis and line for the aftermarket on the other axis it's almost 25% of our commercial transport volume in each bar. And again our perspective, not different from the conventional wisdom that's out there in the industry right now is that wide-body line fit and the aftermarket is under pressure and will remain under pressure until international travel picks up and we're hopeful for that to happen at least between the rich countries over the world where vaccines are likely to get pandemics under control. And we hope to see some progress for that as 2021 goes on. But on the narrow body side, things are looking more promising. Everybody in North America is aware of the increasing flights and load factors and crowds generally gathering at airports every day for domestic flying. It's another example how, when and where the pandemic is under control, people want to fly. The two geographies in the world where this is most evident are in China and the US and we hope, and expect that Continental Europe will be in that camp sooner rather than later. That supports the aftermarket. Flying supports the aftermarket. And production rates also are trending up on the narrow-body side as most people know, including especially for us the 737 MAX. We, the MAX, back in 2019 was our biggest single aircraft production program and it is picking back up, although still at a slow rate. We were shipping at a volume or rate of about five or six aircraft per month in the first quarter and we expect that to rise to over 20 in the fourth quarter, based on the best understanding we have right now of the production line expectations in Seattle. So that talks a lot about aerospace. Again, pretty solid expectations for military, and business jet, and reason to be optimistic on the narrows body side for commercial transport, that 50-50 narrow body, wide body split, we would expect by the end of this year to look quite a bit different, skewed towards the side of the narrow-bodies with increased flights that are happening now and increased production rates up for the 737 MAX, and also potentially for the A320 line in Europe. Flipping over to the Test side and I can say a whole lot about Test today. That Test has done well through the pandemic in terms of bookings and shipments. Shipments in the last four quarters were to $91 million Volume up about 15% and bookings for the last four quarters were $96 million for a positive book to bill of 1.06. So our expectation for the Test side of the business remains strong. It's a combination of municipal government spending, potentially the beneficiary of some of the stimulus efforts underway in DC. These days, and also a large element of defense spending, which has been strong. We expect we will continue to be strong over the coming year. I'll pause here for now, and turn it over to Dave to talk through our financial statements, Adjusted EBITDA levels, bank covenants,, et cetera. Dave.