Brian Shore
Analyst · Needham & Company. Your line is now open
Okay, thanks Matt. This is Brian here and I’ll try to give a little perspective on the quarter, topline in particular and then we’ll talk about some other updates and events. I just want to remind you that we had -- our last call was probably less than 2 months ago, our fourth quarter call would have been I think the beginning of May, so there isn’t a lot of new news for you in terms of the updates, but I will do what I think is warranted in terms of updates. Okay, first of all let’s talk about the quarter’s -- Q1 in terms of revenues, electronics weak and mostly in Asia for us electronics is really an Asia story, big driver for Park and when we talk Asia, we’re really talking very much China, not all China, but we’re very Asia centric, very China centric in terms of electronics not only in terms of circuit board manufacturing, board shops, but also OEM, the OEMs are starting to dominate in Asia. When the industry transitioned from a Western talking electronics manufacturing, Western market to an Asian market the first step was circuit boards and assemblies were being produced in Asia to pour Western OEMs, now the OEMs also tend to be Asian. So, the China economy isn’t so great, I’m sure I’m not giving you any new news flash there, there are some trade skirmishes that haven’t helped either, or specific items that have become difficult for some of the Asian companies to get for the manufacturing. So that hasn’t been a real plus either, so for us in terms of electronics topline we really need to think Asia and again you know a big portion of Asia is going to be China in terms of the market. Aerospace, it’s really GE story, Matt indicated that Aerospace revenues were down as well. GE story, we talked about this in detail in the last conference call, the inventory burn down, that’s going to impact our revenues to GE in 2016 and 2017 calendar years. So we’re in that now and in the middle of it and our revenues at this point are about half what they were to GE about a year ago. And of course we haven’t really ramped up to the big revenues yet, but it still hurts. So we’re running this -- currently this quarter, first quarter about half the level we were about a year ago at GE and that’s because of the inventory burn down which we discussed in detail last conference call. Again that’s a 2016-2017 event, starting in 2018 that’s when things will start to move backup and actually pretty quickly I think. So, Q2 let’s talk about that, I know you’re always interested in Q2, we believe it will be somewhat better in Q1. Electronics is always a big question mark, gives us very little visibility, what do we base that upon, based upon talking to our customers and the OEMs, talking to them often frequently as much as we can to get as much insight as possible as to what’s going on and what they see for the near-term. Long-term probably isn’t that relevant because the comments could really be anything, but maybe less meaningful. So Aerospace, we have more visibility in Aerospace and we expect Aerospace topline to be improved in the second quarter as compared to the first quarter as well but not based on GE, it’s not a GE story, that’s an everything else story and a lot of other things that are going on in the Aerospace. Okay. So that’s the brief update on the quarter in terms of top-line quarter one, quarter two. Let’s talk about GE again. So well, like I said, not going to be a lot of new news item since our last quarter conference call, but we did respond to that 10-year RFQ that we received probably a couple of months ago and now the balls back in GE’s court, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that are represent in the 10-year RFQ based upon their forecast, those are not our numbers, those are GE numbers. And GE again I want to remind you the A320neo, it’s a biggest program, but we’re also dealing with 747, Comac 919, Passport 20, that’s for a Bombardier program and a number of other Boeing -- well actually GE engines for Boeing airplanes. So as I said after ’16 and ’17, after the burn downs is over. So kind of this, it will ramp really quickly, because two things are going to happen, which will both accelerate the revenues one is the burn down will be done and second is that some of the big problems particularly the A320 are going to start to really move up. So we get to ’18, that’s when things are going to start to move up very quickly and beyond and we’ll be at our maximum revenue level probably by about year 2020 maybe ’21 based on the forecast we have, right, so that’s what we’re expecting from GE Aviation. And this is based upon the forecast we have, based upon known programs, I wanted to remind you about that because we work with GE and a lot of development work with GE as well. So we’re just talking about the base number, there is a lot of opportunity to do better than that and I don’t think that opportunity is just kind of theoretical, I think that some of those opportunities will turn into reality, not all, but someone. That’s how it is, we working 10 opportunities maybe two to three actually come to fruition. So GE is also giving us quite a bit of lab work actually testing work, just kind of help us out, while we’re going through this burn down difficulty and that doesn’t produce a lot of top-line, but it produced a lot of bottom-line. The contribution from the lab work is quite good and that’s something that they’re giving us now just to -- like I said it’s a win-win, to help them out and also to help our side of course as well. I want to remind you, we talked for this a number of times. Once we signed that the 10-year agreement with GE, which we do expect to do, but we’ve committed to build this redundant factory in Kansas, it’s about a $12 million investment that’s for redundancy, which is for GE and GE’s customers, the big ones like Boeing and Airbus, which would not be comfortable sole-sourcing us with just one line for all these key programs that we’re on and that’s a situation we’re in right now and it’s not sustainable to be sole-source with just one line. So last time we talked about a joint development agreement that we’re doing with GE and that is going well. This is for a large volume product and we’re working on together, we’ve done a number of development programs with GE, I think we mentioned the AFP project, which also relates to our 752 LTE product. So let’s change gear Scorpion, we’ve talked about that in the past, but actually there is new, because Textron is building number of other production and 4 million really [ph] production units and test articles and they’ve turned to us, to do a lot of the work, especially the harder work, they have over suppliers that do easier parts, but they’ve asked us to do the harder work and I think you know our forte is to move very quickly and be responsive particularly with different parts and parts which need -- requiring short lead times, which are most of the parts actually for the Scorpion program. We’re also doing a lot of large parts assemblies, bonded cold cured [ph] parts and tools. So this is not just straight forward work and we’re also doing quite a bit of NRE, Non-Recurring Engineering. For this program and others and that’s all very good for Park, NRE is good for Park in terms of -- positions us well in terms of our business, but it also is good contribution to the bottom-line. So we talked, I think once or twice about another very large opportunity with the aerospace company, sorry a large opportunity -- a large Aerospace Company I should say, we haven’t named that company, we are not willing to do that yet, we’ve been going through the screening, it continues to go well. We have a meeting next week with this large company and we’ll talk about the next step, I think I told you already, that we’ve already responded to a 12-year RFQ and based upon certain business levels we committed to build a factory. This is different than GE in a sense it's not a sole-source situation, we would share the business if you get it with one other supplier. So there is a question mark as to what percentage we get and at certain percentage levels we have simply committed to build the factory for them as well, that’s a very, very large opportunity for us though. So we’re hoping it continues to go well. Switching over to electronic for a second, I think we talked about a joint development agreement with a large electronics company in the Asia. This is to develop a niche product. I don’t believe -- I think I forgot to mention last time, we actually signed an agreement I think in the prior conference call, maybe the third quarter call we said we’re about to sign the agreement, well that agreement is signed and the development agreement further the development activities are proceeding, and so forth so good. One other comment I want to make regarding Meteorwave 4000 product, that’s kind of the top of the product line. One, there was a large Asian electronics company, which decided to do testing of all of the leading electronic materials products for circuit boards, for advanced circuit boards from Park and our competitors. And there was something called CAP testing, CAP stands for conductive anodic filament. This is a very important reliability test that is an industry standard and Park’s material is the only material that got to a 1,000 hours without a failure, and that’s I think quite significant and that’s not being kept a secret, the word is out about that. It's really important that those kind of things happen for Park because there are a lot of entries into the very high end area of the market now, so it's important that we’re able to distinguish ourselves technically I think we have in that one regard or in that one case rather. Okay, operator, that concludes our introductory comments. Why don’t we go to questions at this time?