John Scribante
Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Your line is now open
Good morning. Thank you everybody for joining us today. By now I hope everybody has seen our third quarter financial results, which reflects our teams continued execution over the past two years on repositioning Orion for growth, improved margins and a transition into the solid state lighting industry. Orion’s quarter three revenue rose 23% year-over-year to $20.6 million, driven by solid execution in sales from our enterprise accounts with additional contribution from our distribution channel. We met our target and achieved a gross margin of 30% in the third quarter, up 180 basis points from the year ago quarter and in line with our full year target. Margin was favourably impacted by our sales mix as well as our supply chain and product designs. We have additional margin leverage potential as we execute on our design and tooling initiatives over the next few years. And from a cash flow standpoint, we consume $368,000 [ph] in cash from operating activities during the quarter. We ended the quarter with strong balance sheet and networking capital of $31.3 million including $19.1 million in cash and $6.3 million in total debt. As we have discussed on previous conference calls, the second half of our fiscal year is typically stronger than the first half. Based on where we are today and being this close to the end of our fiscal year, we are narrowing our guidance to a revenue growth of 10% to 15% over fiscal 2016 while keeping gross margin guidance at or near 30% for the rest of the year. With that overview, I’d like to now discuss our products and sales initiatives. For the past two years we have focussed on developing best-in-class LED fixtures for the commercial, institutional and industrial market. With a particular focus on making the most energy efficient fixtures from a lumens per watt standpoint. We believe that our demonstrated ability to constantly innovate gives us a significant edge over our competition. As you may know, Orion achieved an industry record of 214 lumens per watt with our ISON class High Bay fixtures that we released in September. The importance of this measure, beyond the fact that Orion was the first to cross that milestone of 200 lumens per watt and noteworthy that even today, six months later no manufacturer has even come close to Orion’s achievement. It enables customers to generate a higher return on investment on their projects using Orion product. And to be able to use those returns to fund new solutions that solve meaningful business problems. The product launch advanced the technology envelope and our leadership from the prior efficiency benchmark we had achieved at 179 lumens per watt in October of 2015. And even today virtually all of our competitors struggle to even get close to this prior achievement. Place this in context most of our competitors including those that are far large still sell high end solutions that are 20% to 40% less efficient. And while somebody would purchase a competitive product that cost the same yet is one third less efficient is rational and is where Orion intends to exploit through our expanded sales channel. I am proud to say that our engineering and product development team has not only achieved this record breaking performance and market leadership, but we have done so in a large competitive market. We estimate that the market for building retrofit and renovation of lighting that is in Orion’s suite spot has a $200 billion installed base. And I’d like to point out that since virtually all of our products were made in our United States manufacturing facility; Orion has an additional competitive advantage in controlling our cost which drives margin, but also ship products in less than 10 days following receipt of order which is an imperative for the building retrofit space. This domestic manufacturing strategy gives us a clear sales edge in fulfilling orders weeks faster than most of all our competitors. And when you are focussed on the retrofit market having the ability to custom package, label and provide site logistics, delivers a competitive advantage that only a domestic manufacturer can provide and one that only Orion has the experience of doing. Another area of opportunity for Orion is the connected ceiling technology that enhances building management and utilization. The market for smart lighting is projected to be worth approximately $20 billion today and these solutions allow building managers to provide access control, fire and safety, space utilization, asset tracking and energy management functions among others. Orion has a portfolio of smart building patents and product technology originally developed for our fluorescent platform and over the next year we expect to be reintroducing these products for use in a digital world. Our innovation team is working to develop new and enhanced products to meet these and future needs in an effort to keep Orion ahead of the smart building costs [ph]. During the third quarter, LED revenue represented 82% of our total lighting product revenue. This exceptionally high conversion rate is driven by market demand for our top performing High Bay and LDR products. In dollar terms, third quarter LED fixture revenue rose 29% to $15.5 million compared to $12 million in the year ago quarter. This level of market acceptance underscores the strength of our product offering, channel penetration and the rapid fulfilment from our U.S. manufacturing facility. Beyond offering the most efficient product in the market at a competitive price we believe we must also provide best-in-class customer experience. Orion is committed to delivering our products with just a few days order received which is critical in the building retrofit world. And we are uniquely serving the retrofit market and it shows in our operational performance. Given our retrofit focus, designs and job site management platform, we enabled very low job side expenses with minimal disruption to the customer. This helps to make the installer more profitable and leads to happy customers. When everybody wins, it gives us a real competitive advantage in the market place. It is also important to note that we have realized margin expansion from our prior generation of High Bay product without any other contribution yet from our 214 lumen per watt product just recently released. Let me now spend a few moments on our sales efforts and our progress in migrating to an agency driven distribution channel. We initiated our plan a little over a year ago and started with just a few agents. We rolled out a plan broadly towards the end of January 2016 and by late April we had agencies in place that gave us relatively comprehensive national coverage. And in the third quarter we continued to see strong growth from the agency channel with approximately 44% of our sales coming from these agents. This compares to approximately 3% in sales from the agents in the year ago third quarter. While there has been a learning curve in implementing our new sales strategy our results confirm that this channel represents a key driven in Orion’s long term growth outlook. During the quarter we moved to shrink certain agent territories to ensure they could provide proper focus and service levels and are pleased with their new distribution framework. We look to build on this phase in the coming quarters and have targeted to roughly double our current agent base to approximately 50 agents by the end of fiscal 2018. We are very pleased with the progress we are making and we are confident that it puts us on stronger position going forward. As for our direct sales efforts, we have focused our national account team to continue to drive vertical sales opportunities across the Fortune 1000 and similar companies and fulfilling that business through the agency and distribution channels. We continue to ramp our investments in sales and marketing resources and sales support personnel for our growing agent channel. These investments along with increasing sales commissions are reflected in the sales marketing line of our P&L statement. So in summary we are focussed on two things. Growth in our business through expanding our channel presence and product innovation and two, a disciplined capital allocation strategy to maximize shareholder return on invested capital. These strategies are paying off as seen in our revenue growth, leadership in LED fixture performance, growing market penetration, improving gross margins and the success of our new channel strategy. So to sum up, we’ve come a long way over the past few years and we believe we are gaining momentum. I want to thank you, our shareholders for your support and we promise that we’ll maintain a disciplined focus on achieving further operational excellence, incremental growth and enhanced cash flow and profitability. So with that, I’ll turn the call over to Bill to provide more insight on our financial results. Bill?