Stephanie Kushner
Analyst · Roth Capital Partners. Please go ahead
Good morning. Thank you, Joni. I’m pleased to be joined today by Jason Bonfigt who was announced as our new CFO just yesterday. Jason has been with Broadwind for eight years in both line management and financial roles. Most recently, he’s been our VP and Corporate Controller. Jason has an undergraduate degree in Accounting and MBA from Northwestern and CPA. I’m excited about the breath of thinking that Jason brings to his new role, and personally, very pleased to relinquish this CFO title and to be able to increase my focus on the commercial and strategic side of the business. Our Q2 results were consistent with our guidance, $43 million of revenue, $2 million of EBITDA and a $0.05 per share operating loss. Our revenue was flat with Q2 of 2016. The short summary is that tower sales were down, offset primarily by revenue gain from the addition of Red Wolf, but also reflecting the early signs of an uptick in gearing revenue, which will be more pronounced in the second half. Towers performed very well in the quarter. Segment earnings rose from last year, despite a 19% lower volume throughput because of improved mix, higher productivity and cost efficiencies. We’re seeing strong operational performance in towers. Our production leaders are consistently achieving our productivity improvement objective. Our market outlook is mixed with near-term weakness in towers, strong recovery in gears, some modest softness in gas turbine installations and continuing weak demand for new CNG stations. Our diversification and growth strategy is gaining traction. Over the past several quarters, we’ve invested in our commercial organization, adding positions and boosting training and development, and added some important technical certifications. I’m excited to see that we’re growing relationships with important customers like Komatsu and Caterpillar. At our Weldments business, we’ve begun production of fabrication for asphalt plant supporting road construction infrastructure. After a slow start, our Process Systems business is also growing. We just received our first order for large welded vertical separator vessels from a significant new oil and gas customer. We continue to be active with regard to bolt-on acquisition opportunities that we’ll add further to our customer diversification strategy and add new technical capabilities. On the next slide, towers bookings have been low this year in part due to low volumes of turbine awards. The industry has experienced, somewhat, of a pause in signed turbine contrasts, despite the very high-volume of development projects in the pipeline and our largest customers are reducing inventories of components, such as towers in the face of this weakness. The contrast in Broadwind orders versus last year is especially, large because that’s when we signed a three-year framework agreement. At least, for the next few quarters, our customers indicating they will we purchasing at the low end of the contract quantities, which leaves us with available capacity. We continue to work aggressively to expand our customer base and secure new tower orders to fill both plants. We were pleased to see that the political efforts to initiate steel tariff under Section 232 had paused since those tariffs, unless also applied to important towers, would have hurt our competitiveness as a U.S. tower manufacturer. I’m excited to say that the order rebound in gears that we reported last year has accelerated. Gearing orders more than doubled to $11.6 million in the quarter, mainly a surge from oil and gas customers, both long-term customers and some new ones added this year. And even outside of oil and gas, our other orders were up as well. The plant has been performing well, and that is positioning us to win new business. We’re also seeing some increased activity with mining customers. Although this is not yet reflected in bookings, we believe this should support strong order intake in second half. Process Systems orders of $4.4 million were soft because of low gas turbine aftermarket bookings and no CNG equipment orders. Q3 is starting much stronger, with about $3.5 million booked in the month of July alone. And at June 30, our ending backlog was $156 million. We’re seeing some unusual dynamics in the U.S. wind market, mainly because of the specific terms of the PTC extension. As you can see in the left chart, wind power capacity under construction or in advanced development between now and the end of the decade remains strong and continues to grow, with nearly 26 gigawatts either under construction or in advanced development status. Those 26 gigawatts are spread across 143 projects in 29 states, 30% of which are in the Midwest and 27% in Texas. However, completions are becoming increasingly back-end loaded towards the end of the decade. As you can see in the right-hand graph, in their forecast of installations, make us adjusted four-year installation estimates upward by about 6%, but they’ve tweaked down their 2017 estimate slightly, while adjusting up the slope of the growth curve. So now the expectation is for more than 12 gigawatts coming online in 2020, the final year to qualify for the 100% PTC. During the first part of 2017, the industry has seen some sluggishness in awarding new turbine orders as developers push to improve their economics in the face of tax code uncertainty and declining power prices. We, in turn, are seeing this in terms of the tower market and are continuing to drive improved productivity and stringent cost management to improve competitiveness. Following a temporary low, we fully expect a strong market emerge during the next few quarters, and are bracing for a resurgence of last year’s boom in the next few years. Turning to gears. We’re moving through an inflection point in the demand for U.S. manufactured gears this year. And in our markets, the uptick feels more pronounced than this April forecast suggests, partly because we have expanded our customer base. The non-automotive U.S. Gearing industry has been in a multiyear slump, triggered by weak oil and gas and mining segments and a strong U.S. dollar, but the market is shifting. Exported gearing is recovering because of the weaker dollar, which is down more than 8% year-to-date against a trade weight of basket of currencies. In addition, domestic demand has risen due to the recovery in the oil and gas markets and generally strong industrial activity. Our customers are telling us that they have shifted a higher share of their buy back to U.S. gear manufacturers, partly because of the buy America political environment, and because during the last oil and gas cycle, their long supply chain was costly to turn off and turn on. Our Process Systems segment participates in the natural gas markets in two ways: supporting utility gas turbines; and a compressed natural gas market. The chart on the left tracks global orders awarded for gas turbines for power jam, both units and gigawatts. So as you can see, orders totaled about 44 gigawatts in 2016, with 275 units. The anecdotal market estimates project slightly order – slightly lower orders this years, maybe 40 gigawatts. With only Q1 industry data available, 7 gigawatts were awarded, down from 11 gigawatts in 2016. However, this almost certainly overstates the decline as orders tend to back-end loaded in this industry. For Red Wolf, our first half orders for content for new gas turbines was flat versus prior years, although lower in the U.S. market and high overseas. The bulk of Red Wolf’s business, historically, about two-thirds, goes into the gas turbine aftermarket, which is tied to the install base of turbines and specific campaigns to repair, retrofit and operate the turbines. The order intake for that business has been soft for Red Wolf in the early months of this year, but we’ve begun to see some recovery and expect a stronger second half order intake rate. We are still learning about the key drivers for bookings in this aftermarket business, which can vary significantly depending on the model of the turbine, the intervals between outages and the mix of the work being done. Our other Process Systems product line is the manufacturer of compression units for CNG stations. In the chart on the right, our new CNG station additions in the U.S. plotted against the spread between the CNG and diesel fuel prices. Since the mid-2014 slump in oil, new station bills have been down sharply, the spread between natural gas and diesel, once well above $1 a gallon, is now down to about $0.12. Given the very limited market for new stations and an entrenched set of competitors, we’ve not booked units for any new stations this year. We have begun to gain some traction mainly in producing decompression and other equipment for what is referred to as the virtual pipeline, that is moving gas in high-volume trailers between pipelines. I’ll turn this over to Jason now to talk about the financials.