Paul Tufano
Analyst · Needham and Company. Your line is now open
Thank you, Lisa, and good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining our call. If you turn to the third quarter summary, in the slide deck first off we are seeing that I am very pleased with our performance this quarter. It’s the fifth consecutive quarter that we met or exceeded our commitments and we are very pleased with that. From a revenue perspective, we generated $604 million of revenue that’s up 5% year-on-year, it is the third consecutive quarter of revenue growth. That growth was really fuelled by performance in four of our various market sectors, our Aerospace and Defense sector grew 16% year-over-year primarily with broad based growth from existing customers. Our Medical segment grew 17% year-over-year. This is the first quarter of year-on-year growth of any significance since the second quarter of 2016. We are pleased with that, that’s primarily driven by growth in our cardio and diabetic care programs. Our Test & Instrumentation segment grew 34% year-over-year. We are especially fortunate to have a broad engagement of semi cap equipment manufacturers of our portfolio and given the strength of that sector we are enjoying good growth. And finally, we saw our computing up 16% year-over-year driven by storage and security providers. From a gross margin standpoint, we posted 9.4 points of gross margin, that’s a 20 basis point improvement year-on-year. Our non-GAAP operating margins were 4.1%, our EPS was $0.39. Our cash cycle days was 73 days, that’s an 8-day improvement over the previous period a year ago, was a seven day deterioration from the second quarter of this year. Now clearly our range for cash conversion days has been 72 and 68, but quite frankly we were hoping to be below 70. The results of that increased quarter-on-quarter of cash cycle days is that our cash flow from operations was about flat at minus 3 million. We are 90 million positive on cash flow from operations for the year. Our guidance of 125 to 150 stays intact. And from an ROIC standpoint, we posted 9.9% ROIC that’s a 130 basis point improvement from a year ago period. So all-in-all, I consider this quarter a solid quarter. If you turn to the next page which focuses on bookings, as we had previously stated, revenue growth is essential for us to achieve our financial objectives. And therefore our bookings growth drives revenue and we’ve had our focus on bookings and set our goal to be equal to or better than $150 million of booking in the second half of the year. I am extremely pleased that we are able to post that 150 mark in the third quarter. As you look at our bookings mix, 60% of our bookings came from high value markets, 40% from traditional markets and a pretty good distribution between Industrial, A&D and a little bit in Medical. So let’s do a little color on these bookings. Telco, as you said before we are very much focussed on winning business in next generation telecom. And I am extremely pleased that we have a new customer this quarter in the Free Space optics business. I think this is an exciting area that is critical to both telecommunications and data center opportunities and we are happy that they have selected us to be their partner. In Industrial, we have a new customer in energy management area, and we have seen additional wins in smart cities. In A&D, we have new programs, a number of existing customers with existing customer’s experience [ph] primarily to the late ammunitions, communications and avionics. I would like to mention that we have one win, relatively small. It is the largest win we’ve ever had in our RF area. And as you know our investment in RF and our high speed design center is a key focus for us. We are very encouraged by this win which is a defense win in that space. And then finally in Medical, we continue to see growth on new platforms with existing customers. So, clearly we’ve posted or achieved the first result [ph] our objective for the fourth quarter is to continue this progress and we look forward to talking with you about that in the quarter ahead. Now looking -- turning to the next slide, earlier this year we laid out a number of key initiatives. And just as we said, we have always said that our goal is to drive revenue growth. And that revenue growth probably at the right mix and at the right level of profitability to improve our financial performance to allow us to achieve our ultimate financial goals of operating margins greater than 5% in ROIC of 12. And in order to do that, we felt it was important to continue to focus on three key areas. First is the optimization of our global network, both with the focus on getting consistent customer experience around the globe and more importantly to drive improved levels of operational execution. The second was to implement our market sectors sales organization that drives bookings growth and therefore revenue growth, and finally to expand our engineering capabilities and solutions. Now as we have done over the last several quarters, I’d like to now give you an update on where we stand with some of these initiatives. For the release of our network optimization, a major action that we took was to relocate the headquarters, the corporation from Houston to Phoenix and we’ve talked about that in the past that was facilitated ability [ph] to bring the entire corporate staff together, drive better communication, better speed and more thoughtful decision making. I am pleased to announce that move is substantially complete, and that was done with no disruptions in our business. Secondly, last month we announced that Mike Buseman would join us as the head of global operations. You know Mike’s been on board for two months. He is actively touring our sites and he’s accelerating our agenda on operational excellence in customer focus and we are extremely pleased to have Mike on board. As it relates to our market sector organization, our business development teams are full strength and more importantly we’ve added two new experienced leaders in our go-to-market organization. Lind Boruk [ph] now heads our Aerospace & Defense industry. Lind [ph] comes to us with a vast experience in this space having previously worked at Boeing, Honeywell and Rockwell Collins. In the Medical space, Todd Martensen has joined us to lead Medical. Todd has a long history in Medical device sales having worked at Johnson & Johnson, Danaher and Braun. And [Indiscernible] who is our previous head of Medical is transitioning to lead our efforts to drive our partnership with Qualcomm on our recently made announcement. Now clearly, our objective is to drive our bookings growth in excess of $250 million per quarter and we’ve laid that out as our ultimate goal in 2019. We will do that by aligning our business development, our engineering and operations organizations to create better value propositions for our customers. I am pleased by the traction we are making and I am excited by the challenge that lies ahead of us. As we look at engineering and the expansion of our solutions capabilities, you know it is our fundamental belief that a robust set of engineering solutions will yield to higher value engagements that are stickier. And to that end over the past year we have been investing in a broad range of extend capability, either in Medical or Defense or surveillance or next-gen Telco. Or in RF and high speed design in IoT, the last two of which are tied to our relocation at Phoenix and the establishment of our two new design centers. To me, these are the keys to driving that profit growth and more importantly more sustainable high value customer projects. Now a few weeks ago, Qualcomm Life announced that their new smart single used biometric sensor reference designs and in part of that announcement they indicated that Benchmark has been selected to commercialize this product and serve as a device design and manufactured record with the FDA. We are extremely excited to be parting with Qualcomm in this area. You know first off, we believe this is an exciting new class of Medical devices that will facilitate not only patient monitoring, but also outcome based medicine. And the combination of these sensors in Qualcomm HIPAA-compliant to that network will provide healthcare professionals access to near realtime data and I think makes some unique and significant advancement in healthcare going forward. So to be at the ground floor of this new market is extremely exciting for Benchmark. But moreover importantly, we are honoured that we were selected by Qualcomm Life. And we are hopeful that you know that selection was based on our long track record in the Medical device manufacturing design arena as well as our IoT capability. And we look forward to working with Qualcomm to first bring this device through the FDA certification and then to commercial availability, to drive market demand and more importantly to enhance future designs and further expand the market. So, you know this is an indication of how engineering and engineering led solutions can drive growth in exciting and new markets. And I feel this is a validation of our strategy and we are humbled by the opportunity to work with Qualcomm. As I turn to the next slide on the deck, which is an update to our progress on our second half milestone, just a level set as we stated earlier this year our target business model is to achieve operating margins of greater than 5.5 in our ROIC of 12%. And to do that we need to be at revenue of greater than 2.8 billion to 3.2 billion and in order to give you some waypoints or milestones to track our progress we laid out a series of interim milestones. This shall reflect those interim milestones for the second half of 2017. And so let me just further in and articulate our progress. On bookings, we said it would be, hope to be above $150 million by the second half of the year, I am pleased to say that we did 152 in the third quarter, so we are in line from a revenue mix standpoint we hope to be 65% of our revenue coming from our higher value market segments. We are currently at 68 and currently have been above 65 for the last three quarters. Our gross margins at 9.4% or above 10 basis points away from our target for the second half of the year. And on SG&A we have work to do with 5.3% at 30 basis points above where we want to be and on profit per square foot we are at $27 a square foot versus $29. Now for the last two we will be dependent on where the revenue and the profit is over the course over the next several quarters and therefore puts more emphasis than validation on why driving bookings in revenue growth and the right mix is so essential. So on balance I think we are tracking well against the majority of these targets. Still work to do and we will endeavour to make that happen. So with that I’m going to turn it over to Don, and Don will give you some color on the quarter and then we’ll take some Q&A.