Greetings. Welcome to Nortech's First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Chris Jones, Chief Financial Officer at Nortech. You may begin.

All right. Thanks, Paul, and I'd also like to welcome everyone to today's conference call. Jay is going to begin today's call with a review of our business, current trends and our strategic planning process. Then I'll review Nortech's Q1 2023 financial results before turning it back over to Jay for his closing comments. And then we will open it up to all of you for questions. Before we continue, please note that statements made during this call and Q&A sessions may be forward-looking regarding expected revenue, earnings, future plans, opportunities and other company expectations. These estimates, plans and other forward-looking statements involve unknown and known risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in this call. These risks, including those that are detailed in our most recent Form 10-Q may be amended or supplemented. The statements made during this conference call are based upon information known by Nortech as of the date and time of this call, and we assume no obligation to update the information in today's call. You can find Nortech's complete safe harbor statements in our SEC filings. And with that, I will turn it over to Jay for his opening comments.

Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us. We are very pleased with our first quarter financial results, including strong year-over-year growth. In fact, for the past eight quarters, Nortech has posted year-over-year quarterly growth in four key metrics: sales, gross profit, gross margin and EBITDA. Chris will go into more financial details later in the call. During our last quarterly call back in March, I talked in some detail about Nortech's value proposition. For any new listeners today, I'll just touch on a few of the key points. We manufacture low-volume, high-mix electromechanical systems, including complex cable assemblies, printed circuit boards, also known as PCBs, and other components inside boxes or housings. Our solutions provide critical connections with our customers' products, transmitting power and data and oftentimes both. And in some cases, we manufacture the whole product. We serve a wide range of medical, industrial and defense firms from Fortune 100 multinationals and OEMs to smaller regional U.S. manufacturers and start-ups. Geographically, we have successfully expanded our own global footprint over the years to now include the U.S., Mexico and China. This 3-tier cost structure, coupled with lean manufacturing principles help keep us cost-competitive and responsive to customers around the world. Nortech is a high-touch business. Our skilled team members provide hands-on expertise while also leveraging sophisticated equipment in production and testing. Our people are a key element to Nortech's competitive advantage, and they deserve our deep gratitude and admiration, particularly for their efforts during the pandemic and supply chain disruptions. One of the privileges of being Nortech's President and CEO is the opportunity to meet our people at our locations around the world. Whenever and wherever I talk to Nortech team members, I'm impressed by their strong desire to provide excellence to our customers.…

All right. Thanks, Jay. All right, in the next few minutes, I'm going to provide some details of our financial performance in the 2023 first quarter but I would -- all right. Now let me take a minute to highlight a new chart we added to the press release, and which includes -- we're going to include each quarter going forward. It provides eight quarters of trailing 12-month historical data and four key metrics cited earlier, sales, gross profit, gross margin and EBITDA. So I wanted to add this chart because we know there are individual quarters that can be affected by outside factors and these might include timing fluctuations, customer shipments, supply chain issues. Any of these during a given reporting cycle could temporarily disrupt our momentum. Nortech also reported numerous nonrecurring items in 2020 and 2021, including PPP loan forgiveness, a gain on sale and leaseback, goodwill impairment and other items. Those nonrecurring items are listed in our press release, and they are excluded from our adjusted gross profit, gross margin and EBITDA. The LTM charts also show a dramatic turnaround from our lowest quarter in Q1 of 2021, two years ago. At that time, our LTM revenue was $99 million, gross profit was $8 million, gross margin was 8.1% and EBITDA was negative $2.3 million. For the 12 months just ended March of 2023, our revenue is now $138 million, gross profit is $22 million, gross margin is 15.8% and EBITDA is $6.7 million. Nortech's finances are healthier on every metric. All right, switching gears to this quarter's financial performance. As Jay noted, progress was made on several key performance areas with quarterly revenue up nearly 14% from the prior year period. Again, we're particularly pleased with this revenue momentum as the quarter's year-over-year growth continues and…

Thank you, Chris. Before we open the call for your questions, I'd like to briefly share my thoughts on our ESG initiatives. According to the electronics trade association, IPC, the leading companies in our industry are highly intentional about their ESG priorities. Goals related to climate change and energy use are currently garnering the most attention. Nortech intends to lead and not follow with ESG. In the early phases of this journey, we are looking more at the environmental and social categories. As a public company, we believe we are further along with our governance than many private firms in our industry and supply chain. Generally speaking, the overall ESG process consists of four ambitious elements, baselining, peer analysis, stakeholder engagement and evaluation and determination. We are taking the long view in strengthening our company for the future. In the short term, however, we are also focusing on maximizing financial results for our shareholders. We believe these long- and short-term goals can be balanced. They are not mutually exclusive. With our ESG initiatives, we are committed to leveraging industry best practices, tapping outside experts for guiding and harnessing the collective experience and expertise of our Board and company leadership. I speak for our entire leadership team in saying we believe succeeding with ESG goals will provide Nortech with the clear business benefits beyond simple compliance. Our ESG efforts will also serve to proactively position us favorably with our employees, customers and suppliers. Related to this topic, we're watching to see the disclosure actions that the SEC may take later this year related to the company's climate initiatives, both for Nortech and our supply chain and our customers. Regardless of specific government actions, we believe companies both upstream and downstream from Nortech will be looking for partners that are in tune with these goals and making progress toward achieving them. That concludes our presentation, and we'll now open the call for your questions, and we'd strongly encourage any questions you may have.

Very good, Paul, thank you. And thanks to everyone for joining us today. We obviously feel very good about our first quarter results. We look forward to talking to you again next in August with our second quarter 2023 results. And with that, I'll hand things back to Chris. Chris?

All right. Thanks, Jay, and I will also end with our safe harbor statement. So as I mentioned at the beginning of the call, please note that statements made during this call were forward-looking regarding expected revenue, earnings, future plans, opportunities and other company expectations. These estimates, plans and other forward-looking statements involve unknown and known risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied on this call. These risks, including those that are detailed in our most recent Form 10-Q may be amended or implemented. Statements made during this conference call are based upon information known by Nortech as of the date and time of this call, and we assume no obligation to update the information in today's call. You can find Nortech's complete safe harbor statements in our SEC filings. Thank you, and have a good evening.

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.