Good day ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Powell Industries’ First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be opened for questions. This conference is being recorded today, Wednesday February 06, 2013. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Karen Roan with DRG&L. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Camille and good morning everyone. We appreciate your joining us today for Powell Industries’ conference call to review fiscal 2013 first quarter results. We would also like to welcome our Internet participants listening to the call as it is simulcast live over the web. Before I turn over the call to management, I have the normal details to cover. If you did not receive an email of the news release issued yesterday afternoon and would like one, please call our offices at DRG&L and we will get one to you. That number is 713-529-6600. Also, if you want to be on the permanent email distribution list for Powell news releases, please relay that information to us. There will be a replay of today’s call and it will be available by webcast by going to the company’s website at powellind.com or a recorded replay will be available until February 13, 2013. Information on how to access the replay was provided in yesterday’s earnings release. Please note that information reported on this call speaks only as of today, February 06, 2013 and therefore you are advised that time sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of the time of any replay listening. As you know, this conference call includes certain statements including statements relating to the company’s expectations of its future operating results that may be deemed to be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, competition and competitive pressures, sensitivity to general economic and industry conditions, international political and economic risk, availability and price of raw materials and execution of business strategies. For further information, please refer to the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now with me this morning are, Mike Lucas, President and Chief Executive Officer and Don Madison, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial and Administrative Officer. I will now turn over the call to Mike.

Thank you, Karen. Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today to review our fiscal 2013 first quarter results. I will make some opening comment. Then I will turn the call over to Don to discuss the details. We began our new fiscal year with another solid quarterly performance. The order rate for the quarter, up $272 million was a new record for Powell, including a large project that the sales team had been pursuing for some time. Even without this one large offshore project, our underlying order rate was robust due to the closing of many projects that had been process for a number of months. Backlog at the end of the quarter reached a record $554 million, surpassing the previous record achieved in 2008. While first quarter revenues were essentially flat compared to a year ago, we were able to deliver much better than expected earnings. That speaks directly to the strength of our organization and our people. And let me just quickly personally thank the Powell teams from around the world for all your hard work, dedication and support. Strength in the U.S. and Canadian oil and gas markets continues to be the major contributor to our business and we anticipate strong order activity through the rest of this year and into 2014. Engineering resources across the industry continue to be a constraint, impacting both project award timing and customer scheduling. New investments in petrochemical projects are expected to begin generating inquiry activity later in the year. However, we don’t anticipate any significant order volume before next year. While we are seeing a limited number utility projects and still believe there is pent-up demand in this sector it is yet to be realized in the marketplace. Overall, we are optimistic, but remain watchful and we are focused on executing the projects we have in our current backlog. I will now turn the call over to Don to discuss the financial details.

Thank you, Mike. Revenues were a $154 million in the first quarter compared to a $157 million in last year’s first quarter. We saw lower domestic activity compared to a year ago, but revenues outside the United States were relatively unchanged. Gross profit as a percentage of revenues was 22% in the first quarter compared to 13% in the first quarter of fiscal ’12. This increase in gross profit is a result of favorable operation execution across the company. Improvements in Canada were also a large contributor to these results. Selling, general and administrative expenses increased by $2.6 million to $22 million. This increase is primarily related to increased personnel cost, incentive compensation resulting from higher levels of operating performance and an increase in sales commissions associated with the mix of orders received. SG&A expenses as a percentage of revenues increased to 14.5% in the first quarter compared to 13% a year ago. Amortization expense was $415,000 a decrease of $288,000 compared to the first quarter of fiscal ‘12 as certain intangible assets have become fully amortized. Our provision for income taxes in the first quarter of fiscal ‘13 reflects an effective tax rate of 32.6%. Our provisions below statutory rate due to the utilization of loss carry-forwards on Canadian income. Net income for the first quarter of fiscal ‘13 was $7.4 million or $0.02 per share compared to a net loss of $1.7 million or $0.15 per share in the first quarter of fiscal ‘12. New orders in the first quarter were a record $272 million resulting in a record backlog of $554 million compared to a backlog of $437 million at the end of the previous quarter and $474 million a year ago. For the 3 months ended December of 31, 2012, cash provided by operating activities was $21 million. Investments in property, plant and equipment totaled approximately $13 million which included $8 million investment in our facility expansions. At December 31, 2012, we had cash of $97 million compared to $90 million at September 30, 2012. Long-term debt and capital lease obligations including current maturities totaled $4 million. Looking ahead, based on our backlog and current business conditions, we are raising the low-end of our previous guidance for revenues and earnings. And now expect full-year of fiscal ‘13, revenues to range between $700 million and $725 million and full-year earnings to range between $2.25 and $2.50 per share. Included in our earnings outlook is an estimate of $0.25 per share for one-time cost of associated with the startup of 2 new facilities. Now, let me turn the call back to Mike for few final comments.

Thank you, Don. Just a couple of comments before we open to Q&A. The 2 facility expansion projects we have in Houston and in Edmonton are still on schedule with operational dates planned for late summer of 2013. We are excited about both these facilities and the expanded capability they will provide us to better serve our customers. With another quarter under my belt I'm even more enthusiastic about the opportunities for Powell. The main strengths of our company continue to be project execution, our technical expertise and ability and customer centric attitude on all levels of the organization. There's a little doubt in my mind we will succeed regardless of the challenges of the marketplace. At this point, we will be happy to open it up for your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from the line of Brent Thielman with D. A. Davidson.

Just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on what you are seeing on the utility side of things and also whether you saw or seen any potential impact from Hurricane Sandy?

On the utility front, there are isolated projects I would view them as minor projects maintenance oriented, nothing that I would consider major new investments from a broad based perspective. There's no single concentration within one particular geographic area or one utility. When it comes to the impact in the northeast, we did see -- we reported last time about $1 million to $2 million of initial wave of replacement parts. We do have several tenders out at this point in time and which we expect that we will be doing some more substantial replacement work over the next 12 months to 18 months that could easily be as much as $5 million to $10 million.

And then just on the offshore side it sounds like you got nice order there. Are you still seeing a pretty good pipeline of opportunities on that end?

The pipeline in the offshore market is fairly strong but that put that -- you need to put it in the context that that is also a long cycle market. So with many things that we are working on today will not turn to orders in the current fiscal year.

Our next question is from the line of Jon Tanwanteng with CJS Securities.

Two questions for you, was the strength there due to at least some recent engineering constraints experienced by customers and second maybe given the magnitude of increase from the backlog why just take it at the lower end of your guidance, you did $717 million last year in revenues and $474 million in backlog, are you expecting relatively less orders through the year or is it an issue of timing in projects?

First question, yes, many of the jobs that we were able to book in the quarter were jobs that we've known about have tender placed in our proposal process many months ago and have been following on and it was as much a coincidence as anything else that they all fell in the same quarter. But yes, I would say the reason that we had to delay continues to be because of constraints across the industry of engineering resources. That same constraint will impact the execution of projects. Much of the work that we booked in the first quarter will be working through a lot of this same engineering firms and clients going through the detailed engineering documentation, engineering approvals and while we do anticipate some of this work converting to revenues with a percentage of completion, recognition of revenues, a much of this, a bulk of this will actually fall in to next year.

Okay, got it. And then, you know, nice job on the EPS and margins as well. Can you give a little more detail on the performance of that and how sustainable are they going forward?

Clearly, as we've talked in the past that we work to improve our operating performance. This is a situation where it is no one order, no one project, no one change order that dramatically impacted your results, consider the results in the current quarter, very favorable mix but nonetheless, through operating performance of the company. When you are looking at going forward, we talked about it, the last call, reiterate at this time. The second quarter will continue to be a challenge. It will not surprise me if we see a reduction in gross margin as a percentage of revenues in the next 90 day period but then the second half of the year I expected it to bounce back and I at this point in time, I would anticipate it to be north of 20%.

The next question is from the line of John Franzreb with Sidoti & Company.

Just a little bit about the pricing environment and margin profile of the new orders. Would you call it better than most recent six months? Are you taking maybe some jobs at a lower margin because you have an excess capacity coming on? Can you give us a little color on what your thinking is on new order additions, especially considering how high the number is?

First, the answer to the question, we're not taking on low margin business to fill facilities. We are market pricing and we are trying to improve and raise market prices with each of our tenders. The overall market today, I will view it as slightly a better continuing to trend that we have talked about last quarter, that I would not call it step function changes but I still feel that the trend of improved price levels is, we are realizing those in the marketplace and that the concern that I have when you are looking at beyond the year from now is that how much of this may be absorbed with inflationary pressures that’s something we are trying to keep our eye on. We are trying to make sure that we factor in the best foresight that we see in materials, but that continues to at this point in time it appears to be more of a risk than it may be have this time last year.

Got it, got it. Now, if I remember correctly the original tooling of the new facilities is about to be about 50%, correct me if I am wrong. Is that still the case have you changed how much you want to increase or decrease on the production side?

I don’t remember the 50% number. So I won’t speak to that specifically, but clearly as we have gone to the process, we have look at our backlog, we are looking at the market. We have made some minor change orders on the facilities that we think are prudent based on what we are expecting in the next 12 months to 24 months of work, had we gone out and made major changes? No. We have just basically taken the information we have evaluating our bottlenecks within our existing facilities and try to make sure that we are taking it, correcting those to the degree that it makes sense with this process.

Okay, Don. So you are essentially saying that you are adding a little bit more capacity than you’ve originally planned?

That is correct.

Our next question is from the line of John Braatz with Kansas City Capital.

You mentioned about the tightening of engineering resources and at the same time bidding the activity is proving and you mentioned the petrochemical opportunities maybe later this year, from a personnel standpoint engineering standpoint, is this constructing your ability to bid on projects at all?

It’s not an internal constraint, I am not saying that we are not tied, and they were not recruiting as well. At this point of time, we are not restricting our tender process as to trying to cheery pick which work we are going to pursue. We are trying to follow up the market and take advantage of this wave of opportunities in front of us. The constriction or the constraint is really more in the outside of our organization with finalizing the specifications and working through the final configurations of this facilities because you really cannot configure the electrical power requirements until you designed all the processes that are going to need to be managed. And so that the process of finalizing the engineering even to point that you could have a realistic tender process and then the process of going through the final detailed engineering documentation and getting engineering approval to begin, our actual project execution from a manufacturing standpoint, we are seeing that elongate due to constraint within the industry.

When you look at the petrochemical opportunities that your referenced, maybe compared to prior cycles and so on, how significant might that be from a historical perspective?

Well, there has not been a major spin in petrochem in US in probably 20 years, but my analogy is looking at it more to the wave of refinery spending that we saw about 5 or 6 years ago. At this point in time the indications are from the projects that have been discussed; the ones that are already within the engineering firms that they are beginning to work on, if these all go forward it will be ever bit as big as the refining investment that went into the Gulf Coast back in 2007-2008.

One last question, can you give us a sense of how sizeable that one large contract -- offshore contract was.

It was just north of $50 million.

Our next question is from the line Beth Lilly with Gabelli.

I wanted to ask about Canada, you had a fair amount of challenges there, and I'm guessing based on your results that the problems in Canada are cleaned up. So first question is, how are things up there and then secondly was Canada profitable in the quarter.

Canada was profitable. It has been profitable for every quarter since the third quarter of last year and we are continuing to improve operating results. Right now we have continued to -- the backlog is growing, we are increasing our resources to respond to the backlog and also facets of the business because there are about 3 or 4 different sub units or product lines that we focused on there and each one of those are profitable. So as we turn the corner, yes I'm confident that we've turned the corner, are we to the profitability level that and the capacity, I don't anticipate that we are going to get to our goals and objectives to probably get the new facility in place and then have a few months to actually iron out the things that will occur with that transition. So I think we will be optimized probably some time in 2014. But to answer your question, we are pleased with where we are, the team up there has done a great job of getting the business cleaned up, we've got a good group of folks and they are meeting our expectations.

And the new facility being in place, how will that help you reach your goals and objectives, is there such a backlog of work and you don't have the capabilities to do the work?

Right now what we have with our existing facility is predominantly an assembly and test operation. We are having to rely on our fabrication facilities in the US, basically here in Houston. So that when you are looking at trying to manage projects and ship significant amount of your metal work from Houston to Edmonton there is complexities in the process and there's cost associated with it as well. With the new facility that we are currently -- that’s currently under construction and equipment that we have on order, we will have basically the same capabilities that we have in our Houston Mosley [ph] facility. We will have the ability to do all on our sheet metal, the paint finishing, all of the mechanical assembly as well as the electrical wiring and test and delivering the projects from our Canadian facility with complete -- with the new capabilities. It will not have the same capacity as Mosley [ph], but it will have the same capabilities. And that's what we really need to finalize our efforts to reach our long term objectives.

Okay, and you know Don we spent a lot of time in the past talking about your gross margins and then historical operating margins and getting back to the high single digits. So gross margin of 22%, I mean that’s in the past when you’ve hit those margins, it mainly been because of one-time items or some close outs and your make ups to the quarter itself. The 22%, did you generate that strictly from just, sound business practices or were there one-time items in that?

There were no one-time items of any material amount. When you go back and look through the close out variances, the change orders, at this point, this particular quarter, I would view them as all offsetting, which you would want in the ideal situation and the 22% with the mix of business that we have in the quarter was a true operating results of the business.

Okay, and then I just wanted to make sure. So there is $97 million in cash on the balance sheet and that’s in the $4 million in debt, did you say.

Yes, that’s the revenue bond that we had since back in 2000 and 2001.

Our next question is from the line of Noelle Dilts with Stifel, Nicolaus.

This is actually Steven on for Noelle. So ex that $15 million one-time large project still some pretty good strength in the quarter. Where is this being driven from specifically within oil and gas segment? Is it coming from pickup in downstream or is it also other offshore work?

There is some offshore work in there, but I won't characterize it as leaning towards production, both onshore and offshore. A lot of what we're doing up in the Canadian oilsands would be viewed as production type work, but there is some responding as well. At this point in time, Petrochem is still a very, very modern and isolated project of very small, nature nothing as far as what we have been talking about as far as major investments.

Then on the process control systems, another nice sequential pick up in backlog after really large increase last quarter. Is that still coming from the toll road financing or what’s driving that, and do you expect that segment to be profitable over the back half of ‘13?

Clearly with the growth in the -- the type of work they were being awarded today is consistent what we talked about it is heavily driven from product financing. There is some municipal in there, there is some public works and some transit work in there. But when you look at the growth it has skewed towards the private financing. The backlog growth is giving us a very solid base now to work on, much of that would have actually come into what you will consider the heavy execution phases of the projects as we approach the second half of the year and yes we do expect to see operational improvements as we start working for that backlog.

Our next question is from the line of Alex Yaggy with Cortina Asset Management.

I have a couple of questions on the capacity expansions just for clarification. The $0.25 that you have put in first of all did any of that go through this quarter and where is that going to actually show up in the income statement as you report that? And then secondly as you go into 2014 what does that number or to the next fiscal year what does that number become?

Okay, I am not sure I got all the question but to answer your question there was, there was a very minor amount that has gone through in the first quarter I would say clearly less than $100,000 so it’s insignificant at this point in time. There may be another small amount similar size in the second quarter. The vast majority of that $0.25 impact will be when we start the actual production transfers from one facility to another and gearing up the startup of the new facilities that will predominantly be in the fourth quarter, if I had to guess, probably two-thirds in the fourth quarter, one-third in the third quarter.

Into the next fiscal quarter that $0.25 -- or the next fiscal year, the $0.25 what do you expect that to be is there ongoing expense after everything is up and running or it will be much cleaner?

It will be clearly much cleaner the $0.25 is the estimated cost of the 2 relocations since startups of production. Our goal is to have that all incurred in the current year, there could be some late cost that come in, that would because of just the timing of the access to the facility that could roll into our first quarter, but the numbers should be the same, so if we ended up with $0.20 in the current year, there could be a nickel that will roll into the first quarter, it would not be incremental based on the estimates...

Okay, and then just finally as those facilities are up and running, have you put any clarification as to what kind of revenue opportunity that would lead to?

Short term is going to be from the Canadian facility it’s going to be more profit improvement. Clearly the market up there is very strong, and we will probably be able to ramp up that facility even faster than what we would have given the market situation. With the ramping up of our new facility at Houston a lot of that’s going to be depending upon what we see with the market and potentially the petrochem projects coming out in ’14 and ’15. But no, we've not tried to quantify that at this point in time, it’s all going to be driven based on the market opportunities.

Our next question is from the line of Kevin Leary with Spitfire Capital.

Just a couple of questions. First on gross margins, they have been running sort of there's 22ish percent range for the last three quarter now. I know you said they might dip a bit in the second quarter and then go back up above 20 in the second half, but it seemed pretty consistent. So I'm wondering what has to happen from here either internally at the company or in the marketplace for gross margins to expand from where you've been running?

Its incremental steps, we've got to continue to pursue our operational improvements and cost reductions that are planned in the current year. We've got to realize some benefit in the price improvements that we are seeing in the marketplace. We need to make sure that we manage the containment of materials costs inflation, but in our view most of all of the what we are talking about doing is this what you consider basic business processes that we've got to continue to manage. As the backlog goes through and the better that we can plan and execute schedule, the more we can minimize changes in our production plans as it relates to our clients’ overall project schedules the better off we are going to be. But clearly I would, I'm trying to characterize that the 22% we saw in this last quarter was a more solid 22% than the previous quarters. The 2 previous quarters clearly had some backend loaded project improvements that benefited both the third and the fourth quarter. We did not see that in the first quarter.

And then just generally speaking about end markets, what we are hearing a little bit about petrochem maybe picking up further out utilities, there are still ways out but generally speaking, are there any significant gross margin differences among the various end markets?

From a Powell perspective, the better projects are the more complex projects. They fit our business processes and allow us to generate better margins on basically the same market price level. So from a Powell perspective, it’s complexity. The more value added that we can provide from an engineering project management perspective, the more sophisticated the electrical scheme is than better it fits who we are and the profits we are able to derive from that project.

And then last question. Obviously, the ramp and backlog, working capital was an obviously used of cash last year. There's a big ramp sort of change in outlook about your source or use of working capital for 2013? Thanks.

When you are looking at it from a macro perspective, no. Our business processes are such that we are able to minimize the growth in working capital relative to revenue. Does it put some additional pressure on it? Yes. The big issues is always going to be what our working capital, is the timing of a particular project because even if you are able to obtain milestone buildings that are very favorable upfront, there's always some retention that most of every clients wants to hold back towards the end of our project, and so on any one given day where we stand on those relative to starting new projects could impact working capital. But, to answer your question, I would expect some additional pressures but no material changes from our previous thinking.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is a follow-up from the line of John Franzreb.

Mike, and in last night’s press release, you said you anticipated strong activity through this year and into 2014. I wonder if you could tell us, would you consider good incomings order book or strong incoming order book?

I think you will see it continue, of course this record of 272, we won't continue at that pace. I think if you could back over the last 3 or 4 quarters, it ought to come in at that level. For the year, as you recall last year, we had our second best bookings here ever last year. I think this year it would be at or above that and probably close to another record on the booking side.

Great and how the settlement benefit or potential settlement benefit from your dispute in Canada you were talking about this time last year, what's the status of that, Don?

Yes, I will answer that. Basically, the process continuing, it is going through the claim process as defined in the contract. As with any type of claim process, when you start going through mitigation, arbitration, it always seems to take longer than you would think it would. At this point in time, I don’t expect final resolutions before late this year, whether or not, we can get it resolved before the end of September or not, I am not sure. But we still view our position as very favorable. We clearly expect to recover some of the cost that we incurred that brought down our first quarter of last year but as far as whether that will benefit the current fiscal year or it will benefit fiscal 2013 at this point in time; it's too hard to tell.

Our next question is a follow up from the line of Beth Lilly.

Don you made some interesting comments about the gross margin, and I just wanted to go back to that. Still the 22% is a better quality this quarter than it has been in the past, are we to imply from your comments that there is an opportunity down the line to expand that 22% higher?

Clearly that’s our objective, we’ve talked about this over the years. Our objective is always to outperform where we have been in the past. We have been at 22% in the past so our goal is to outperform it. Are we are working hard to accomplish those objectives, yes. Do I think we will be successful. I think we will be able to continue to improve the gross margins, but not necessarily in a sequential quarter-by-quarter basis.

And these new facilities that are coming up, are they going to help you in terms of expanding that 22%?

I think the net impact will be positive. Clearly there will be bumps in the road as you start them up, but if the market is as strong as we envisioned it for the next couple of years and we can get those facilities and get rid of some of the inefficient costs that we currently have, we are very positive on the impacts what these facilities will provide to both Powell and to our clients.

Okay and then I wanted to follow up just on John’s question in terms of the claims process with customer. So you finished doing the work for them a couple of months ago?

Yes, several quarters ago. We have demobilized or are completely offsite I believe in the second quarter of last year.

Okay and you received to the extent that did you receive any money from them for the work that you did?

Yes basically and since we received the majority of the original contract up to, when we started negotiating giving a more contagious on change orders. The process broke down in the final few months and basically our plant we know are pursuing claims with the owner as well as we are pursuing claims with our customers. So with a process that is going through and the majority of the funds of the based contract have been take but not 100%, there is still a couple of $1 million of the base contract that was never collected. The real issue is the contention between the extra work that occurred because of scope changes as well as the extra cost incurred because of incomplete engineering data and availability of the site for us to actually do our job. It was a lot of customer provided material in this job, this was a complex job that you are not be able to explain in the five minute conversation, but the bottom line is that most of that evolves around defining scope changes and delayed cost and what we are entitled to under the basis of our contract.

Okay, and have you quantified what those change orders are that they didn’t pay you for.

No, we have not.

And were there a lot of legal cost in the quarter.

Clearly there is some legal cost. We anticipate that we will probably incur in the current fiscal year a few hundred thousand dollars. It’s material but is not going to change the outcome of the year.

[Operator Instructions] I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to management for closing remarks.

Thank you everyone for joining us today. We look forward to talking to you next quarter and as always we very much appreciate your interest in Powell Industries. Good bye everyone.

Ladies and gentlemen this concludes the Powell Industries first quarter earnings conference call. If you would like to listen to a replay of today's conference please dial 13035903030 with the access code of 4592331. ACT would like to thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.