William W. Boyle
Analyst · BB&T Capital Markets
Thanks, Jim. Good afternoon, and thank you, all, for joining us today. Our third quarter results, which I assume you all have by now, were generally in line with Wall Street expectations, with earnings per share of $0.69, a bit higher than the consensus forecast of $0.65. Although our sales of $340.4 million were a bit under the consensus of $349 million, which $3 million of that $9 million differential being due to currency rate movements. So the quarter was pretty much as you probably expected. The 2 major changes in the third quarter were the improvements in our backlog and cash flow from operations. Like everyone else in the defense marketplace, we've been impacted by the sequestration and overall DoD environment. However, as we have said in the past, we expect to be impacted less than most others, primarily due to our transportation presence and our inroads into international defense markets. Importantly, in the third quarter, defense systems backlog grew by $141 million and is now $91 million higher than at the end of last fiscal year. While defense systems sales in the third quarter were only $83 million, at the same time, they booked $234 million of new business into backlog, of which $159 million or 68% of that $234 million was international. In addition, our other defense segment, Mission Support Services, increased their backlog by $64 million so far this year to $801 million. Thus, in a very difficult DoD marketplace, our 2 defense segments have actually grown their backlog by $155 million this year, and this does not even include approximately $270 million of the very important littoral combat ship award of almost $300 million earlier this year. Since although that is sole-source, it's an ID/IQ contract, which goes into our backlog only as task orders are received. Transportation's backlog did decline this year by $121 million since year end. Some of this was expected due to the progress being made on major new contracts in Vancouver and Sydney. But about half of that decline, $59 million was simply due to currency exchange movements. Their total backlog, of course, remains very strong at well over $1.5 billion, $1,543,000,000 to be precise. With regard to cash flow from operations. After operating cash outflows of $56 million in the first 6 months of this fiscal year, we said that this would turn around in the second half and should be very strong next year. That turnaround, in fact, did happen in the third quarter with positive operating cash flows of $49 million, which made a big dent in the $56 million outflow earlier in the year. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jay Thomas, our CFO, who will review the specific segment results. Jay?