Peter Gundermann
Analyst · CJS Securities. Please proceed with your questions
Right. But we got the award in the end of September. Dave will talk a little bit about what the requirements are. But we basically got our full application amount of $14.7 million. There was a small benefit in the third quarter of $1.1 million and a reduction of cost of goods. It'll be a much more significant impact in the fourth quarter and the first quarter as the thing has a six-month period of performance. The bright spot in the quarter, for sure, was bookings, consolidated of $153.5 million, book-to-bill 1.37. That continues a very positive trend over the last four quarters. And I'm going to throw out a bunch of numbers, which are evident in the table on the last page of our press release. The last four quarters, total bookings have trended very positively, $116 million to $120 million to $126 million to $154 million over the last four quarters. Total for the last four quarters, $516 million, a book-to-bill of 1.16 over shipments over the last four quarters. The numbers are driven by a very positive Aerospace trend and a negative Test trend. So a real mix change in business. In terms of bookings, aero bookings in this most recent quarter were $142 million for a book-to-bill of 1.49. So 50% higher than shipments. And again, the sequence over the last four quarters, if you look at that table is very noteworthy from our perspective, $74 million to $100 million to $118 million to $142 million, that means the total for the last four quarters in our Aerospace segment was $435 million, a book-to-bill of 1.22. One caveat in there is that in the most recent quarter, we did get a significant amount of bookings that are categorized in our aerospace group, but when they ship, they will appear as in the other category, which we expect to happen over 2022. And that total is somewhere in the neighborhood of about $17 million. The aerospace news is driven by pretty good, a pretty solid set of good news across most of the industry that we service. Narrowbody activity in particular is very strong. Flights are up. Load factors are up, and production rates are ramping with the -- primarily driven by 737 MAX. We're shipping in the mid to high teens these days or we were through the third quarter in terms of ship sets per month. And retrofit activity is picking up noticeably. So, we think that's been a major driver, not only for the strength in the last quarter, but looking forward, we see a target rich environment there that we expect will drive us very positively for the foreseeable future. Widebody activity on the other hand remains pretty subdued. But we are encouraged by the current using of international travel restrictions, particularly in the U.S. which should pick up or should promote widebody utilization, as we close out 2021 and enter 2022. Similarly business jet demand for the OEMs has been very strong. I'm sure you've all read about the book-to-bills that the major OEMs are reporting. We should benefit from that in terms of higher production rates forecast for 2022. We aren't necessarily seeing that in our production yet. There's a lag between their orders and -- to their -- from their customers and their orders to us. But we're sitting on that and looking to see what our 2022 production rates are going to be like. We expect them to be higher. And finally, military aircraft, about 10% of our business in a typical year, is stable, remain strong, mostly driven by F35 these days, and a few other premiere programs. While I'm talking about the aerospace market and industry, I do want to take a little bit of a detour here and talk about an emerging opportunity, which we're pretty excited about. And some of you have probably read about there is a trend or a number of startups in the industry and more established companies also who are developing electric aircraft. And often these aircraft are categorized as eVTOL airplanes, electric vertical takeoff and landing airplanes, but also conventional aircraft with electric propulsion. We are of the opinion -- after having done some development and a pretty comprehensive review of the industry that some of our skillset is directly applicable to these types of aircraft. We haven't talked about it too much as a kind of main course of conversation over the last couple of years, but we have been developed -- busy developing a franchise of electrical power distribution, primarily for smaller airplanes. And many of you have heard me talk about, or us talk about programs like the Textron, Denali or Pilatus PC-12, or the Bell 525 more recently, we've been talking about our involvement in the FARA and FLRAA competition for the U.S. Army Future Lift. The capabilities we have and the expertise we have developed is increasingly apparent -- is directly applicable to this emerging electric or eVTOL segment of the industry. And I don't have a whole lot of predictions beyond this here today, other than to do this little bit of introduction, because we expect that as we wrap up this year and move into next year, this part of our business will get a few headlines and we expect that it should be a promising area of -- for us to plan as we go forward. Skipping over to our Test business. Test has had a tough spell here. It's been a downward trend with both sales and bookings under pressure the last few quarters. We think of it as an $80 million-plus business. So, we need to average at least $20 million a quarter in bookings to keep things healthy. And the last few have been about half of that. Our second quarter was about $8.2 million, and this quarter -- third quarter was $11.1 way off where we want to be. We've talked about it before and the story has not changed. We feel like these delays in orders are largely related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the work-from-home scenario that a lot of our customers in this space are dealing with. We do not feel that we have lost anything competitively. And we are seeing some signs of life. Our October bookings, subsequent to the third quarter or the first month of the fourth quarter came in at just shy of $12 million, $11.9 million. So, we booked more in October than we did in the third quarter, which was more in the second quarter. So, the optimist in me says that hopefully things are starting to break loose. And our fourth quarter bookings levels should put us back on a healthy track. Taken together, we ended the quarter with a backlog of $354 million. That's up from the beginning of the year when we began with $283 million and we think sets us up pretty well for expectations going forward, which I'll talk about more in a few minutes. But for now I want to turn it over to Dave to go through some of the specifics of the income statement and our banking arrangement and some of the cash events. Dave?