Mike Porcelain
Analyst · Northland Capital. Please go ahead
Thank you. Given the various global news headlines relating to political volatility and trade wars, I'm quite proud of our Q1 performance. I believe our performance is evidence of the market leadership that our products have and substantiates my belief that customers will increasingly turn to us to fulfill their needs for secure wireless communication.Let me give you some color by segment of our Q1 performance. In our Commercial Solutions segment, it was a great quarter. Net sales were $94.3 million compared to $78 million last year, a significant increase in 20.9%. Bookings in this segment were $75 million for the quarter, resulting in a book to the ratio of 0.8. Our Satellite Ground Station Technology Solutions, which consists primarily of our modems and amplifiers, both solid state and TWTA that are used in satellite communication had higher net sales this quarter as compared to last year. It was a good quarter for sales to both U.S. Government and international customers, and our Heights products continue to gain traction.During the quarter, we announced that our Heights networking platform was selected by Telefonica, one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world, for a number of their customers for a multiyear program to upgrade Vivo, Brazil and the Telefonica Argentina mobile networks in support of their 2G, 3G, and LTE cellular backhaul. We believe this contract bodes well in the Latin America market, and we hope to replicate this contract elsewhere around the world as mobile operators increasingly need systems that can handle more capacity.As we have said before, based on the anticipated increase in the number of satellites, both high throughput or HTS and LEO satellites expected to be launched, we believe that we are in the early stages of a multiyear period of growing demand. In fact, during fiscal 2020, we expect deliveries to increase on our previously received $20 million order for Ka and V-band TWTAs to support the new Jupiter high-speed satellite network.Given the increasing need to backhaul cellular traffic across remote areas around the world, we made a strategic decision this quarter to expand our Satellite Earth Station product line. Specifically, we entered into an agreement to acquire UHP Networks, a leading provider of innovative and disruptive satellite ground station technologies for a purchase price of approximately $40 million, of which $35 million is payable in cash and $5 million is expected to be paid in restricted stock.UHP is based in Canada and has developed revolutionary technology that is literally transforming the very small aperture terminal or VSAT market. For instance, UHP offers satellite modems, which can process up to 450 megabits per second of aggregate traffic processing over 190,000 IP packets per second. UHP modems have remarkably low TDMA overhead as compared to other TDMA providers.UHP's disruptive technologies were developed with a number blank sheet of paper and are unencumbered at legacy TDMA methods. In simple terms, their implementation of TDMA technology can result in a 20% efficiency over other TDMA implementations at a much lower cost. Being designed from the ground up, UHP satellites routers are truly universal and can switch on the fly between modes, using multiple configuration profiles that are built into the device. This universal flexibility allows mobile network operators to expand cell phone service to rural areas with full and highly efficient coverage.The acquisition of UHP provides a low price point within our product roadmap, and is anything we have ever offered before. Importantly, we expect to integrate UHP's TDMA technology into our industry-leading Height platform. This exciting combination provides a clear roadmap for our customers who have a variety of cellular back haul and fixed enterprise needs. Make no mistake, we are excited about the growth that we expect from this acquisition and overall, believe this product line will grow from current levels over the next several years.Now let me turn to our public safety and location technology product lines, whose first quarter of fiscal 2020 sales in aggregate were significantly higher as compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2019. Here fiscal 2020 is also shaping up to look like a terrific year. Our fiscal 2020 is definitively benefiting from our fiscal 2019 acquisitions, in particular customer reaction to our Solacom acquisition remains very positive. In fact, in November 2019, we announced that Solacom will provide call handling systems and solutions as the initial entering point for the entire country of Australia. Today, Solacom has been deployed around Australia and is expected to handle more than $8.9 million emergency telephone calls that are made there each year.During fiscal 2020, we expect to enable our version of advanced mobile location, or AML technology, in Australia. This will enable emergency services personnel to more accurately pinpoint the location of people calling from mobile devices. For those of you familiar with companies like RapidSOS, in simple terms, this is our version of it and we have big plans for it. In the future, we will roll out multimedia contact options for messaging and video calls. Over time, you will be able to leverage these technologies to our existing customers and to new customers, both in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.The acquisition of Solacom, although occurring just less than one year ago, in my mind, is certainly a success. We are on track to meeting our objectives and we have started to cross market to Solacom technology to several legacy customers who are using older technologies. With the recent acquisition of Solacom and the GD 911 business, Comtech has emerged as one of the largest next generation 911 contract holders in the United States.As an example, during the first quarter of fiscal 2020, we were awarded an $18.4 million multiyear contract extension to provide FCC mandates enhanced 911 services to Comcast, a major U.S. Voice over IP telecommunication carrier. Such contract extension highlights our expertise for these types of solutions. Looking forward, we have a strong base backlog and growing opportunities and end market conditions remain competitive but very healthy. All-in-all, given the product leadership strengths we have in our Commercial Solutions segment, we are optimistic that this segment will grow for many years ahead.Now let me turn to our Government Solutions segment. Net sales in this segment were $76 million in Q1 of fiscal 2020 as compared to $82.9 million in Q1 of fiscal 2019. Net sales of our mission critical technologies were lower as compared to last year due to the absence of approximately $8 million of sales made last year for BFT-2 satellites terminals. As previously announced, we do not expect any such sales in our fiscal 2020.Net sales of our High-Performance Transmission Technologies during this quarter were higher than the three months ended last year, driven by increased sales of our solid state high power amplifiers and related switching technologies, as well as increased sales of our troposcatter technologies, including our Modular Transportable Transmission System or MTTS troposcatter terminals.Bookings in our Government Solutions segment for Q1 of fiscal 2020 came in at $60.6 million. As everyone knows period-to-period fluctuations in bookings is normal for this segment. In this regard bookings this quarter do not reflect the full amount of orders expected from a large U.S. Army global fuel support contract that we won, or any amount from a forthcoming multimillion dollar contract to provide troposcatter equipment for use by the U.S. Marine Corps.As announced in October 2019, we were awarded a contract with $98.6 million ceiling from the U.S. Army, which calls for our Mission-Critical Technologies product line to provide global field support services for military satellite communication terminals around the world. The field support contract covers diverse engineering and technical skills to support these satellite terminals, including logistics, help desk, network engineering, security engineering, RF and satellite system engineering and support. Through October 31, 2019, the contract has been funded at only $24.4 million with additional funding expected to occur across the 12 month performance period plus a possible six-month extension period. As such, additional bookings in future quarters are expected.In addition, we were pleased to learn that during the early part of our Q2, the U.S. Government announced that our teaming partner on a U.S. Marine Corp troposcatter opportunity was awarded a 10 year $325 million IDIQ contract. Out teaming partner announced that it intends to subcontract the manufacture and delivery of all 172 troposcatter systems to Comtech, and we are currently negotiating contract terms with them, which we expect to be finalized soon.None of the expected contract award is currently in our Q1 bookings number or our backlog. We believe this multiyear opportunity validates Comtech's market-leading troposcatter technologies and expertise, and bodes well for the future as we continue to see strong demand for these products. In summary, although still early in the year, fiscal 2020 is looking like a multi-year of growth for our Government Solutions segment.Before turning it back to Fred, I do want to reiterate a few remarks about our recent success on our go forward strategy. Our fiscal 2020 results are clearly anticipated to benefit from the greater scale, more diverse earnings and expanded participation into growing markets that we set in place over the last few years. We believe our strategy of investing in marketing, research and development and focusing on both organic and acquisition growth has unquestionably proved successful.In fact, as we sit here today, over $400 million or 60% over our 2019 revenues did not exist in fiscal 2015. Software sales are increasingly becoming more important and today, it is fair to assume that approximately 50% of our Commercial Solutions segment revenues or 25% of the total company's revenues are now software-based. To me, this is impressive.We believe our strategy of deploying cash and capital for acquisitions is also paying off. Clearly, we have successfully completed three acquisitions TCS, Solacom and GD Next Generation 911. And as announced in November 2019, we are working to complete our fourth with UHP and we have also other deals in the pipeline. From our perspective, acquisitions bring more programs, more capabilities and will allow us to achieve more profitable revenue growth than we could achieve by ourselves. Like we have demonstrated with our recent acquisitions, we only intend to do acquisitions that we believe fit into our culture and values, and ones that we believe can deliver long-term positive results for our shareholders.Finally one last comment which is a repeat from what I said back in September of 2019 when we released our fiscal 2019 results. When I sit back and look at Comtech, one key data point that I find is a great testament to our strength is our operating cash flow. Here, we generated over $185 million of GAAP operating cash flows over the last three fiscal years. Timing aside, we expect cash flows to grow from current levels and I am optimistic that our future is bright for many years to come.Now let me turn it back to Fred who will provide some closing remarks. Fred?