Bill Hull
Analyst · ROTH Capital. Your line is now open
Thanks, John. I’d like to thank everyone for listening today. I’m going to review the quarterly results and share a few details with regard to our business trends, and then we’ll take questions. First, I would like to discuss our revenue. Total revenue was 15.6 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017. This was down 6% compared to the year-ago period. We have reached the point where LED product represents our core business, as they have become the focus of almost all of our customers. LED products represented 75% of total lighting product sales and grew by 19% in the quarter. Legacy fluorescent and services revenue accounted for the majority of the remaining revenue and declined by 39% in the first quarter when compared to the year-ago period. The decline in legacy fluorescent and services revenue were primary contributors to the year-to-year decline in total revenue. Our enterprise accounts orders represented 44% of total fiscal first quarter sales while channel sales represented 56%. As John discussed, we are expanding our sales to include distribution sales through agencies. As such, we expect to see a shift toward pure distribution sales over time. Additionally, please keep in mind that we fulfill virtually all of our business through channel partners today and a role that our enterprise sales plays is in support of national accounts that are partially fulfilled throughout the channel. Continuing with our revenue commentary, it is also informative to understand that we have intentionally redirected the smallest ESCO partners, distribution and consolidated around our most successful ESCOs. Essentially, we’ve gone from over 100 ESCO partners at the beginning of this year to about a dozen today that represent most of the volume. The impact of redirecting a larger number of small ESCO partners was felt on the revenue line, but should be more than made up by new agency partners over time. As John described it, the new agency partners now open up a new channel which services the largest segment of the industrial lighting market as well as the segment where we previously did not participate. That evolution didn’t come without a short-term cost in terms of lower revenue from ESCOs, which ironically was much larger than the year-to-year decline in revenue. Effectively, this means we were able to redirect a larger number of small ESCO partners to distribution while successfully maintaining the majority of the revenue from that segment by focusing on the top tier ESCOs. Nonetheless, this approach resulted in fewer transactions in the first quarter but also led to higher margin business and very strong growth in backlog. In the first quarter, we shipped approximately 2,300 customer orders at an average price of $6,700. This was down from 3,100 orders in the first quarter of fiscal 2016 but the average order size rose significantly from 5,300 in the comparable quarter of last year. We also fulfilled 23 large orders over $1,000 in the first quarter of 2017, which was the same number as we filled in the corresponding year-ago quarter. The decline in total orders was largely expected and should recover as the agency channel grows. In addition, the year-to-year increase in average deal size reflects strong sales of relatively high price, high margin products in the quarter, most notably in our high bay lighting lines. As previously mentioned, our backlog was strong. Backlog stood at 12.6 million on June 30, 2016, which represented the highest level in two and a half years. It grew by 142% in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 versus a comparable year-ago quarter. As John mentioned, a good way to measure our progress is by comparing revenue plus backlog in the current quarter and the same metric in prior quarters. For Q1 of fiscal '17, total revenue plus backlog grew 29% versus the comparable period a year ago. Our backlog reflects strong bookings that we expect to ship in the next several quarters which should lead to a corresponding increase in revenue. As such, this gives us an extra degree of confidence in our ability to show solid growth this year. To summarize our revenue picture, our LED products are driving growth, we built backlog, our sales efforts are strong and a drag from legacy products and services should moderate going forward as those products approach run rate levels. Switching to the gross margin side, we showed significant progress in this year’s first fiscal quarter. Our gross margin was 25.8% in the recent quarter and this was up from 22.7% in the comparable year-ago quarter. This increase was due to a number of factors including favorable product mix and strength in overall product margins. On the product mix side, our gross margin benefitted from excellent growth in our high margin, high bay products, which grew significant faster than overall LED product sales. We target reaching a 30% gross margin by the end of this fiscal year. In order to accomplish that, we will need to continue to see growth from high margin LED products and maintain strong margins on our other product lines and service lines. We’re optimistic that we can accomplish this goal because we are seeing strong growth from some of our highest margin products. Additionally, we expect to see margins stabilize or increase on lower margin products as new higher margin versions of our higher volume products are released in the coming months. The increase in gross margins drove our first quarter gross profit up from the prior year, despite slightly lower revenue in the same period. This factor, coupled with relatively flat operating expenses, a small increase in other income and a tax benefit were enough to reduce our net loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 versus a comparable year-ago period. Our net loss shrank from 3.7 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2016 to 2.9 million in the recent quarter. Our net loss per share also improved from a loss of $0.13 in the first quarter of fiscal '16 to a loss of $0.11 in the recent period. Moving to the balance sheet, our capital position remains strong as of June 30, 2016. We have 14.2 million in cash and 3.3 million in combined short- and long-term debt. Our net working capital was 28.4 million and our book value was 43.5 million or $1.55 per outstanding share. At this time, I would like to say a word about our guidance for fiscal 2017. As we previously mentioned, we are revising our expectations for two primary reasons. First, we built significant backlog in the first quarter. But the timing of product shipments may result in revenue being pushed out, as we experienced in the first quarter. While growing backlog is a good thing, especially when it grows as much as it did in the quarter, we expect to continue to see strong sales and this may affect the timing of future revenue, so we want to be a little bit more conservative with our estimates so the timing of revenue doesn’t impact us as significantly in future quarters. Secondarily but equally important in our thinking, the tradeoff between the impact of redirecting small ESCO partners to distribution versus the potentially offsetting ramp of our new agency partners. Since we want to be conservative with our expectations for these new agency partners, we don’t want to assume they will make up the whole difference from lower revenue from small ESCOs in the short term. With that being said, we continue to believe that we have the potential to hit our prior revenue target but we want to guide external expectations toward a more comfortable 10% to 20% revenue growth in fiscal 2017. At the same time, our gross margin goal remains unchanged. We are still aiming for a 30% gross margin by the end of fiscal 2017 with caveat that just depends on product mix, which we are currently steering in the right direction. On that note, I would like to conclude our prepared comments and turn the call back over to the operator to address any questions.