Alan Offenberg
Analyst · CJS Securities, your line is now open
Yeah, Larry, we do believe that we will get a little bit of growth year-over-year in Arnold. The quarter certainly was below our expectations, yet at the same time it’s pretty identifiable, you know, what led to that underperformance and one of the items that, you know, both of the items actually referenced in our prepared remarks, but the continued erosion of the Reprographics business, which was something we understood on acquisition of the company so that’s just a natural headwind that they face. I think the good news is over time that just becomes a smaller and smaller amount of that business, you know, gradually goes away, but this quarter in particular the company was burdened by some underperformance in Europe as we mentioned, as well as a restructuring that’s taken place, the European operations that hasn’t fully reflected itself in the company’s operating performance, which we expect to see the benefits of those restructuring efforts beginning to impact the company throughout the balance of the year. It’s an interesting dynamic with Arnold. As we’ve discussed, they work on so many different end users in different applications that in Europe, we specifically highlighted that oil and gas was challenged in Europe, which it absolutely was. They’ve got other oil and gas customers in other parts of the world where that business is doing just fine. And it’s entirely dependent on the application being used by the application associated with the European business or impacted by current prices, you know, throughout the energy markets, in the other segment it wasn’t. So it’s the kind of the blessing and the curse I should say the diversification more of a bluffing of course, but we expect that Europe’s performance will improve over the balance of the year PMAG, North America precision thin metals continue to perform extremely well. The Flexmag division is performing consistent with our expectations and performing very solidly. So, it’s really I think exciting for us to think about the future for Arnold in the context of having all of their cylinders firing at once, which it hasn’t really benefited from yet and when that happens, I think you’ll see performance more in line with our initial expectations, we’ll see I believe growth year-over-year this year and as we talked about in prior calls and as Tim Wilson presented at our Investor Conference a couple of years ago some very exciting macro level long-term opportunities, particularly in the automotive sector that we continue to be very enthusiastic about. So, while the quarter was certainly below our expectations, I would summarize by saying do you still expect modest year-over-year growth and you remain very bullish about this company over the medium and long-term.