Good afternoon. My name is Camilla and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Park Aerospace Corp. Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Release Conference Call and Investor Presentation. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. At this time, I will turn today's call over to Mr. Brian Shore, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Shore, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, operator. This is Brian. Welcome, everybody. And I want to introduce Matt, of course. He's with us, our CFO, as usual, Matt Farabaugh. And also, we'd like to take this opportunity to wish you and your families a very happy new year. All the best to you in 2024 it is, right? Yes. We just announced our Q3 earnings, I guess maybe about 45 minutes ago. So you want to pick that up. And also, in the earnings announcement, there's instructions as to how you would access the presentation that we're about to go through. You want to do that as well. The presentation is pretty long. Sorry about that. I really was thinking I was going to do this one, so I'm going to make it shorter and end up being longer. It's hard for us, or at least for me, because it just seems like sometimes there are important things to cover. We don't do the sound bites. We don't hire IR firms to do a little clever, kind of slick things. And I don't know why you'd want that anyway, because I would think you'd want to hear it from management. So we're not as polished. It takes a little bit longer. It'd probably take about 45 minutes or so to go through the presentation, so just be advised. We might skim through some of the items, though, that we've gone through previously. There are some items in this presentation which were in the Q2 presentation as well, so that might help us a little bit. Before we get started, I just really want to give a shout-out to Donna because Q3 is a bear for us because our holidays are kind of a mess. Not just the presentation, we're closing our financials, so Matt…

Thank you. [Operator instructions] Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Nick Ripostella with NR Management. Please proceed with your question.

Good evening, and Happy New Year, Brian, and to the whole team there. I know you can't get into specifics of this potential new program, but might you be able just to say something about the math behind it in terms of the kind of rate of return profile that something like that would have? Can we just assume it would be similar to the existing profile? And, Yes, do the best you can. When you talk about the Company and you use the word conservative, I trust you. I can take that to the bank, so you could be conservative. The second question is, obviously, Park has a very bright future, and as you've said in the past, you paid your dues. So concerning how much cash do you think the Company really wants to keep on the balance sheet going forward? What's your viewpoint on that?

That's a tough one. The first one, Yes, the margins are quite good on this new project, quite good, and maybe better than our existing margins. Certainly not worse, maybe better than our existing margins, so quite good. And, by the way, Happy New Year, Nick. Thank you for your questions. Hopefully that gives you a little perspective. There's a lot of information. This is not just kind of like starting. We have lots of information, a lot of numbers that have been crunched, so we know a lot about this project. So when I say the margins look quite good, that's not just kind of off the top of my head stuff. How much cash do we want to keep? Well, that's why I mentioned we got the $9.3 million, but we still got to pay the IRS for that, the Patriots and stuff. Well, I don't know. I mean, good question. It's something we think about. The board talks about it all the time. It's really nice to have cash so that if we want to do this project, we say $6 to $10 million, but let's say we spend more money on automation, let's say it's more than that. It's nice to be able to say, yes, we'll do it, rather than, okay, where do we get the money for it? The customer that approaches us, they know that, too. We're a public Company, so they know that if we both agree to do it, that we're not going to come back and say, oh, sorry, we don't have the money. I don't know. That's a good question, Nick. I mean, I'm not really going to say, oh, we got way too much more cash than we'd like to have. When we had $150 million or so, I would have said that. But at this point, Yes, I mean, it's really nice to have the cash we have, but I wouldn't say, oh, my God, we have so much excess cash. I don't know if that helps, but that's kind of an off-top of my head, off-the-cuff answer. It is something we talk about at the board level quite a bit, though.

Can I just ask another question?

Sure.

I mean, obviously, with what's going on there, you're going to start generating cash hopefully in the next couple of years. But even after you pay the taxes and things like that, I mean, it's just, obviously, it's nice. We like that you run the Company very conservative like that, but with programs like this, I'm just trying to feel it out a little bit. But I understand where you're coming from. Thank you.

Yes, good point. It's not a static number. You're right. We expect to generate cash. So it's something that really we have to evaluate on an ongoing basis, Nick, I think. It's nice to have something so that when opportunities present themselves, we can go after them. We never thought of buying back stock as our biggest priority, but we'll do that as well if the price is right and the opportunity presents itself. So it's nice to have cash available for that as well. Companies, they go borrow money to buy back stock. It's like, okay, that's an interesting way of doing business, but it's not our way of doing business. So we plan to be around a long time. We're not playing for a couple years and playing games with our, what do you call financial engineering stuff. Does that help? Are there any other follow-up questions?

Thank you so much. Best of luck for the rest of the year and next year.

Thank you very much, Nick. Happy New Year to you and your family.

Okay.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, and I would like to turn the floor back over to Mr. Brian Shore for closing comments.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everybody, for listening in. It was really nice to be able to share what's going on at Park with you. Again, wish you and your family a Happy New Year. That comes from both Matt and me and Martina, Donna, all of us. And we'll be around. If you have any questions, feel free to give us a call. Happy to talk to you. So you have a good day, and we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.