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Key Tronic Corporation (KTCC)

Q2 2013 Earnings Call· Tue, Jan 29, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Key Tronic second quarter fiscal 2013 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following today’s presentation, the conference will be open for questions. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, January 29, 2013. I would like to turn the conference over to CEO and President, Craig Gates. Please go ahead, Sir.

Craig Gates

Management

Good afternoon everyone. I am Craig Gates, President and Chief Executive Officer of Key Tronic. I would like to thank everyone for joining us today for our investor conference call. Joining me here in our Spokane Valley headquarters is Ron Klawitter, our Chief Financial Officer. Today, we released our results for the second quarter fiscal 2013. We’re pleased with our strong year-over-year growth in revenue and earnings for the second quarter, and for the first half of fiscal 2013. Our many new customer programs continue to ramp up, and we have an increasingly diverse mix of new customer programs. At the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2013, we were generating revenue from 169 separate programs, and had 52 distinct customers, up from 149 programs and 40 customers a year ago. During the second quarter, we continue to extend our customer portfolio across a wide range of industries. We won new programs involving RFID, exercise and security equipment. While many of our new program wins will take many months to move in to production, the outstanding and unique services that we provide our customers during the ramp phase have played a key role in our growth by becoming a powerful differentiator to help us win new programs. As our business has grown, we’ve continued to overcome many challenges associated with rapid growth, steep program ramps, product mix changes and the addition to new facilities and people. We focused on optimizing product designs, production processes and supply chains, and made changes in our business processes to enable continued profitable growth. As a result, we continue to see increases in our margins and profitability in the second quarter. While we maintained strong operating efficiencies and further strengthen our balance sheet during the second quarter, our sequential quarter revenue was impacted by…

Ronald Klawitter

Management

All right. Thanks a lot, Craig. As always, I would like to remind you that during the course of this call we might make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events for the company’s future financial performance. Please remember that such statements are only predictions, actual events or results may differ materially. For more information, you may review the risk factors outlined in the documents the company has filed with the SEC; specifically our latest 10-K, quarterly 10-Qs and 8-Ks. Please note that on this call we will discuss historical, financial and other statistical information regarding our business and operations. Some of this information is included in today’s press release and a recorded version of this call will be available on our website. For the quarter ended, December 29, 2012, we reported total revenue of $94.6 million. This is up 12% from $84.5 million in the same period of fiscal year 2012. The first six months of fiscal 2013, total revenue was 192.1 million, this is up 25% from 154.2 million in the same period of fiscal 2012. Despite the fact that we have been moving many new programs in to production, we have continued to improve our gross margins. Our gross margin was approximately 10% in the second quarter of 2013, up from 8% in the same period of fiscal 2012. For the third quarter, we expect our gross margin to be around 9%. Our total operating expenses were $4.2 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2013. This is up just 2% from the second quarter of last fiscal year, which is much less than our year-over-year growth in sales. Although the new program startups that fueled our revenue growth have required the addition of technical and support headcount, we’ve done a good job of controlling our…

Craig Gates

Management

Okay, thanks Ron. Moving in the third quarter of fiscal 2013, we continue to believe our fundamental strategy remains sound. As we’ve discussed before, there are three major competitive advantages behind our continued success. First, increasing cost in China are driving demand for more localized production; Mexico, for North American end-users and China for Asian end-users. Among EMS providers, we stand alone in the excellence and breadth of our Mexican operations. As more previously outsourced manufacturing business moves back from China, we stand to continue to benefit. Second, our unique organizational structure, which we have honed over 25 years of experience in running offshore operations, bring significant advantages to OEMs. Our growing portfolio of customers is increasingly desirous of offshore cost savings, but fear IP loss, do not want to manage an offshore relationship, fear of offshore schedule risk and inventory uncertainty, and want U.S. based engineering and prototyping. While we’ll sometimes be competing against our customers in-house factories, we believe that beyond the level of cost and services we can provide from our Mexican facilities, we do offer an exceptional level of experience with the process of competing with an in-house model. Third, our size and responsiveness compared to our degree of vertical integration and engineering capabilities become even more attractive as the push for localized production intensifies. While our growth has moved us in to the Tier 2 category as an EMS provider, we continue to provide the flexibility of a Tier 3 provider and the capabilities of a Tier 1 provider. With these three competitive advantages powering us, we expect to continue to win market share. While mixed changes in our program portfolio and cost associated with ramping up new programs, will continue to be a part of our business, we expect our sustained focus on controlling cost, augmenting production processes, and enhancing our design capabilities will continue to result in competitive advantage. Despite the continued macroeconomic uncertainty, and a near-term significant decline in the demand from one customer, we continue to see positive business momentum, and are building an increasingly diversified customer base. We anticipate more of our new customer programs moving in to production, and our pipeline of new business opportunities is increasingly robust. Over the longer term, the EMS market is expected to see growth, and we believe Key Tronic is increasingly well positioned to continue to capture market share and capitalize on emerging opportunities. This concludes a formal portion of our presentation. Ron and I, will now be pleased to answer your questions.

Operator

Operator

(Operator instructions). And our first question comes from Bill Dezellem, Tieton Capital Management. Please go head.

Bill Dezellem - Tieton Capital Management

Analyst

Thank you. Relative to this quarter, you had the three different customers that you specifically called out, with the one that had the slowdown, and the two that brought some more business in-house. How much of that did you understand and anticipate when you gave your December quarter guidance, versus how much of that was a surprise to you during the quarter? Craig Gates – President, CEO: I would say that most of what happened during the quarter; we had anticipated when we gave our guidance. Bill Dezellem – Tieton Capital Management: And then relative to the one customer that had a significant slowdown, are they – or were they running at the end of the December quarter at their new reduced level of run-rate, or are they still decreasing their commitments to you as the weeks progress? Craig Gates – President, CEO: They are changing their forecast pretty much on a daily basis. So, whether or not there are the bottom, whether or not they’ve started to come back up again, I can’t answer with any degree of clarity. Ronald Klawitter – CFO, EVP – Administration , Treasurer: But our guidance for revenue for Q3 does anticipate additional reductions and that difference coming from that customer. Bill Dezellem – Tieton Capital Management: Right. Craig Gates – President, CEO: We’re always pretty conservative in our guidance, so we’ve expected them to continue to go down, and it maybe that they don’t. Bill Dezellem – Tieton Capital Management: And if I’m reading between the lines correctly, and maybe I should ask, because it sounds like at times when they are changing their forecast on a daily basis, sometimes it’s actually going up. So, that’s what makes you wonder really directionally where their at? Craig Gates – President, CEO: That’s correct. Bill…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). And we have a follow-up question from the line of Bill Dezellem with Tieton Capital Management. Please go ahead.

Bill Dezellem - Tieton Capital Management

Analyst

All right, well, it no one else wants a turn then I’m going to continue here.

Craig D. Gates

Analyst

You know, Bill, from here on out when we get done with this operator, every time I’m going to tell them your name if Bill Dezellem and you work for Tieton Capital. This has gone on for 20 years and it’s time to fix that.

Bill Dezellem - Tieton Capital Management

Analyst

Tieton Capital Management it is. Thank you.

Craig D. Gates

Analyst

There you go, Buddy.

Bill Dezellem - Tieton Capital Management

Analyst

So in the press release, you referenced maybe for the first time that I can recall in the 20 years that you just referenced that you actually made a comment about coming periods and the ramp of new programs offsetting a slowdown in the one customer that had the significant slowdown. That begs the question of when you talk coming periods, that sounds more forward looking than you normally would be, and I know that you’re cautious about being forward looking, which to me implies a sooner quarter rather than farther out quarters; i.e. the June quarter or September quarter is when you’re looking at these new programs ramping in a way that’s noticeable to offset the one significant slowdown. Is that a correct interpretation or what more light can you shed on the phrase, coming periods and that whole thought process that you dangled in front of us?

Craig D. Gates

Analyst

Well, we’re trying to be very careful, to live with all the rules and guidelines we have for outlook, and at the same time, we want to give everybody a very clear understanding of how we view the future and the fact that we’re seeing a dip for this quarter, this upcoming quarter concerned us that people might be reading into it that this decline is going to continue and we didn’t want people to walk away from anything we’ve said or written today believing that’s what we thought was going to happen. So we have been very, very cautious about saying it’s going to go or it’s going to shrink, but we wanted to make sure people understood that the outlook continues to be bright and up and we view the next quarters to two quarters as a dip rather than a decline. So that’s why we said it. In terms of being precise on telling you whether it’s going to come back two quarters from now, three quarters from now or half a quarter from now, it depends on a whole lot of moving parts that there’s no way we would be willing to predict. But we did want to make sure that the people that follow us and risk their money on us understood that we were viewing the business as a dip rather than a decline.

Bill Dezellem - Tieton Capital Management

Analyst

And I would even take that a step further and pose the question of whether, you know, not for the near term because clearly you’re forecasting a dip, but long term you’re almost giving more positive signals about the business than I think we’ve ever heard you give, especially when you start talking about this – it almost sounds like a bit of a seat change in the last six months where you’re having a number of larger opportunities present themselves and that ultimately flows through revenue and could be very, very material to the business unless we’re not hearing you correctly.

Craig D. Gates

Analyst

Well, to, I think, give the best view I can of that, we’ve always disclosed the fact that our biggest customer is quite a large percent of our business in our mind. At one point they were pushing 30%. So in our view, if you go back four years ago, we won the race against the 2008/2009 recession and were able to bring in enough customers to keep us in the black and get us growing nicely. But one of those customers in the 2010/2011 timeframe included this one big customer that at 30% is pushing the range of where we like to see our biggest customer be in size; it’s too much risk. So we’ve been in that race, a much less desperate race than the one we were running in 2008/2009, but that race has been to shore up our revenue in the case –in case this big customer got a little bit sick on us. And what happened to us is this big customer got sick ahead about two quarters, we think, head of where we could have compensated with the new business and shown a continued growth in revenue even if this new customer declined to a more reasonable percentage of our revenue base. So that’s about as clear as I can be about it, is we’ve continued to add new business, new customer, new revenue in a very healthy pace. One of the customers that we added a while back that certainly helped us through the bad times following the recession has been a little bit too big for comfort, not only in our own minds, but when we spoke to various analysts, we agreed with them, before we spoke to them, during and after we spoke to them. And so it looks like we have tied rather than won the race this time and we’re just trying to make it clear to everybody that we believe that we’re going to win and the timing is just a little bit off.

Bill Dezellem - Tieton Capital Management

Analyst

That’s very helpful. Thank you. And then diving into the one specific customer a bit further, often times we have seen where they have a dip, it allows them to clear inventory and get their turns – their inventory turns where they want them and then since they’re actually having you produce at a below-normal run rate level, the business then ramps back up. Is that what you would anticipate at some point in the future with this particular customer, that they will be producing at a higher run rate than where you’re currently at today?

Craig D. Gates

Analyst

I don’t know that I could say I would anticipate it. It certainly has been, historically, the case with this and other customers that they slow us down below their actual pull-through rate until they burn up inventory and then we come back up. But there’s always a risk that their business will continue to decline, so we’ve been cautious about forecasting any kind of significant recovery in their order patterns with us.

Bill Dezellem - Tieton Capital Management

Analyst

That’s fair. And a couple of numbers questions. Ron, the revenues were down versus the September quarter by a small amount, but the gross margin percentage was up. How did you accomplish that?

Ronald Klawitter

Management

A better mix of our revenue. Some of the declines that we saw are on lower margin business, so I would have to say the size of the business gets a lot tighter margin and so when some of the largest customers decline it’s actually a more favorable mix of the revenue that we have left.

Bill Dezellem - Tieton Capital Management

Analyst

Understood. And then your revolver, you’ve paid way down, but given that you’re not ramping revenues in this coming quarter, that, in theory, would imply that you may need less working capital. So would you expect to pay the revolver off as of the end of March when you report next time?

Ronald Klawitter

Management

It’s a very good possibility.

Bill Dezellem - Tieton Capital Management

Analyst

Great. Thank you both.

Craig D. Gates

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). One moment please. Mr. Gates, there are no further questions at this time.

Craig D. Gates

Analyst

Okay, I’d like to thank all of you again for participating in today’s conference call and Ron and I will look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Thanks, and have a good day.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the Key Tronic Corporation second quarter fiscal 2013 conference call. If you would like to listen to a replay of today’s conference call, please dial 1-303-590-3030 or toll free at 1-800-406-7325. Thank you.