Peter Gundermann
Analyst · Truist. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Debbie and good morning everybody. Our agenda this morning is to talk through a summary of our second quarter, which frankly was a little bit of a mixed quarter. On the one hand, sales were a little bit lighter than we expected as was the income statement. On the other hand, our core aerospace markets continue to recover nicely and we believe we will be setting up a better second half to 2021. I will do that summary to begin with. Then I am going to turn it over to Dave for a more specific discussion on our income statement and balance sheet, some special items that are happening or expected to happen in the near future. And we are also going to be reinstituting some revenue guidance more than we have been since the pandemic took hold. It’s a little bit of a risky item, but we are here in August. We are well into the second half already. Much of the business that we plan to execute in the second half is in work. So, it seems a reasonable time to do such a thing. And then, of course, we will close with questions and answers. So, the second semester – or excuse me, second quarter, revenue was frankly similar to previous quarters we have had recently at about $111 million. We have been bouncing around a band from say $105 million to $115 million since the third quarter of last year. And as one might expect, we are not setup to be profitable at that revenue range. Our goal has been and continues to be since the pandemic took hold to execute on our responsibilities in terms of development programs that we think are important to our future and stay cash positive and financially healthy, waiting for the markets to recover. Frankly, when the pandemic took hold in late first quarter, early second quarter of last year, a few of us would have expected that we would be sitting here a year later, waiting to see strong recovery, but that’s how long it’s taken. And even now, as all of you know, there are some clouds on the horizon for the aerospace industry, especially with the Delta variant that we are all dealing with. Our first quarter also was a little bit lighter than we expected in part because of supply chain problems, which have become familiar to refrain, not only in our industry, but many industries these days. It’s a little hard to estimate and it’s not really an auditable number, but we feel that our second quarter, absent any supply chain headaches would have been $5 million to $10 million higher in terms of revenue, which would have made our income statement look quite a bit different than it does. Still, in many respects, we actually feel like we are making quite a bit of progress and we think that things are coming around and starting to recover pretty strongly. Even with our second quarter results when compared to the first quarter, we feel like we are on a pretty positive trend. And both Dave and I feel like the first quarter is a more relevant comparator actually than the year ago quarter because the year ago quarter when the pandemic was taking hold was full of chaos all around the world. Compared to the first quarter, revenue was up 5%. Our GAAP net income loss was reduced pretty substantially. Dave will talk through those numbers. Our adjusted EBITDA went from a slight loss to a slight profit and cash from operations improved from a negative $7 million to a positive $4.5 million. So we feel like we made progress even on a reduced revenue level, but the best news for the quarter is that our aerospace markets continue to show signs of recovery relative to where they were earlier in the pandemic. On a global basis or a macro basis, business Jet and GA orders have been very strong for major OEMS. I won’t repeat it, but you have probably seen book-to-bills in the industry for our OEM customers of, in some cases 1.5 up to 2 or even higher. And narrow-body transport activity has been very strong with increasing utilization, especially in the U.S. and China, but also in other places around the world and plans to increase production rates both in Seattle and in Talus. Military aircraft, a third part of our aerospace business has been pretty consistent throughout the pandemic and remains so. The strength in the market has led to pretty solid improvement in our aerospace bookings. Our aerospace bookings in the second quarter were $118 million, which was a book-to-bill of 1.32x. 1.32x is normally something we would be jumping for joy about. It continues a string of steady improvement in bookings on a quarterly basis since the pandemic took hold. Going back to the second quarter of last year, we hit a low point of $43 million and since then, our quarterly totals have been – we went from $43 million to $65 million to $74 million to $100 million and now to $118 million. So we are pleased with that trajectory, keeping in mind, of course, that in 2019, before the pandemic took hold, we were running typically in the $175 million quarterly booking range. So even though $118 million is a solid book-to-bill, it’s still a ways away from where we were pre-pandemic. And given that historically, a significant part of our business has been wide-body related and wide-body continues to be very weak in terms of utilization and flights and production rates, it’s unclear at this point how long it’s going to take to get back to that level. It’s probably reasonable to assume that $175 million quarterly aerospace bookings, is going to be a challenge until we see some wide-body recovery. And again, the Delta variance has pushed back recovery that we thought was going to be taking place right about now actually. Moving away from aerospace towards test, our test bookings performance hit a real soft spot in the second quarter, $8 million, which is a real drop off compared to the $24 million average that we’ve had for the previous 4 quarters. Our plan for the quarter wasn’t $8 million. It was actually in excess of $20 million. We blame COVID, frankly, for a lot of the delay and not necessarily for competitive losses. There is a handful of programs that we are pursuing. We’re still pursuing. They have been delayed. We feel because of COVID, we can’t point to a competitive loss that brought us from our expectation of over $20 million down to $8 million for the quarter. So that being the case, we would hope for and expect a rebound in bookings for our test business in the current quarter and in the fourth quarter of this year. Taken together, aerospace and test, consolidated bookings for the quarter were $126 million. That’s a book-to-bill of 1.14, which we’re still pretty pleased with, leaving us with a backlog at the end of the second quarter of $313 million. I’ll jump straight to our expectations before turning it over to Dave of what we expect to happen in the third quarter and the fourth quarter, and that is we’re predicting revenues in the $115 million to $120 million range for both of those quarters. We expect the fourth quarter to be slightly higher than the third quarter based on schedule. And we believe that, that kind of revenue performance, given the way the company is set up right now will get us in the range of breakeven on our income statement and solidly positive on an adjusted EBITDA basis. There are risks. The major one that I already referenced is our supply chain challenges. These are things that everybody is wrestling with these days. It makes running a business a little bit unpredictable. Our sense is that things aren’t getting much worse at the moment, but we don’t see them getting a whole lot better either. So that’s a complicating factor, and we’ll have to see how things work out in the next not just two quarters, but frankly, probably a little bit longer as the world kind of gets back to some level of normalcy. Also, our revenue projection for the third and fourth quarter is dependent on some level of book and ship business, quick orders that come in and go out that are somewhat unexpected, and there’s usually a regular flow to them. Those orders had largely dried up when the pandemic took hold, which made earlier predictions much more difficult, they are starting to come back and we are assuming continued progress in a book and ship business. So we have a healthy backlog, we’re getting book and ship orders, supply chain is a risk. But when you balance it all out, we think $115 million to $120 million is where we’re going to be. Said another way, though, if we could wave a magic wand and solve supply chain, we would, we think, comfortably be above $120 million on average. So we are building in some level of conservatism there in those numbers, hopefully enough. With that, I will turn it over to Dave.