Brian Shore
Analyst · Needham & Company
Okay, thank you Matt, this is Brain again. Let me go over some more commentary about the quarter and update our business activities as well. First of all money compared to second quarter to the first quarter the revenues were off about $6.5 million in the second quarter as compared to the first quarter so revenues were fracing actually a little bit above Q1 levels in the first four weeks of the quarter of the second quarter then dropped off. Revenues in June were a little above the Q1 averages. Actually the revenues in first four weeks were higher than even actually in May so they are going quite well until like the fifth week of quarter to the fifth week of our five week month of June and then they trended down pretty quickly. But the average revenues in June were a little still above the average in the first quarter to put it in perspective. Then July dropped off from their and then August dropped off further from there. So what is this about, it’s really about electronics and it’s about the market and it’s about a market correction. Now in our first quarter there was some euphoria I guess and the quarter is quite strong but I think if you go back and look at the transcript actually weren't everybody, I guess we fit in doing this for a long time, we've had a lot of experience that the electronics market in particular can turn very, very quickly without really any good advance warning and I’ve made this comment, I mean probably dozens of times in last 15 to 20 years that the electronics industry is interesting because of a lot of very intelligent people who collectively are not very intelligent in terms of predicting what’s going to happen. In fact after the week five, is when the things started to turn down. We had our first quarter conference call after week four, then week five things turned down. So that was a good example of not being able to see what was coming very well. So I think what we have here is a pretty significant inventory correction particularly Asia. Remember, Asia where things accelerated at least for Park in the first quarter by dramatically, and I think Asia got ahead of itself. There was overbuilt in Q1 and we’re quite sure about that now. One thing about electronic is everybody is brilliant when looking back, looking forward not so brilliant. So over one actually for Park was artificially efficiently high based on that overbuild, then the correction in July and August is artificially low, in other words it's not based upon -- the high wasn’t based upon the fundamentals, it was higher than the fundamentals, lowers, lot lower than the fundamental as well. So what we’ve learned, Chris Mastrogiacomo our President, has been over in Asia for the last three weeks meeting with all of our key customers and OEMs, learned something interesting about the Chinese market and we haven't heard this before. In China controlled economy that’s not a surprise, it’s not an acquisition, it's just everybody knows that and there is an allocation system. The government allocates certain amount of business to the OEMs for in infrastructure build out of 4G LTE internet infrastructure. But that allocation is interesting because if an OEM can demonstrate that it can handle more, then they can get a bigger allocation. And that’s what happens, some of the OEMs were quite aggressive in building and buying, buying raw materials and building product that demonstrates they can handle more and therefore be entitled to a larger share in terms of the Chinese government’s actions. And that exacerbated things -- exacerbated the problem, obviously. So we had inventory corrections, inventory overbuilds in the past and this is why we're exacerbated because remember in the first quarter I said the first quarter good news in electronics was largely Asian and Chinese story related to the Asia OEMs not so much the western OEMs so I think the market is probably paying for that now. So an obvious question is okay, there is an inventory overhang when will it end? When will things get back to "normal" and I’ll just tell you what we’ve been told, and I will give you my caution after that, my caveat after that, which we’ve been told towards the end of the calendar year November, December is when things should be normalized. Now, again I have to remind you that the industry’s ability to predict these things is usually not very good but that’s what we’re being told anyway, do the math, there's so much extra inventory is stocking the system and this is how long it will take to be absorbed. The end market is so, so because in terms of global economy, but there still seems to be somewhat vital build-out of 4G LTE, not just in China but around the world. So, then the question is well, what level we'll return to though because normal, remember as we now know, wasn’t the first quarter. It is probably not the second quarter, it must be something in between those levels but we just don’t know, we'll have to find out. So let’s talk about the bottom line in the first quarter, we would have focused on that a little bit as well, we talk about the top-line, obviously the bottom-line is going to be very much driven by top-line. So if you look at quarter two compared to quarter one we had about $6.5 million loss in revenues, but actually its worse than that, with a $9 million loss of production, in other words, production in Q1 was $9 million higher than in Q2, production at sales value we’re talking about not at inventory value, production at sales value, understand production was $9 million higher in Q1 and Q2. So we got caught up in this thing as well. We were building and building and because we had real orders in everything it wasn’t just pie in the sky stuff. So we got even more of a double whammy there, because the P&Ls for Park is going to be driven more by production in revenues ultimately, they are both equal of course but there is mismatches from period-to-period. So our P&L have been penalize more from a production perspective than a revenue perspective. So that hurt our P&L and of course, it also hurt our revenues, the fact we had extra production and because we had extract inventory which had to be Park inventory, I’m not talking about industry inventory which had to be double as well. So that may be single or double or even triple whammy I’m not sure. The other reason that the P&L is as bad as it is in Q2, the addition to the production, loss of production in Q2 as compared to Q1 is it’s hard to put the brakes on spending and just regular overhead spending and things like that when things drop off so quickly it doesn’t happen that way, actually benefited from the fact that spending will lag revenues in their first quarter because revenue spiked up so quickly, they’re spending to adjust. In the second quarter they dropped down so quickly they’re spending didn’t have time to catch up. So if you look at the difference in just the revenues, you would say yes, there should be a significant bottom line impact, but the bottom line impact for us is even more than you could just understand by the revenues you have to look at those other two factors that spending lags a little bit behind the revenue change and that there was this difference in production which is greater than the difference in revenues if you look quarter one and quarter two. So those are the explanations, let me just see, those are the explanations of the top line and also the bottom line in Q2 as compared to Q1. Q3, I know everybody is always interested, we have four weeks of sales in the books, revenues in the books in September and they’re tracking at August levels in September meaning that they have not recovered, so remember first quarter June was actually at the level of the second quarter. June was at the level of the first quarter then July dropped off from there and August dropped off further from there. In September the first four weeks of the third quarter, our revenues are tracking at the August level in the second quarter to set back debt on the August level in the second quarter, which is lower than the averages for the second quarter because, the second quarter trends down month-over-month, right, June-July-August. Now, we sometimes or in the past anyway we would give you some insight into bookings, as an indicator, our bookings at the beginning of the quarter but we’re not really going to do that, this is not a meaningful comparison anymore, because we have such significant bookings from GE particularly in September that the number is not meaningful, wouldn’t give you any kind of meaningful insight. All right, so that’s the explanation of the P&L, top line, bottom line in terms of business updates. Why don’t we talk a little bit about GE, so I think I even -- no actually I haven't mentioned last time, it hadn’t happen yet. We received what was called a global RFP through 2021, that wasn’t a surprise we have been expecting it. So, we’ve been working on the global RFP, we’re still working on a number of key development projects which are very significant potentially away for Park. We also did receive an agreement for 2016, I think I mentioned previously that we only had agreements for ’14 and ’15 but now we have an agreement for ’16 but the key areas are going to be out there 2021 as far as I’m concerned, as I mentioned we received the number of additional POs just for recently but I don’t think we’ll go into the number now, this is not maybe that relevant. Expansion, we talk about expansion for last couple of quarters, this company GE we’re not -- in last quarter we named the company, previous to that it was the Jet Engine Company, has asked us to do an expansion for redundancy purposes not just capacity. A redundancy purposes, the facility which applies into the programs now is in Kansas, but the companies, the customers asked us to go to another factory so we have redundant capability for them in case of a catastrophic event, like a tornado for instance, that you people might think about in Kansas anyway. But that price tag has moved up. I think we previously mentioned it was around 10 million, but looks like it’s closer to 15 million, also we’re not sure where it’s going to be and we’re still working with GE on that question. In other words where that factory, that expansion will be located, that’s a question and that will affect the price tag for us to some degree. Last quarter’s call we mentioned that we’re working on some 47A program, and that the next big program to leg in would be the Leap engine for the Neo, the A320 Neo which starts next year. Electronics, the market is down, we’re still working on our new products and the reception continues to be interested and pretty good. I think we make more and more inroads as we go. It’s funny, electronics Park has always been very conservative in introducing new products, we hold them back, we have a reputation for doing that but what we don’t actually commercialize the product until it's been tested quite thoroughly, both in-house and at special or customer locations, beta sites. And when we introduce a product, we feel pretty good about it, that doesn’t mean there won’t be problems. One you get into a real production environment there is always going to be things have to be done but some of our competitors do it a little differently, they just seem to push products out there. And creates a little haze and smoke in the industry because a lot of customers want to take a look and just want to take a look at these products and they do and of course it’s a little bit of like confusion sometimes since we have commercial products that are proven and then we hear that OEM or customer's looking at brand X's product and we’re excited about it, but three-four months later we’re told well that product really wasn’t ready for prime time. So it seems like we’re kind of going through that process a little bit where maybe some of the market's coming back to us after looking at brand, X, brand Y, brand Z and I don’t want to say that brand X, Y and Z aren’t really good companies, there are some of them are very good companies and they have very good products, they do, just may be a little bit of different marketing philosophy with new products. I've spoken to Chris every day at his trip Asia and we have actually some I think quite serious interest about the new products over there which would if things go our way, lead to significant revenue opportunities in the future. I guess the last thing I’ll comment on is our cash. I don't know if you noticed, but our total cash which is what we call cash, marketable securities, restricted cash which is about 25 million restricted under our loan agreements about $310 million so it moved up a little bit, actually quite a bit since the beginning of the year. So we have the $310 million, we have about $104 million of long-term, but actually there is a short term component of it, but bank debt, let’s call bank debt $104 million of bank debt, so you can do, figure the math out in terms of our net cash now. The cash is overseas largely, when we have about $50 million under U.S. the rest is overseas, so if we repatriate that the cash would attached [being] involved and you can do the math on that as well. But I also want to remind you that in addition of having a $310 million of cash and marketable securities, that we also paid just little under $300 million of cash dividends in less than 10 years. So I think that will cover it in terms of our introductory remarks. Operator, can we go to questions now?