Brad Feldmann
Analyst · Needham & Company. Please proceed
Thank you, Diane. Thank you everyone for joining us on the call. Today, I’ll be providing a summary of our fiscal year 2017 financial performance, a review of our recent investments and an update on our strategy. I will also be sharing some insight on our highly valued New York City Fare Payment System Award received in mid October. Then I will hand the call over to Anshooman Aga, our New CFO, who will discuss our financial results for the quarter and fiscal year in greater detail. Starting with Slide 3. To recap the fiscal year results, we have record sales for the fiscal year of $1.486 billion compared to $1.462 billion last year, net of $20 million in foreign exchange headwinds and up 3% on a constant currency basis. We also had record quarterly sales of $445.6 million in Q4 and very strong adjusted EBITDA of $50.2 million. For fiscal year '17, adjusted EBITDA was $105.6 million compared to $118 million last year, net of $1.9 million foreign currency exchange headwinds and $20.7 million of additional R&D investment. We are pleased to report that our adjusted EBITDA is in line with our fiscal year guidance. Increased C4ISR product sales and mission support solutions and improved financial performance in our transportation segment drove strong results in the fourth quarter. We also had very strong order intake in Q4 and ended the year with book-to-bill ratio of 1.07. With the announced win of the New York City Fare Collection contract in October, we now have the highest backlog in the company's history. We are very pleased with our Q4 financial performance and I wish to thank our great team for their hustle in winning the customer, one of our key strategic priorities which I will touch upon a bit later. Now on to Slide 4. I'd like to take a minute to step back and provide some context on our mission and technologies so I better can explain our strategy and how we're choosing to invest in Cubic's future. Here at Cubic, we have a common mission across our businesses. Ultimately, we seek to provide our global customers with better information or situational understanding so they can make better decisions. For our transportation customers, this means reduce -- reducing congestion in cities and making the daily lives of the commuting public more efficient. And for our military customers, this means driving, improved mission effectiveness, and operational readiness. Our solutions enable this increased situational understanding in cities, the battlefield, and training environments. We provide instrumentation to understand the environment, communications to transmit this understanding, cloud computing to process this understanding, algorithms and simulation to gain keener insights, and data visualization so our customers can apply this gained understanding effectively and efficiently. This common mission in our integrated cutting-edge technologies allow us to share know-how, processes, infrastructure, and people across our business units. Turning to Slide 5. We’ve made significant investments in the past years in these technologies and are welcoming their imminent payoffs. A great example of this is our recent win in New York. We’ve spent the past year and a half working on our bid, including investing $6.4 million on engineering capabilities in our back office validator and reader solutions, and we're very proud that the hard work and investment has paid off. Shortly after the close of fiscal year '17 in October, we were thrilled to announce that Cubic has been selected by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to replace the iconic Metro card with a proven next-generation fare payment system similar to that used on bus, tube, and rail services run by Transport for London. In fact, Transport for London partnered with us to win the MTA solution. Our extensive pre-contract engineering investments greatly benefited our bid and relationship with the MTA. The new system will allow customers to create personalized transit accounts to securely see ride history, check balances, and add funds. Our solution and our partners statewide will provide fare media, streamline fare collection, and phase out costly twenty-year old equipment. Ultimately, the new system will provide customers a more integrated travel experience across the region, including the Long Island railroad and Metro-North rail. Cubic's win in New York reinforces our position at the forefront of the worldwide shift to easy-to-use seamless and open payment methods. We are confident this win will lead to more major agency implementations that upgrade or replace existing systems to improve the lives of millions of travelers and enhance the efficiency of their operations, and the benefit of our investments will only continue to multiply. Turning to Slide 6. We are pleased with the critical strategic investments we're able to make in all our businesses this fiscal year. During fiscal year '17, we increased R&D investment by $20.7 million to develop technologies that we believe will help accelerate our strategy and goal 2020. I’d like to provide you with some detail on where the R&D investments are going in each area of our business. In transportation, these investments are focused on shifting from a program centric company to a new generation product centric company. These innovations include NextBus 2.0, Advanced Mobile, Open Payment and Cloud technologies. As we just discussed, we're seeing a return on our investment already with the New York award. In C4ISR, we continue to develop Halo, our software definable antenna technology that will bring network wideband communications to our Department of Defense customers. We're pleased with the resulting recent JCTD win to support the development of the joint area layer network. We are experimenting with some concepts to offer ISR as a service to our customers. We have completed the successful operational tests for the U.S. Army Transportable Tactical Command Communications program or T2C2. We expect a decision this winter to move from low rate initial production to full rate production on T2C2 driving further growth. In defense training, we've invested in combining training and gaming technologies to support the United States Navy's Littoral Combat Ship program with the creation and delivery of immersive game-based courseware that can be used to support other ship classes and platforms. We are also developing an intelligence surveillance reconnaissance and social media synthetic environment for the courseware, which increases training environment complexity and we're utilizing augmented reality to enhance training fidelity. These core investments position us for strong organic growth. Our superior solutions are driving global customer demand because we're focused on our customers most pressing needs. And with respect to internal initiatives, our investments in GEM and SAP are ensuring all the data that runs our business is in one place and we are utilizing a common process to drive effectiveness and efficiency. Next on to Slide 7. I want to briefly discuss how our investments are serving humanity. After hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, devastating Houston, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, our GATR team deployed its satellite antennas and personnel to support disaster recovery operations. Our expeditionary communication specialists were among the first to arrive in storm ravaged areas and set up communications infrastructure to enable rescue and recovery operations using GATR suite of solutions. With local communications lines down, our antennas provided Internet connectivity for clinics and hospitals and made it possible for civilians to notify others about their safety. We are very proud and thankful to have been able to connect people to their loved ones after these natural disasters. Turning to Slide 8. I would like to provide an update on our strategic priorities. Under Goal 2020, we're well on our way to becoming the global market leader in our transportation and defense C4ISR in training markets, achieving $2 billion in revenue, growing at 10% plus, with 10% plus operating margins, by executing on our five priorities of winning the customer, building NextCity, C4 ISR, and NextTraining globally and living One Cubic. On slide 9, winning the customer is the core of everything we do and the innovation is critical to the growth of the company. Our competitive edge and thought leadership and transportation has greatly increased and our strong customer relationships continue to generate contract awards. We are also combining capabilities and our C4ISR business to deliver innovative customer solutions. The Department of Defense recently approved the mobile unmanned demand distributed lethality, Airborne Network, Joint Capability Technology Demonstration, MOD Land JCTD that will leverage our ongoing investment in our wideband communications solution, that enables the Joint Area Layer network. With our selection, our multi-your investment in this capability has paid off in a major way. Additionally with our investment in combining training and gaming technologies, Cubic Global Defense has received four additional delivery orders, totaling $29 million to support the United States Navy's Littoral Combat Ship, LCS with immersive game-based courseware. On Slide 10. We're continuing to build NextCity globally, with the success of OneAccount, an enterprise back office system that transforms the customer experience and enables the introduction of new forms of card and mobile base payment and information. Earlier in the year, we expanded our OneAccount footprint with the contract award for the U.K.'s Abellio, ScotRail and our strategy is further validated by our win in New York City. There is a rise in demand for open payment systems across our transportation customer base and we're well-positioned for bids in Boston, Brisbane, and San Francisco. We remain extremely confident, our OneAccount solution leads the markets demand for advanced cloud-based back office systems. Emphasizing our strong relationship with Transport for London, our contract to provide services to London's Oyster and Contactless Ticketing system has been extended for a further three years until 2025. Cubic will continue providing operational and maintenance services to London's Oyster and Contactless Ticketing system, investing in further innovations to the benefit of TFL's customers as well as delivering at least $26 million in guaranteed savings to TFL. In mission solutions, GATR's, Army Transportable Tactical Command Communications or T2C2 program completed operational testing earlier this fiscal year. We continue to see accelerating demand and we anticipate the customer will proceed with a full rate production decision this winter. Additionally, we are partnering with a platform provider to offer our new Intelligence as a Service business model to support the DOD's expanding needs for real-time intelligence. We continue to build our NextTraining capability by developing and delivering innovative and integrated systems that facilitate and provide performance-based training for the U.S and allied nation militaries. Due to our position as a leading provider of instrumented combat training centers worldwide, we have received a contract award worth $26 million from a customer in the Asia-Pacific region for the delivery of three mobile combat training centers. Cubic will provide its latest generation laser-based simulation equipment for dismounted soldiers, vehicles, and numerous weapon configurations. This contract also includes the implementation of communication system components, after action review capabilities and exercise control system integration. During Q4, we also supported the United States Navy in opening the first Littoral Combat Ship, LCS training facility in San Diego. We're experiencing increased interest in performance-based training with the successful delivery of the initial Immersive Virtual Ship Environment, IVSE courseware that will help train thousands of sailors to gain competency in their shipboard duties. We are confident there will be further demand for our virtual courseware. We have delivered 297 airborne instrumentation systems on the Joint Strike Fighter program and have another 211 backlog to deliver by 2019 with potentially more than 2,000 systems to follow. We continue to make great progress on our Air Combat, Live, Virtual, Constructive LVC training contract with the Air Force Research Lab. This contract represents the future of the air combat maneuvering instrumentation market as it will allow synthetic entities to be played in the cockpit and enhance the training effectiveness and efficiency of fighter pilots. Finally on Slide 11. We are 80% done with our ERP implementation under our living One Cubic priority. We will finish our implementation soon in fiscal year 2018 and anticipate a 2% to 2.5% margin lift by fiscal year '19. Along with improved employee engagement scores across the business, our teams in transportation and defense are working together on engineering solutions. For example, our TR4 card reader and our New York Transportation bid utilized the expertise of our defense engineering team. The expertise in our common technologies allows us to share resources and deliver the most innovative solutions to our customers. Next I will ask Anshooman Aga, our CFO, to describe our fiscal year 2017 results in more detail. As you know, Anshooman joined us earlier this year from AECOM and became our CFO on October 1. His presence and new perspective has already made a great difference in Cubic's executive suite. We are delighted to have him on board.