Sunny Sanyal
Analyst · Anthony Petrone with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Howard. Good afternoon and welcome. We started off this fiscal year with strong top line performance in the first quarter. However, our profitability was below expectations due to a number of different factors that Clarence and I will review with you. Revenues in the first quarter were up 8% to $200 million from $186 million in the same quarter a year ago. Direct conversion contributed $5 million in the quarter. On a segment basis medical revenues increased 8% and industrial revenues increased 6%. Our revenue growth was driven by higher global sales of CT tubes and products for oncology, dental and airport baggage screening applications, partially offsetting these gains were lower sales already graphic digital detectors and mammography products. Growth in our industrial segment in the first quarter was once again led by strong demand for our industrial CT tubes for airport baggage screening applications. To give you some color according to third party research, the global market for these airport screening systems is projected to grow at the rate of more than 5% compounded annually over the next five years and reached $4.3 billion by 2023. Stringent security regulations and the need for improved throughput, has been driving the demand for CT systems for both checked and carryon baggage screening. Over the coming years, we expect that most airports will replace older systems with more sophisticated next generation CT systems that offer 3D imaging and automated threat detection capabilities. In nondestructive testing and inspection, we continue to ship linear accelerators for imaging applications in the aerospace, defense and manufacturing verticals. During the quarter, we also opened a new office in the Houston area to be closer to and better serve customers in the oil and gas vertical. We have several new products for this vertical moving through development phases and expect to talk more about them in the coming quarters. In our medical segment, we have strong global sales of CT tubes as well as an increase in sales of oncology and dental products. In particular, dental detector revenues increased double-digits from the prior year quarter and have grown sequentially over the past four quarters. We also announced this afternoon that Varex has renewed its three year pricing agreement with Canon Medical Systems for calendar years 2020 through 2022. This agreement extends our multi decade long relationship with Canon Medical through which we continue to supply our CT tubes and heat exchangers for integration into Canon Medical CT imaging systems for the global market. We estimate potential product sales during the term of this renewed agreement to be approximately $385 million. In addition through separate agreements we also supply Canon Medical with our digital detectors and high voltage connectors. I'm also happy to say that since the beginning of the fiscal year, we have renewed a number of additional multiyear pricing agreements with key customers. To give you a frame of reference, these customers including Canon represented more than 50% of our medical segment revenues in fiscal year 2019. These agreements reinforce the long-term nature of our partnerships with our customers. In China, our local OEM customers continue to make progress in bringing their new CT systems to market and we expect that our unit volumes will continue to grow this fiscal year. This growth in China, along with the rest of world activity contributed to overall growth in our global CT tube sales during the quarter. As a reminder, most of the CT systems in China are new placements that expand our global install base of CT tubes. As the install base grows, we expect to benefit from sales of both the initial CT tubes that are incorporated into the new systems as well as multiple feature replacements over the life of the systems. During the first quarter, our Wuxi facility manufactured and shipped its first orders of our new locally made radiographic digital detectors for both local Chinese OEMs and global OEMs factories in China. We shipped a number of prototypes to existing and prospective customers and early feedback has been positive. We also recently signed a multiyear contract with a dental OEM customer based in China and we will be supplying them for detectors from our Wuxi facility. This new customer is just one example of dental OEMs that are launching new systems in China, and we look forward to the prospect of working with more of these potential customers in the future. While we're talking about China, let me give you an update on how the coronavirus outbreak has impacted us. As a point of reference, our facility in Wuxi is located about 450 miles east of Wuhan and about 90 miles west of Shanghai. Like many other manufacturers in China, we have temporarily put a hold on operations at our facility in Wuxi and shifted manufacturing to other locations to cover current demand. While this has certainly been a concerning time, I'm glad to report that as of today, none of our employees are constructed the virus. We currently anticipate being able to reopen our factory next week and look forward to resume in production. Somewhat in response to this major health event, we have seen early signs of some increased near-term demand for our CT tubes and radiographic detectors that are incorporated to diagnostic imaging systems used for screening this type of respiratory disease. We will continue to monitor in the situation closely. Marketing efforts in our medical segment are paying off. In December, we attended RSNA, the largest trade show event of the year for the medical imaging industry where we showcased and discussed several technologies and innovative products. These included our Z platform digital detectors, non-glass flexible substrate detectors, photon counting detectors, liquid metal bearing cardiac and CT tubes, and nanotube, X-ray tubes. We also exhibited in the new AI pavilion where our software team demonstrated artificial intelligence capabilities to autonomously detect and discriminate meaningful artifacts in X-ray images for lung screening and liver and dental applications. Overall, RSNA was a busy show for us and we came away with a good number of meetings scheduled with prospective customers that want to discuss ways our new technologies can be incorporated into their next generation X-ray imaging systems. We expect these new technologies to be a significant competitive differentiator for us in the future. Before I turn over the call to Clarence, let me provide you with some high level comments regarding our gross margin which was lower than expected in the first quarter. Quarterly variation in gross margins is not unusual for us. Our adjusted gross margin rate has ranged from 33% to 38% over the past 8 quarters. This is primarily caused by changes in product mix, volume or productivity and could also be due to timing of customer pricing changes and product cost reduction activities. We are in competitive markets that have varying levels of price erosion, particularly with digital detectors. To offset this, we have ongoing programs to lower our cost structure by optimizing our supply chain, redesigning products for cost effectiveness and improving factory productivity and product yields. Our separate and significant opportunity for improvement relates to the previously announced closer of our Santa Clara facility and related transfer operations to Salt Lake City and other various locations. We had expected to be able to stop production in Santa Clara by the end of calendar year 2020. Good progress has been made by the team and we now expect to pull the closure date in by a full quarter with some ramp down of operations in the fourth quarter fiscal year 2020. With that, let me hand over the call to Clarence to talk about our financial performance in greater detail.