Dr. Yoav Zeif
Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Yonah. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us. Today, I will touch on the highlights of our first quarter and share insights on a number of key milestones achieved so far in 2022. I will then hand it off to Eitan to discuss our financial results and outlook in more detail. The first quarter was our strongest in six years, a great start to an exciting year for Stratasys. We delivered solid results that include contributions from across all platform to drive top line growth and improved margins. All of our technologies grew, and I'm happy to say that all of our key businesses showed improvement compared to our pre-COVID first quarter of 2019. We are particularly excited by the early momentum from our new Origin P3, H350 SAF and NEO systems, designed specifically for high volume production of end-use parts. Our focus on execution is yielding results, that demonstrate how our strategy to grow our leadership position in polymer 3D printing is working. Our revenues of $163.4 million were up 22% versus the prior year quarter. We see particular strength in systems which grew 37% and we ended the quarter with a robust balance sheet that included over $475 million of cash and no debt. During the first quarter, we expanded our penetration further into applications for aerospace, automotive, and fashion, we tailored industry-specific solutions. For example, working with our partner Lockheed Martin, we uniquely qualified a high performance and tailored material for aerospace end-use parts. In Automotive, Radford Motors is now second auto OEM using all five of our technologies for using design, prototypes, tooling, and final parts used in vehicle production. We also officially launched the commercialization of our fashion solution with Techstyle, that's Techstyle. The industry's first 3D printer designed specifically for printing direct to garments and other end products. It opens unlimited possibilities for the fashion industry to personalize and customize premium textiles, clothing bags and accessories, footwear, and many other fashion applications. I would like to highlight three important milestones reached since the close of the quarter, that we expect will contribute to our ongoing efforts to outperform. First, we announced the creation of the new entity comprised of MakerBot and Ultimaker. With our focus on industrial, health care, and production scale, polymer 3D printing for manufacturing, we determined that MakerBot, a desktop solution fell outside of our core businesses. The transaction serves several purposes. It allows us to further concentrate our efforts to grow our leadership position in our area of focus. It has a margin accretive benefit on our business, and our commercial agreement provides us access to entry-level 3D printing users, allowing us to potentially realize incremental synergies without distracting our resources. We believe that the desktop sector is growing at a healthy pace, and that the new company will be a leading force in that industry and we view our investment as having the potential to realize incremental long-term value for our shareholders. Second, we recently published our inaugural report on environmental, social and governance activities, which we believe is the first report published to GRI standards in our industry by an OEM. This report outlines our commitment to ESG and establishes benchmarks for future targets. Our sustainability priorities include design for responsible production and consumption, transparency, people-first initiative and social impact programs. We are also focusing on renewable energy projects, quality education, industry innovation, and climate action. The 3D printing industry is ideally situated to drive innovation and improvement in manufacturing from a sustainability perspective, and Stratasys is aiming to lead those efforts. I encourage visiting our website to review the report. And third, and last week, we hosted our annual flagship manufacturing virtual event, where we announced a number of new product updates, which will strengthen our market-leading offerings and the value potential our products can bring to customers. PA-12, the most popular industrial 3D printing material is expected to be available later this year for our H350 printers. Also for the H350, we announced the upcoming availability of polypropylene, which is very popular in traditional manufacturing, but not widely available in 3D printing. This material further demonstrates the competitive superiority that our SAF technology provides in powder bed space with respect to materials, speed, accuracy, cost per power and total cost of ownership. In FDM, we are upgrading our F123 Series, with the launch of the F190CR and the F370CR systems. CR means composite ready and includes the new Nylon CF10, a carbon fiber material that is both exceptionally strong and light, thereby extending the end market opportunities for the F123 Series. We also announced our first Stratasys validated FDM materials from third party materials partner which our channel will begin to sell in the second half of 2022. It's a great example of our open materials ecosystem approach beginning to bear fruit. With our P3 technology, we are adding GrabCAD Print Software to Origin, completing the integration efforts to have a single platform across all of our co-manufacturing systems. We announced the availability of the first origin compatible materials from our origin open material license. And importantly, we launched Origin Local, an offline non-cloud version, which is ideal for use by certain defense and government applications. When you consider all of these developments along with the new product that we recently launched, you can see why we are so excited about the future. Every execution on our strategy and build momentum, customers continue to permanently replace a number of their traditional manufacturing choices with our additive manufacturing solutions, expressing their long-term confidence in Stratasys. The recent supply chain and related issues have been a catalyst across industry to rethink how they manage their product lifecycle. We see it happening with leading companies such as General Atomics, which invested in both Stratasys and Stratasys Direct and has been expanding its additive manufacturing program for unmanned aerial vehicles beyond tooling to end-use parts. They have a goal to increase the percentage of parts using additive on their UAV drones to 50% on their smaller ones and mid-single percent on the larger ones. We see it with health care companies like Medtronic, which has moved from machine tools to 3D-printer tools with Stratasys because they can create more accurate and complex path while reducing cost by 80%, saving millions of dollars. And we see it with transportation giant, like Alstom, which is 3D printing spare parts, tens of thousands of them, so far. As part of its industry of the future program reducing its dependence on outside suppliers, while reducing lead time by 95%. There are many more such changes taking place across industries and we believe that this clearly shows the path that manufacturers have owned as they make their production lines more efficient, less costly, more sustainable, and simply better with Stratasys. We are also encouraged to see the U.S. Government and large manufacturers step up to help more companies get involved in our industry through the Additive Manufacturing Forward Program. This initiative was announced by the White House earlier this month and reflects their belief in 3D printing's benefit to the manufacturing economy. This includes building more resilient supply chains and onshoring manufacturing to help grow the economy. The program is specifically designed to help suppliers to companies like Raytheon and Lockheed invest more in additive manufacturing, GE Aviation, Honeywell, and Siemens are also some of the initial participant companies. While many of our largest customers are building out sophisticated advanced manufacturing centers, it's their suppliers who manufacture a lot of their end-use parts. This program helps incentivize more companies to invest in additive manufacturing given large OEM are now committing to purchasing additively produced parts. The program also will provide training, technical assistance, and standout development, all things needed to help additive manufacturing to go in the mainstream, and Stratasys has the full solution and broadest portfolio to support this initiative. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Eitan Zamir to share the financial results, and update our outlook for 2022. Eitan?