Rob Dawson
Analyst · B. Riley Securities. Please state your question
Thank you, Jim. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter fiscal 2021 earnings conference call. I’d like to start with a brief review of our second quarter results and discuss what we’re seeing now and expects going forward before returning the call over to Peter to give more commentary on the financials. We are pleased to report sequential growth in both sales and profits in the second quarter. Sales for the fiscal second quarter came in just above $11 million, a sequential increase of 11% over the first quarter and up 6% from the prior year second quarter. We’re starting to see signs of recovery in the wireless carrier ecosystem spend, as evidenced by the two sizable orders we received over the past couple of months, which brought our backlog to nearly $24 million at one point last month, the highest in the company’s history. Not all this backlog will ship immediately, but it certainly supports our expectations for a strong back half of the year. These two multimillion dollar orders at our Cables Unlimited division in Long Island were for our Optiflex hybrid fiber solution for use in the build out of wireless tower sites and came from a new Tier 1 wireless carrier customer we had never done direct business with before. These orders represent a significant win for us and highlight the increasing demand for our product offerings as wireless carriers accelerate their 5G build out and the related network densification. As I’ve noted before, significant project wins like this layered on top of our higher run rate through both our core OEM customers and our strong distribution partners, give us confidence that our combined product platform is a springboard for future revenue growth. Historically, we’ve had just one Tier 1 customer on the hybrid side. So we’re very pleased to add a second. As we’ve noted before, our Optiflex hybrid fiber solution has been one of the key components of our growth in the last few years. These solutions underscore our capabilities in supporting carrier tower site builds and we feel that along with our small cell and DAC thermal cooling solution, we’re building a more complete set of products for the wireless carrier market. We’ve developed a strong reputation in the market, our ability to deliver is great and we continue to build on this proven track record. We are a strong and reliable vendor for any carrier and the market is recognizing this more and more. We now have product of various types, actively shipping into every wireless Tier 1 carriers network. We’re doing business on one product or another, or multiple products, with every one of the companies in the wireless Tier 1 ecosystem. Much of that product will go through our distribution partners or it might go direct and to some we’re selling various product types through both channels. Looking at our product areas and market segments, our distribution business remained solid. Our RF, coaxial cable and connector products and our C-Enterprises faster and fiber products together make up our primary offer sold through distribution. As I noted before, during the past few years, we’ve successfully strengthened and increased the diversity of our distribution channels. And this business continues to provide a solid increasing baseline of sales. As the business climate continues to improve, particularly around tower and general technical crews being able to get out and do work on both outdoor and indoor sites, we expect our distribution business will continue to grow. Moving on to small cell, nothing has changed. Small cell is still a huge opportunity, which we expect will increase sales in the second half of the year and beyond. Spending is beginning to slowly improve, definitely more than where it was six months or nine months ago. But we still have not seen it unlock like we’re starting to see on the macro side with things like hybrid fiber. Part of the delay in small cell spend has been the carrier’s reexamining their deployment plans due to certain performance issues and the new spectrum from the C band auctions. But these seem to have come down to tweaks and designs. We believe that the reason C band auction, the spend related to the C band auction is going to drive the need for infrastructure to make it all work and that a significant increase in spend is not a matter of if, but rather a matter of when. And with both our offer and our customer relationships we are more strongly positioned now for long-term growth once the widespread rollout does occur. Our sales activities continue to increase and we have a strong backlog of small cell orders. We have a product actively shipping to anyone who’s deploying small cells, as well as ongoing discussions regarding future deployments. So as spend normalizes and increases like it’s going to do, we can scale rapidly once the carriers are ready and we believe we’re well-positioned to benefit. In addition to the substantial opportunity we see within small cell, we see a significant opportunity for our DAC thermal cooling offering, which plays in both traditional wireline and wireless carriers, as well as in market segments like cable operators and mobile edge computing providers. Our thermal cooling solutions enable us to offer a definitive value proposition, centered around a better design and clear cost and energy savings. And it’s allowing us to initiate a different kind of sales conversation with a new set of customers. We’ve discussed and quoted some major potential projects, and some significant upgrades that we think are going to start to break free in the coming handful of quarters. We believe these are going to have to happen around the 5G spend and will likely come in waves as more and more new or replacement equipment is added to sites. To give an example of the discussions, we’ve been in conversations with a company that has a wireless coverage footprint that is not cellular, but more like broadband for high speed connectivity. This customer reached out to us seeking a unique DAC cooling solution for their rooftop sites, which would potentially represent a multimillion dollar opportunity. This one example shows how our DAC products can go beyond the traditional carriers and open opportunities with new kinds of companies like cable MSOs and utilities. We believe we’re going to see DAC begin to gain momentum in the coming quarters and we feel very good about the opportunities for this product, both in the carrier space and in all these alternative markets. One final point on the recovery in our markets, our industrial OEM and defense customers, which are primarily serviced out of our Northeast facilities are returning to more normalized levels and we anticipate sales expansion in these segments. This again is part of our increasing baseline of revenue that we can build on top of with large long-term project wins. Turning to M&A, as I said before, we’re committed to driving consolidation in our industry and our plan is to make an acquisition of a much more meaningful size. As we announced during the quarter, we’ve set up a Board committee specifically focused on helping our M&A strategy and we remain committed to M&A activity this year. We continue to add to a growing pipeline of potential candidates and while I have no specific update to share today, there’s certainly no shortage of conversations going on. So to conclude, it looks like the world is getting back to some normalcy here and we expect the wireless carrier spend to continue to recover and grow. We see a growing opportunity to expand further into this market with our hybrid fiber, small cell and DAC offerings, all of which gave us a strong foundation for growth going forward on top of our core run rate product lines. We believe we’re getting back to normal sequential growth, and with our strong existing backlog and solid pipeline of opportunities, we feel confident that we will return to year-over-year revenue growth in fiscal 2021. While it’s tough to predict timing on certain larger orders and the related fulfillment, with what we know today, we expect to see a steady increase over the back half of the year, with continued sequential revenue growth in both Q3 and Q4. With that, I’ll now turn the call over to Peter for a review and discussion of the financial results for the quarter. Peter?