Thank you, Karen, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter fiscal '16 conference call.
I am on slide 3. We are executing our strategy to expand earnings by focusing on our distinct assets, be they be our selling process, our engineering capability, customer fabrication capabilities, along with our capital assets to capture greater market share and to expand our business. We're focused on improving the level of our predictable base business and in diversifying and strengthening our revenue streams.
Our key markets are refining, chemical, petrochemical markets, power generation and serving the U.S. Navy. Short-term objectives include driving top line growth through capturing greater market share. Our near-term objective is to expand revenue to over $200 million across this cycle. And longer-term, continue to leverage our distinct capabilities via diversification and expanding market share to continue to grow value for our customers and value from Graham.
Please turn to Slide 4. Highlights for the first quarter include: Revenue at $27.6 million, which compares to $28.5 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2015, down 3% year-over-year. First quarter net income was $2.4 million, or $0.23 per share. This is consistent with a year earlier, with net income at that period of time, $2.4 million or $0.20 a share. Return on sales was 9% in the quarter. Backlog remains strong at $110 million.
We also took action to level backlog conversion and spread revenue conversion across several quarters in addressing the change in outlook in our markets. We've also scaled back our costs, the actions taken at the end of the fourth quarter to reduce our fixed cost base.
I'm on to Slide 5. First quarter sales were 36% from International markets compared to 22% last year. This was driven by increases to the Middle East as well as our other markets. We did have strong refining industry sales, with refining industry sales at just under $8 million. Chemical and petrochemical processing industry sales were just a bit above $11 million in the quarter. Power industry sales, $3.7 million. Our annual revenue for the trailing 12 months is $134 million.
Slide 6, please. I spoke a moment ago about the efforts and our focus on expanding our predictable base business. I've been very pleased with our progress there. Compared to 10 years ago, we've expanded that by 2.5x from what had been around $20 million back in the mid-2000s to just over $50 million last year, fiscal year '15. Our goal and our expectation is to exceed $60 million from this segment of our business, which includes nuclear market MRO, executing our naval strategy, our aftermarket strategies and our short cycle new equipment sales. The important aspect of this strategy is that we'll reduce earnings volatility as this segment is less cyclical.
I'd like to turn it over to Jeff, for Jeff to review the financial performance.