John Roush
Analyst · CJS Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead
Thank you, Robert. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. I’m pleased to report that we had a very strong second quarter. We executed well across the company and on balance overall trends are positive, so we believe we are well on-track to achieve our goals for the full-year. I’ll briefly cover the financial highlights and let Robert go into a bit more detail in his section. The Q2 revenue and profitability were strong, and in both cases they were higher than our own expectations. Revenue came in at $96.5 million, which was above both analyst consensus and the high-end of our own guidance range. Organic growth was 5% in the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $16.3 million, up 13% year-over-year and again above both analyst consensus and the high-end of our own guidance range. Adjusted EPS was $0.20 in the quarter, which is at the high-end of our guidance range and in line with analyst consensus, but the number was impacted $0.03 by foreign currency losses. So, absent that our adjusted EPS would have been that much higher. On the revenue side, we were pleased to come in at $96.5 million, the dynamic we saw was similar to Q1 with revenue ending up $7 million higher than we expected. We got strong contributions from many areas of the company, the Precision Motion business continued to see strong demand in both medical and industrial applications and delivered year-over-year growth of over 20% driven by double-digit growth in optical encoders as well as the addition of the Applimotion precision motors acquisition, which is performing above our forecast. Our Laser segment grew 9% year-over-year revenue in the quarter, if you adjust for the divesture of JK Lasers, with healthy growth from both our scanning products and our CO2 lasers. So for the first-half of the year, our organic growth was 6.3%. Q2 orders increased 6.6% versus a year-ago, if you again adjust for the JK Lasers divestiture. The Q2 book-to-bill ratio was very close to one between 0.98 and 0.99 for the company as a whole. This puts us at 1.03 on a year-to-date basis. Based on our first-half order rates and our current forecast from customers, we feel we are in a good position to achieve our full-year revenue goal of $370 million. So I’m pleased to see the healthy customer demand across most of the company and the numbers certainly bear that out. I would make the point that much like we saw in Q1 in several cases, customers pulled forward orders into Q2 that we had projected in Q3. We also do recognize that there is a level of seasonality in our business. In recent years, Q2 has been higher than Q3. This is primarily driven by microelectronics customers that we have seen have higher volumes in the late winter and early spring months followed by a summer time low. We do see the same trend to some degree in some of the other markets. But given this dynamic we do see a revenue level in Q3 that will be slightly below that of Q2, but still completely consistent with our view of the full-year. We also note that there continued to be sluggish economic indicators, particularly in China, and also in Europe. These dynamics have been built into our expectations all along for the year and they really haven’t changed. We still expect organic growth to be mid-single-digit for Q3 and for the full-year. From a strategic perspective, we view the company as well-positioned in the right technologies and the right applications to successfully drive profitable growth. So we continue to identify and pursue a good pipeline of designing opportunities for our medical cross-selling initiative. During the course of Q2, we were able to identify $4.4 million of annualized revenue opportunity, that resulted from this cross-selling process, where a given product line is presented to a medical customer through the sales relationship that we have previously had from a different product line. Our medical sales teams across the company continue to meet regularly to exchange leads and ideas, and to share market intelligence on customer product development activities and opportunities for us to get more involved at those customers. As the medical OEMs better understand the breadth of our product offering for the medical market, we see continued opportunities to further penetrate the top 100 OEMs. So while the medical equipment market has been challenging, particularly in the U.S. over the last year, we do see a robust pipeline of new business opportunities that will help us to drive and deliver growth in 2016 and beyond. Given our confidence in our long-term growth prospect here at GSI, I want to echo some of my comments from previous conference calls, when I said, we believe increased investments are needed to accelerate and sustain organic growth in many of our businesses in 2016 and beyond. So to that end, we expect to see increased R&D and sales and marketing growth investments in the second-half of 2015. We’re currently in a process of launching and staffing our first R&D center of excellence in China, which will initially focus on scanning products. And we are also in the process of adding engineering capabilities within the Vision and Precision Motion segments. We are also having some key capabilities and product marketing across GSI to deepen our understanding of key application areas, and enable us to better align our product roadmaps with customer strategies, so we can differentiate our products over time. On the acquisition front, we continue to cultivate a number of bolt-on transactions across all three of our segments. Most of these potential transactions have revenue below $20 million, although in a few cases they are substantially larger. All of the targets feel attractive adjacencies or they strengthen us in a key application area or geography. In some cases, we are now looking at deals that our primarily technology deals that bring a key capability in an attractive growth area, where we see a significant opportunity to leverage our existing market presence. We’ll keep you updated on all these deals as they process and we have something in a position to be announced. At this point, I’d like to provide some commercial updates on progress across the company. But I’ll start by noting that we have renamed one of our segments. Our segment that had been previously called Medical Technologies is now known as Vision Technologies. The reason for the change is that we increasingly see that all three of our segments have revenue and future potential in the medical space. So when we originally made the strategic decision several years ago to pursue the medical technology vertical, we knew that acquisitions would be a key part of that strategy and we want to be able to group the medical activity into one segment to the great extent possible. But while we ultimately found out that there were meaningful medical opportunities in all of the segments, Precision Motion and Laser products, in addition to what we have been calling medical, so it no longer may sense to refer to a Medical Technologies segment that might have represented in the range of 35% of revenue and then also refer to our total sales in medical end-market that was a significantly higher figure. This is ended up being confusing for people, so we’ve decided to clarify things. So the products in the Medical Technologies segment that we previously had they all relate to capturing, displaying, communicating, networking or analyzing images. It’s the process of visualization, so we are now renaming that segment Vision Technologies. So you can now think of GSI going-forward as having three major product technology families and then two major verticals. The products are laser-related technologies, Precision Motion technologies and Vision Technologies. And then, obviously, the two verticals are medical and advanced industrial. And we see really all three of the segments as having a play in the strategy in both medical and industrial market. So as far as the business update, I’ll start with the Precision Motion segment. In Q2, we had 26% year-over-year sales growth, driven by the Applimotion acquisition, as well as 10% year-over-year revenue growth in optical encoder product line. This was driven by strong customer demand in robotic surgery, wire bonding and metrology applications. The integration of the Applimotion Precision Motor acquisition continues to go well and the business has exceeded our expectations in revenue and profitability. Viewed on a standalone basis for Q2, Applimotion have very strong double-digit year-over-year revenue growth. Our Q2 sales of air bearing spindles were down high single-digit versus year-ago due to the strengthening of the U.S. dollar versus the pound and the euro, as well as slower demand from PCB via hole drilling customers, although the product line was up slightly on an organic basis. The overall Precision Motion book-to-bill ratio was 0.89% for the quarter as much of the Q2 to Q3 seasonality that I mentioned earlier occurs in the segment, with sales expected to be about $2 million lower in the segment in Q3 versus Q2, primarily with these microelectronics customers. Book-to-bill for the segment is at 1.0 on a accumulative year-to-date basis through Q2. Now, let’s turn to our Laser Products segment, which remains the largest of the three. Adjusted revenue increased 9% year-over-year in Q2. Our CO2 Laser product line had another strong quarter in Q2 with sales up low-teens versus a year-ago. As they have all year, coding applications drove much of that growth as demand increased meaningfully at all of our major OEMs. As a remainder when we refer to coding, this is laser marking of variable information such as date codes on food, beverage and pharmaceutical packaging, mostly in plastics or organic materials. CO2 Laser demand from both converting and medical applications is also very strong in the quarter. New product introductions continue to make solid traction, with CO2 customers showing strong interest in our new p400 [ph] pulsed mid-power laser. In Q2, we closed on eight new CO2 design wins with OEM customers and applications such as ones I have previously mentioned. So the overall picture for CO2 Laser is very robust. Our laser scanning and beam delivery product line also had a quite strong quarter. This includes high-single-digit revenue growth versus a year-ago with a book-to-bill ratio, up 1.18. Scanning orders were up 43% year-over-year, and were at an all-time record high for the business. We saw the same robust growth in coding applications and converting; for scanning that we have seen in CO2 laser sources. We also had strong scanning demand in laser via hole drilling. On the medical side, our scanning business was a bit mixed. Ophthalmic OCT orders saw strong high-teens revenue growth over a weak comparison last year. On the other hand, scanning demand in laser surgery, cataract surgery and digital radiology were all down versus last year, leaving overall medical sales of scanning products flat. We had nine total scanning design wins in the quarter and made strong progress in launching our China new product development team. So overall, we are very pleased with the progress we’re making in scanning. So now, I’ll comment on our Vision Technologies segment, the former Medical Technologies segment. As I reflected in my earlier comments, most of the sales remain in the medical market, although not all. Overall demand for the segment was sequentially flat versus Q1, but down 10% year-over-year. Sales were up versus last year in printers, RFID technology, surgical informatics and color measurement. Sales declined in machine vision, barcode scanning and surgical and radiology displays. The U.S. hospital capital spending trends continue to be mix. Some technology areas such as robotic surgery and OCT have seen significant recovery. Other areas remain weak. Our customers have communicated a similar demand level for Q3 that we saw in Q2 with improvements coming in Q4. Our book-to-bill ratio in Vision Technologies was 0.89 in Q2 and it’s essentially at 1 on a year-to-date basis. From an operational standpoint, as I look across the company, overall performance was solid. Our factories executed well, particularly from a tactical standpoint. On-time delivery to customers and quality metrics such as yields, scrap, customer returns also improved in most of the factories. We do not leave meaningful revenue on the table anywhere because of an operational constraint. Adjusted gross margins expanded by 140 basis points year-over-year with most of our factories seeing that same trend. Part of that was the contribution of the volume increases from our organic growth, a part was the real benefit we’re seeing from the lean projects we have done in the last year, which had originally focused mainly on the laser businesses, but now have been broadened to include the other segments and locations. Recently held in Q2 the first lean event at JADAK, which we acquired last year in Q2. We saw that the baseline capabilities were very good at the JADAK manufacturing site in Syracuse. But the team was still able to identify opportunities for significant productivity gains with potential annualized savings of over $300,000 from the first event alone. So overall, we are making progress in improving the performance, the efficiency and the consistency of our operations, which will support our growth strategies over time. There are certainly areas we can and need to improve our operational performance. Direct material spend is one area where we see significant productivity opportunity we haven’t yet seen a big impact on the bottom line. Last year, we hired a dedicated strategic sourcing leader for the company, and we invested in the IT capability to track our material spend in a detailed way across suppliers and commodities. This year we have deployed material cost down programs across all of our sites, using that information and capability. Due to first-half savings have run a bit behind our internal budget. In general, we see significant opportunities for savings, but it’s a complex process. It takes time to implement these programs without putting our quality and our customer deliveries at risk. A lot this comes down to maturity. Our productivity engine, our capability is not that mature. We know what we need to do. We haven’t yet built up the experience and cycles of learning across the organization to get outstanding results. I view that as upside. In this productivity, direct materials begin to kick-in. We should be able to see the positive impact on gross margins later this year and particularly in 2016. So, on the whole, there are lots of positives here. Lean manufacturing and continuous improvement are approaches we’re very committed to and we are doing all the right things. We are still in the very early days of this journey, but we’re convinced we will see outstanding results. So with that, I’d like to turn the call over to Robert, to provide more details on the financial performance. Robert?