Operator
Operator
Welcome to Orion Energy Systems fourth quarter fiscal 2010 financial results. (Operator Instructions) Now your host for today’s conference, Victoria Zebras
Orion Energy Systems, Inc. (OESX)
Q4 2010 Earnings Call· Thu, May 13, 2010
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Operator
Operator
Welcome to Orion Energy Systems fourth quarter fiscal 2010 financial results. (Operator Instructions) Now your host for today’s conference, Victoria Zebras
Victoria Paris
Management
Thank you for joining us for Orion Energy Systems fiscal 2010 fourth quarter and year-end conference call. With me today on the call are Neal Verfuerth, Chairman and CEO, Jim Kackley, President and COO and Scott Jensen, CFO. Before we begin, I will read the Safe Harbor statement. Our remarks that follow including answers to your questions include statements that we believe forward-looking within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are generally as such because the context of such statements will include words such as believe, anticipate, expect, or words of similar import. Similarly, statements that describe future plans or objectives or goals are also forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks that could cause actual results to materially be different. Those risk include among others, matters that we have described in our press release issued this afternoon and our filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as those filings, we will disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which may not be updated until our next quarterly conference call if at all. Now I’d like to turn the call over to Neal.
Neal Verfuerth
Management
Thanks Victoria, and welcome everyone to our fiscal 2010-year end conference call. As you saw in the press release, we issued this afternoon, fourth quarter revenues were $18.9 million, were up 23% from the fourth quarter of 2009, and were in line with our expectations. For the full year fiscal 2010, we reported revenues of $65.4 million compared to $72.6 million in the prior year. For the fourth quarter, total bookings were $16.4 million. For our fiscal 2010 bookings were $73.9 million, up 3% from the $71.7 million last year. We’re pleased to see the year over year increase in booking during fiscal 2010. Bookings for 2010 included $62.2 million in cash deals, $11.7 million in financed deals from the OVPP and PPA technology contracts. For the fourth quarter, we reported a loss per share of $0.04 compared with a loss per share of $0.05 in the prior year quarter. For the fiscal year 2010, we recorded a loss per share of $0.19 versus earnings per diluted share of $0.02 in fiscal 2009. As we mentioned in our release, we recorded unusual one-time charges totaling $.03 related to severance and legal expenses. Excluding these charges, we recorded a loss per share of $0.01 for the quarter, which is in line with our guidance for the fourth quarter and a loss per share for fiscal 2010 of $0.16. Let me switch gears now and highlight some of our accomplishments for the year as well as the key drivers of this quarter’s performance. During fiscal 2010, we made great strides in enhancing our operational structure to support our long-term vision for growth, which included new hires in human resources, sales, and engineering. In addition, we implemented our CRM tool that will be used internally and now by our partners in the field,…
James Kackley
Management
Thanks, Neal. Ten months ago, the Board and Neal asked me to step into management becoming Orion’s President and Chief Operating Officer. My assignment, work with Neal on the Orion management team to build a platform for growth to a much larger company. As Neal has outlined, today we have five market ready and accepted product lines, a greatly expanded sales network, a manufacturing plant ready to take on a significant increase in orders, a sound organization structure, a strong management team, enhanced IT systems and many strengthened internal processes. All of these, together with an improved capital goods market has led to significant growth in orders forecast for 2011 that you saw in our press release. So in short, we’ve largely completed the assignment. Neal and I have decided therefore, it’s time for me to leave management and move back to the Board of Directors which I will do effective May 15. As part of this initiative over the last year, I’ve relied heavily on the support of Mike Potts, Executive Vice President and a Director on Orion’s Board. Going forward, Mike will continue to play a key role in the execution of the day-to-day operations to enable Neal to maintain his focus on working with large customers, partners, shareholders, utilities, government agencies and in developing new products. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Scott for a review of our financials.
Scott Jensen
Management
Thank you, Jim. Our reported revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 were $18.9 million compared to $15.4 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, which represents an increase of 23%. This increase was driven by increased order volume in our partner and retail channels as well as the sale of a portion of the OVPP finance contracts, which were held on our books. These contracts were sold for approximately $2.7 million and recorded at a discounted net present value of $2.5 million. For the full year fiscal 2010, we recorded revenues of $65.4 million compared to $72.6 million during fiscal 2009. Partner revenues for the fourth quarter were 27% of our total revenues, down from 50% of total revenues in our most recent third quarter. The decline in the contribution from our partner channel was driven in large part by the seasonality we’ve discussed in previous quarters in which our partners and resellers look to complete projects that were closed in the previous quarter. For fiscal 2010, our partner revenues contributed 42% of our overall revenue. For fiscal 2011, we expect the contribution from our partner network to continue to expand and become an increasingly larger portion of our overall revenue mix. During the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010, we secured 35 new Orion new virtual power plant megawatt supply contracts representing gross income streams of $3.3 million. Revenue for these customer projects will be recognized across the 24 to 60 month term of the agreements. If these projects had been structured as cash transactions, Orion would have recognized $1.3 million of incremental revenue within the quarter and increased income per share of approximately $0.02 within the quarter. For the full year of fiscal 2010, converting our OVPP contracts to a cash basis, OVPP transactions would have…
Operator
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Glenn Wortman – Sidoti & Company. Glenn Wortman – Sidoti & Company: Can you help us better understand the sequential decline in revenue and the sequential decline in bookings?
Neal Verfuerth
Management
I think from a bookings standpoint, when we went out with our guidance, the market was a little slower to respond than our expectations for orders coming earlier and faster, didn’t play out. What we have been encouraged by is that as we’ve entered fiscal 2011, those orders did materialize toward the end of the year and have continued steady and that’s in line with our guidance for fiscal 2011. Glenn Wortman – Sidoti & Company: So for the first quarter do you expect a sequential increase on the top line and in bookings?
Scott Jensen
Management
We’re going to give numbers now on an annual basis and stay away from a little bit of the quarter over quarter commentary. We believe that we’ve given a number that provides good transparency with a longer term component to it. Glenn Wortman – Sidoti & Company: Just looking at the gross margin, the revenue was a little lower but it looks like your costs were higher just looking at things sequentially. Was there anything unusual going on there?
Scott Jensen
Management
We’ve talked about that in the past in terms of quarter over quarter. The prior two quarters were pretty even in terms of distribution of revenue flow and order flow. This was a little lumpier and that does translate into some inefficiencies in terms of estimating costs to make sure we honor the customer’s service commitments we have with our customers. Glenn Wortman – Sidoti & Company: Looking at the OVPP agreements you sold $2.5 million of the contracts in the fourth quarter. Did you have a target for how much, what percentage of these bookings you want to sell each year or is it just kind of depends order to order.
Neal Verfuerth
Management
We’re still evaluating that. I think not only in terms of selling contracts, but we’re evaluating other options too as well as opportunities to provide or infuse capital to continue to grow that business. We believe that’s a great opportunity for customers to take advantage of energy savings without technology risk and without upfront capital deployment and that we can continue to scale that business and do it in a way that provides profitability to the bottom line.
Operator
Operator
You're next question comes from Brian Kremer – Roth Capital Partners. Brian Kremer – Roth Capital Partners: Back to the OVPP and PPA guidance for this coming year, could you walk us through again 20% to 25% so we’re looking at $20 million to $25 million. So that revenue if you keep it as a PPA agreement or OVPP, you’re going to recognize that revenue over a couple of years so that if we try to convert to revenue from that bookings which you obviously didn’t provide because you probably don’t know. Some of that could be converted to revenue directly through sales. What’s the best you can do in terms of providing some insight there and how you look at that next year, or how we should be looking at it.
Scott Jensen
Management
Just to reiterate, when we evaluate our performance and our success, it’s really tied to bookings because we don’t look at a sale as a bad sale whether we get cash or the opportunity to finance a project. That’s certainly a reflection of the success of our product, our technologies, our sales processes, so what we’ve tried to do is at least provide a trail of bread crumbs so to speak to try to give you as much information and look at it, because I certainly appreciate the gap component in the revenue to the top line from a financial statement. But you can simply work that math backwards and take 20% to 25% of the bookings out and treat the rest as cash and recognize that you can use somewhere about a three year average term to account for those future revenues and certainly some of that will occur in fiscal 2011 and a larger percentage of it will be deferred into future periods. Brian Kremer – Roth Capital Partners: It doesn’t look like you didn’t do any solar sales in the quarter, right?
Neal Verfuerth
Management
Actual sales there were none this quarter. Previous quarter and then more into queue with some of our big customers, and again, a lot of them – it’s interesting with the financing, many customers will say they don’t have the money in the budget, and then we put together all the financing and do all the vetting and everything and they end up paying cash at the end of the day. As Scott alluded to, there really is not bad sale. I just look at the financing as a way to get the customer to pull the trigger first and foremost rather than just sitting on it. We’ve had many customers who actually take our financing and pay it out after they start the new budget cycle. So we’re just trying to take away every objection the customer might have to pull the trigger and starting to save with us. Brian Kremer – Roth Capital Partners: G&A and sales and marketing, it looks like sales and marketing was up in the quarter but that looks like something that’s going to continue I would assume to stay at these levels. You’ve made that investment. G&A on the other hand there’s some one time items so it looks like it goes back more to the Q3 with maybe some growth there versus Q4.
Neal Verfuerth
Management
Those are very accurate statements. Our G&A was impacted within the quarter as we outlined and we have been investing in sales and marketing. Our sales people are getting back out into the markets again and aggressively and we’re providing them right tools from a materials cost standpoint and the ability to get out and close deals.
Operator
Operator
There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call over to your host for any closing remarks.
Neal Verfuerth
Management
I’d just like to thank everybody for participating and that’s all we have for today. Thank you.