Edward J. Fred
Analyst · Roth Capital Partners
I don't know if there's necessarily a need to offset more reductions. I mean, let's -- and I'll -- this might be a long-winded answer, but I'm going to try to clear this up for everybody. A-10, we've had a 2-year negotiation with Boeing on engineering changes, et cetera. We finally concluded that, there'll be, as you'll see in the third quarter, an influx of cash from the Boeing program to settle outstanding receivables and claims. However, in any negotiation, you will lose something. Now at the current time, we've basically have taken a 2-point reduction in our gross margin. Let me move on to Spirit. Spirit comes to us, and we go to them, and we have a contract to build 134 ship sets of leading edges on the Spirit -- or the Gulfstream G650. Spirit offers us the opportunity to have what, in essence, is the life of the contract, contract. Now if anybody listened to the Spirit call yesterday, their block, the G650, of 350 ships sets has now increased to 400 ship sets. So using layman's terms, Spirit is either under contract or anticipating to be under contract for almost 400 of those aircraft. That's 266 more planes than we had on contract 6 months ago. In order to get the ability to build those 266 sets of leading edges, we had to take a price reduction in the unit price of delivered items from unit 135 out. Now you make a management decision to do that, because that's going to create 4 to 5 more years of production on a program. That said, let's take the 2 -- and real quick, the Northrop Grumman one. Northrop Grumman is going for, and this is well-publicized, this is not inside information, so nobody panic here, Northrop Grumman is trying to negotiate a multi-year contract for an E-2D buy. I believe the number is 32 E-2Ds, still looking to have us one buy. Just like Sikorsky has a 5-year multi-year aid is their latest one with the government. Now Northrop Grumman is looking at a 32-plane buy with the government. When that occurs, if that occurs, and it does appear that it's going to occur, it's good for everyone, we will not be able to get the same price for our product that we deliver, just like Northrop Grumman will not be able to get same price for the E-2D that they deliver. Everything will come down. In anticipation of that, which should be viewed as a very good sign, because it just means, we truly believe they are going to be successful in their negotiations to have this 32-plane buy done, we have taken the proactive step of reducing our gross margin on that program a little bit, anticipating a cost-reduction to us over the life of the program. Now if you take all 3 of these and you say, "Okay, they all bit us in the second quarter and it caused the second quarter gross margin of 20.1%." This coming off of a slight adjustment in the first quarter. So you're right, we have 2 quarters of adjustments on the books, and we're lowering this year's number to 23% to 24%, instead of 25% to 27%. We do that because accounting rules tell us we must, and to be fully disclosing to our public, we know we're going to have a reduction in Boeing, we know we have a reduction in Spirit, we know we're probably going to have a reduction in Northrop Grumman. So based on the knowledge we have, we adjust our numbers accordingly. Now CPI, just like the customers I just mentioned, now have a process where we go back to our suppliers. And just like Boeing said to us, "You're going to have to come down 2%," based on a negotiation. Where Spirit says to us, "Well, if you want the next 250 planes, I can't give them to you at the same price, you have to give me a better price," et cetera. We are going to do the same thing with our supply base. We will go back to our very valued suppliers on all these programs and say to them, "Look, we gave you a program and it had x number of units in it, well, now, those x number of units has more than doubled, almost tripled. And if you want to continue on, you have to share in the cost reduction, just like we did." And through that process, we will, in all likelihood, get our rates back up, our margins back up on those jobs. But it's not a 1-day process. It's a 6-month to 1-year process on some of this. And so, we don't anticipate that we've lost those margin points forever. That would be bad management to just take the cut yourself and then be the only one that suffers from it. So we will go down the supply chain and get to implement reductions there that get us back some of the margin that we originally have. As far as our other programs, there don't seem to be any in-house that would have that kind of a margin discussion, if you will. But again, if it happens, yes, we may take a margin reduction with somebody else and go back to our supply base and get that margin reinstituted, if you will, through cuts from them.