Earnings Labs

Fuel Tech, Inc. (FTEK)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Fri, Nov 6, 2015

$1.64

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Fuel Tech Third Quarter 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Devin Sullivan with The Equity Group. Please go ahead, sir.

Devin Sullivan

Analyst

Thank you, Kevin. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for Fuel Tech's 2015 third quarter financial results conference call. Yesterday after the close, we issued a copy of 3Q release, which is available on website www.ftek.com. The speakers on today's call will be Vince Arnone, President and Chief Executive Officer and Dave Collins, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions for our Investors. Before turning things over to Vince, I would like to remind everyone that matters discussed in this call, except for historical information are forward-looking statements that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in forward-looking statements. The factors that could cause results to differ materially are included in our filings with the SEC. The information contained in this call was accurate only as of the date discussed, and investors should not assume that statements made during the call remain operative at a later date. Fuel Tech undertakes no obligation to update any information discussed in this call. And as a reminder, the call is being broadcast over the Internet and can be accessed at the Company's website. With that said, I'd now like to turn the call over to Vince Arnone. Vince, please go ahead.

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

Thanks, Devin. Good morning and thank you everyone for joining us on the call today. During our first and second quarter conference calls, we anticipated that many of the same teams that impacted us in 2014 would continue to impact us as we entered into 2014, especially with respect to our APC business. And we expected that we would deliver sequential financial improvements in the second quarter – from the first quarter of this year and at the second half of 2015, which have improved financial performance versus the first half. With that said, our third quarter results met our expectations as revenues of $21.7 million represented an increase of 16% from the second quarter. Further, in the third quarter we returned to generating positive adjusted EBITDA and cash flow from operations. This was a potential financial result for our Company. We are encouraged by the improvement in financial performance from the first half of the year and expect that our financial results for the fourth quarter of 2015 will be an improvement over the third and as a result, our second half performance in 2015 is expected to improve over the first. As many of our long term investors know, we continue to operate in a very challenging environment in the domestic marketplace driven primarily by lingering regulatory uncertainties and migration of fuel sourcing from coals and natural gas. We are specifically addressing this fundamental structural shift in the power generation industry via modifications and our approach towards business development activities, cost structure and overall corporate strategy. We have noted previously and that it was our specific intent over these past two years, to expand our geographical presence and our air pollution control product lines to ensure that we would not be dependent on any one markets, nor product…

Dave Collins

Analyst

Thank you, Vince, and good morning everyone. Consolidated revenues for our second quarter totaled $21.7 million compared to $21.5 million in the prior year. The first nine months of 2015, our consolidated revenues totaled $55.5 million compared to $60.3 million in the prior year. Our gross margin percentage for the current quarter was 36% reflecting a decrease from our prior year gross margin of 46%. For the first nine months of 2015 our gross margin percentage was 39% reflecting a decrease from our prior year growth margin of 44%. The decline in gross margins for both the current quarter and year-to-date periods is principally associated with the mix of technology sales and project margins in our APC segment. Our selling, general and administrative expense for the current quarter totaled $7.1 million, down 958,000 or 12% from the prior year amount of $8.1 million. For the first nine months, our SG&A expense totaled $23.7 million, down $2.1 million or 8% from the prior year amount of $25.8 million. These reductions are reflective of cost saving measures implemented in 2015. Our research and development cost for the current quarter and nine months totaled $1.5 million and $3.4 million reflecting increases over the prior year of $1.1 million and $2.5 million respectively. Given the sales of current R&D projects and the outlook for the remainder of 2015, we believe our current quarter expense levels for R&D spending will continue through the fourth quarter of 2015. Longer term we expect to continue supporting our R&D efforts as we believe this is a critical component for our future growth. Our net loss for the current quarter and year-to-date periods totaled 289,000, $0.01 per diluted share and $3.3 million or $0.14 per diluted share respectively. Our adjusted EBITDA for the current quarter and first nine months…

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

Okay. We'd like to open the call for the questions at this point in time.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today is coming from John Quealy from Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions.

John Quealy

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

Good morning, folks. So can we dive into the carbon a little bit, talk about some of your stocks and obviously I understand competitively you don’t want to give away everything, but talk about the ability, how you only been thinking about it, the time frame to actual commercialize, I mean you gave us a little hand, but if you could just dive deeper that would be great.

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

Yes John, we can give you little bit more information at this point in time but we realistically we'll need to comments we looked into 2016. But we are encouraged by what we are seeing as we are working through the development process with our fuel conversion business. This is engineered carbon, this is taking a very exciting process and applying to very inexpensive feedstocks and running those feedstocks into value added product that can be used in the variety of business segments. I can tell you a little bit about the segments that we are targeting, as I noted we are looking to post some industrial and consumer segments we are looking at foundry industries, iron and steel, we are looking in steel, alloy and silicone alloy producers and then some consumer product variance as well. So it's been a joint effort on both the quality - the process/technology development side, as well as testing the commercial development opportunities as well for this new initiative. We are excited about what we see that's why we are continuing to invest at this point in time. And as I said, there will be a lot more to comment when we move into 2016. We are moving at a very structured pace relative to how we're evaluating our incremental investment if you will, and as we move through those - across those milestones, that's how we take decisions in terms of whether or not we take that next step, as I noted in my commentary we're coming close to those next steps for buy – where we will consider looking at investing and how we're actually going to manufacture product and put them in the marketplace. So that's where we stand today.

John Quealy

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

Great, thank you.

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

You're welcome.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question today is coming from [indiscernible]. Please proceed with your question. Q – Unidentified Analyst: Thank you. Good morning. Just a follow up a little bit on the question about the fuel conversion, you're obviously looking at a lot of potential markets, but can you give us some sense of how big some of these markets could be, I mean what is the potential addressable market for some of them? I mean I guess the leading months as you look at the development of the program because you'd have to be selective to start with I think. So, what kind of market size could we be looking at?

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

Yeah, first of all I'll answer your second comment first. Yes, we are being selective in our approach because we need to obviously -- we need to prove out the efficacy of the processing and the technology, that's first step. And yes, we will target very specific market to do that first. Relative to market size, [Pete], it's difficult for me to go ahead and pull figures at this point in time that I would be comfortable with. All I can say right now is the fact that we believe very strongly that the market opportunities are going to be -- I'll use the word material, without putting numbers on that today. We'll know more as we move into 2016, and come to a point whereby we're looking to invest in actual manufacturing facility operation and we can talk a little bit more about specifically putting commercial product into market, and what those market sizes are going to be as we look at both industrial and consumer markets but today all I'm really comfortable saying is that we're seeing very, very positive indications from both technical efficacy and market acceptance and we are encouraged not to go ahead and look at these next steps of investment. And so that's where we are today, I wish I can give you a little bit more but that will come in the future. Q – Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And can you talk a little bit about where these products would fall sort of in terms of spectrum between commodity and highly technical or engineered products?

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

Yeah, I mean our intent is to actually move all the way towards the end of the spectrum whereby they are technically engineered products and not commodity products. We are actually looking to supplant commodity products. That's our intent. That's our expertise within Fuel Tech's is applying our engineering knowledge to be able to create something that's value added in the marketplace. We're now looking to create a commoditize product. Q – Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And then changing gears and looking from a high level, I guess the Chinese electrical generation market is probably slow, 80% coal or something like that, and it should be a huge potential given the severity of their pollution problems and I think they're planning to spend $300 billion and it could be should be probably a lot more than that over a period of time. Can you give us some sense of what the addressable market for your APC products is, going to that market primarily with ULTRA at this point I guess, but I don't understand why you can't have a broader approach in China and what limits your ability to fully capitalize on the whole market opportunity over there?

Dave Collins

Analyst

Yeah, I can help a little bit with that Pete, and yes of course, the Chinese marketplace is utilizing 75% to 80% coal as their fuel source for power generation. And I've seen recent articles that have actually understated their utilization of coal and so those percentages could possibly be higher than that as we sit here today. We've been in the Chinese marketplace since 2007, and on overall basis I'm pleased with what we've developed and built in that marketplace. What we found just like what many other companies have found when they've gone to move into China to do business, is we've found a very complex cultural business environment, we found highly competitive local Chinese suppliers that are really willing to do pretty much anything to win work. We've also found that compliance means something a little bit different in the China marketplace versus other markets in the world whereby the Chinese market still doesn't have today an ongoing internal enforcement mechanism for compliance with some other regulations. So, that creates a dynamic that is very different than other parts of the world. And that is actually what prevents us from being as pervasive with all of our technology portfolio as we would like to be, okay? ULTRA has been our largest selling technology there, we expect that to continue and that's because we really have a unique solution for converting urea to ammonia for all of their installed base of FCRs, and we believe we have a leg up on that technology in the marketplace. But as we know, new technologies don't stay very new long in that marketplace. So we've done well, I expect to still continue to do some good business in the China marketplace. We will look to see if we can bring other technologies to that market but as I mentioned there is a large number of local Chinese competition that's already there and supplying many of these technology to that market already. So, we're progressing as well I think we can at this point in time but we always look to improve. Q – Unidentified Analyst: And what do you think the trend of your business in China is likely to be this year overall?

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

I think from this year to next year I see a little bit of an uptick in business. 2015 has been a little bit of a downturn in the overall opportunity just because in 2015 we've really felt the impact of a large influx of competition, but we have developed -- we believe we've developed means to make ourselves a little bit more competitive with some of the local Chinese competition particularly with respect to ULTRA And that combined with the fact that there are going to be some lower emissions reduction levels that need to be met as we move into 2016 and 2017, and there's a huge market that needs to be served, that gives us indication that we should see an uptick in business in 2016 from 2015. Q – Unidentified Analyst: All right, and do you think that the competitive impact or competitive pressures on your mainstream business over there is really more sort of a cultural thing or is it because your cost structure is little bit too high for that market?

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

In reality it's a combination of both. It's a combination of both and we're looking to address, the cost structure issue that's where we can. Some of the other cultural business practice issues, that's a little bit more difficult for us to deal with is public company and so we'll focus on the cost structure. Q – Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Thank you very much.

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

You're welcome.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We've reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the call back to the Management for any further closing comments.

Vince Arnone

Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions

Thank you everyone for joining us on the whole call today. We appreciate your interest in Fuel Tech. As I noted, we're very pleased with our third quarter results. We expect better in the fourth and we're optimistic about our outlook for our existing product and technology suite, as well as looking forward toward some contributions from the technologies that we are investing in today. Thanks again everyone and we look forward to meeting hopefully some of you. Next week, Dave and I, will be presenting at Drexel conference in New York City, so if you happen to be there, please stop by and say hello. Thanks everyone.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. That does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.