Hello. And welcome to the Q3 2014 Broadwind Energy Inc. Earnings Conference Call. My name is Daniel and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call over to Joni Konstantelos. Joni you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Broadwind Energy's Third Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. With me today are Broadwind's President and CEO, Peter Duprey; and Broadwind's Executive Vice President and CFO, Stephanie Kushner. This morning's earnings news release is available on our website at bwen.com. Before we begin today, I would like to caution you that this call will include some forward-looking statements regarding our plans and market outlook and also will reference some non-GAAP financial measures. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Please refer to our SEC filings and consider the incorporated risks and uncertainties disclosed there, including our Form 8-K and the attached news release filed with the SEC this morning and our Form 10-Q which will be filed later today. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information. Having said that, I will turn the call over to our President and CEO, Pete Duprey.

Thanks Joni. Over the last 15 quarters, we have shown consistent, solid improvement in our quarterly results. We built a solid platform for Broadwind's future performance. Unfortunately in Q3, we frankly executed quarterly, primarily in our Abilene Tower facility. As we were adding production shifts and staffs as well we qualifying a new Tower model, our Abilene plants flattered. We underestimated the amount of change that the production team could handle. We have already taken steps to contract these issues and improve Abilene's efficiency. I will discuss the performance for the Tower's division in more detail later in the call. For the consolidated group, revenues were flat year-over-year and the operating loss showed a $0.5 million improvement over Q3 2013, due to lower SG&A expense and lower regulatory charges. Gearing and Services both showed nice improvements. We further reduced our inventory balance and we're able to cut our operating losses significant in both Gearing and Services. Our Services segment grew revenue by over 35% compared to Q3 of last year and they had another record quarter for order intake. In Gearing, revenue from our own gas customers in the current quarter was more than double in Q3 of last year. These are some great achievements for the quarter and I don't want them to be over saddled by some steps in Towers. In Wind, the fundamentals were strong and the 2015 looks to be a very solid year. We continue to believe there is support for an extension of the production task credit after the November election which should allow the industry enough time to deploy another round of technology improvements to further lower the cost of energy from wind degeneration. The steel market continues to show increasing demand with outlook in commercial construction, auto, and energy markets. Mining is…

Referring to slide eight on relatively flat Q3 revenue, our gross profit margin declined from 9.4% to 6.7% of sales. The drop was due to sharpening higher labor cost, including over time and increased outlays from maintenance and critical spares and towers to help manage scale of the Abilene plant. Gross profit margins improved in our other two operating businesses. Operating expense was favorable; it declined to $5.7 million, down $1.2 million from last year. In 2013, we reached a settlement with the EPA regarding a legacy environmental issues at our Bradford plant and recorded a $1.5 million charge in the third quarter. In the current year quarter, we added $800,000 for the $750,000 reserve we established last quarter related to the potential settlement of the SEC investigation regarding issues in 2009 and 2010. Although we have reached preliminary agreement with the SEC staff, we cannot consider this closed until it is finalized, which we do expect to happen before year end. So, the lower regulatory charge helped us by a net $700,000 in the quarter. Added to this were the impacts of lower incentive and share-based compensation, reflecting the weaker financial results in the quarter. Our operating loss for the quarter totaled $1.8 million, an improvement of about $500,000 from the 2013 period. EPS was a loss of $0.12 bringing us to accumulative loss of $0.07 per share for the nine months to-date, sharply better than $0.47 loss last year. This was worse than the small profit I projected during our last call because due to the additional SEC settlement provision, not the significantly more difficult Tower results were foreseen adequately. Turning to slide nine, as Pete described, Tower sales were down 17 units in the quarter versus the prior year and below the low end of our guidance…

Thanks Stephanie. We talked about the quarter, and frankly it should have been better. We will fix the tower issue and we do have in place the backlog for strong 2015. As I mentioned in the wind market fundamentals are the strongest that they’ve been in ten years. We simply need more certainty over what's happening in Washington. The oil and gas markets are very robust and we are watching the price of oil and gas very closely. Our liquidity position is strong and we believe that company's prospects for the future are outstanding, which is why we are putting in place a stock buyback program. The Gearing and Services businesses are getting into their groove from an operations perspective. And as Stephanie mentioned we reached the tentative settlement with the SEC which is our last remaining legacy issue from the prior leadership. For each of the businesses to be running on all cylinders at the same time is when things at Broadwind will really get exciting. I will now open the call to questions.

Thank you. We will now begin a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) And our first question comes from James Ward from Macquarie Capital. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. How is it going?

Good morning.

On the share buyback, given you are focused on growth and now you've stated that you are not going to receive much in the way of return on the cash, just sitting on the balance sheet. But what's the motivation in returning it? Why not just hold on to it and take advantage of growth opportunities that might come up? It just seems to conflict with being focused on high growth if you are going to be returning cash to shareholders at such an early stage in where the story is at?

I think at the level we are talking about the $10 million level, really what we are doing is offsetting the -- what I would say is kind of the normal dilution that comes from share awards and we were matching for one case with stock at one point as well. So, it's relatively modest just to kind of keep that share count fairly constant.

Okay. That’s fine. In terms of the PTC, where does your confidence stand on being extended and what are you basing that on?

Well, I think -- there's always been by parts some support for the PTC. I think what -- the scenario that we think will play out is, as part of an extenders -- tax extenders package there is roughly 40 some odd tax credits or incentives that are expiring that Congress really will need to deal with, and we believe it will happen in the lame-duck session. And I think probably the best scenario for an extension is just keeping the language as it was -- the last time it was passed in 2013. And from what we are hearing out of the American Wind Energy Association and other lobbyists from Washington there -- they think that there is a very good chance that it will get passed in extenders package. And I think from the industry point of view, we would like to get one more kind of opportunity to continue to pull cost out of the cost of wind energy and then we can probably compete head-to-head with fossil fuel. So, one more technology cycle is what we would like to get at this point.

And so you're fairly confident that it will be included in that tax extenders…

Yeah. I mean -- I think it's hard to handicap these things. I was at AWEA last week and there was a lobbyist there who is pretty close to it, who indicated that she thought that there was a high probability. So that’s what we are hearing and I think there are lot of good reasons why it should get passed.

Okay. Great. So my last question here is on Abilene and just wondering whether from your perspective it was more of an issue with leadership. You've indicated that management at the point level there has been changed. Or is that more on the staffing side you've indicated that staff was a bit greener and not as accustomed to the processes and therefore couldn’t adapt as easily. How long do you see it taking before the, kind of, kinks get worked out and its producing at a level that you are satisfied with.

I think the issue was across the board. Certainly it was leadership, myself included, at the -- certainly we threw too much at a fairly green set of employees, so we probably overstretched it too much. So we have really focused on retraining the employee base and getting them to be able to deal with two different tower variance in that plan. I think we've thrown the right resources at it and we --we've indicated that there will be some ongoing impact in the fourth quarter, but I would expect quite early in 2015 that plant will be back producing at the levels that it should be and I think that is doable. Going to be some hard work, but I think it's very doable.

Okay, great. Thank you very much.

All right.

Thanks.

Any other questions?

(Operator Instructions) And we have no further live questions.

Okay. It was a tough quarter. We will get this behind us. We will fix it and like we said in our prepared remarks, we feel very strongly that the company is well positioned for the future and we will be showing better results in subsequent quarters. Thanks very much for joining the call. Bye.