Earnings Labs

Kimball Electronics, Inc. (KE)

Q3 2019 Earnings Call· Mon, May 13, 2019

$26.10

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Josh, and I will be your conference call facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Kimball Electronics Third Quarter Fiscal 2019 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Today’s call May 8, 2019 will be recorded and may contain forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Risk factors that may influence the outcome of forward-looking statements can be seen in Kimball’s annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2018 and in today’s release. The panel for today’s call is Don Charron, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer and Mike Sergesketter, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Kimball Electronics. I would now like to turn today’s call over to Don Charron. Mr. Charron, you may begin.

Don Charron

Analyst · Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question

Thank you, Josh and welcome everyone to our third quarter conference call. Our earnings release was issued yesterday afternoon on the results of our third quarter ended March 31, 2019. We have posted a financial summary presentation to accompany this conference call. The presentation can be found on our Investor Relations website within the Events & Presentations tab, or if you are listening via the webcast, you can find it in the Downloads tab on the webcast portal. I will begin by making a few remarks on the overall quarter, and I’ll turn it over to Mike for the financial overview. After that, we’ll answer any questions that you may have. We delivered record sales, operating income, net income and diluted EPS in our third quarter. Strong double-digit organic growth in our Medical and Industrial end market verticals helped us exceed our 8% organic growth goal and set a new quarterly sales record. New program launches and ramp-ups more than offset continued softness in certain other programs primarily caused by global macroeconomic conditions and trade uncertainties. We made excellent progress optimizing our business as we were successful expanding our operating margin by 70 basis points when compared to the third quarter of fiscal year 2018, helping us exceed our goal of 4.5% operating income. Our acquisition integration work with GES continues as we remain focused on our strategy to become a multi-faceted manufacturing solutions company. We have good momentum, and we are cautiously optimistic that we can begin to consistently achieve our goals of 8% organic growth and 4.5% operating income. The Romania operation continue to progress in its ramp-up and improved its impact on consolidated operating income percent by 40 basis points when compared to the prior fiscal year third quarter while also achieving another milestone of generating net…

Mike Sergesketter

Analyst · Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question

Thanks, Don. During my comments, I will be referring to the slide deck Don mentioned, which can be found on our Investor Relations website within the Events & Presentations tab or if you are listening via the webcast, you can find it in the Downloads tab on the webcast portal. As shown on Slide 3, our third quarter net sales were a new quarterly record of $313.5 million, which was a 10% increase compared to net sales of $283.9 million in the prior year third quarter. Adversely impacting our net sales for the quarter were foreign exchange rates, which reduced our net sales 3% compared to the third quarter a year ago. However, offsetting the impact of foreign currency rates were sales resulting from the GES acquisition, which added 2% to our consolidated net sales in the quarter, while the impact from the adoption of the new revenue recognition accounting standards added an additional 1% to consolidated net sales in the quarter. Slide 4 represents our net sales mix by vertical market. Comparing our net sales by vertical to the same quarter in the prior year, our Automotive vertical was down 7% compared to the same quarter a year ago as lower demand in China and, to a lesser degree, Europe, more than offset higher sales in North America largely from the continued ramp-up of new program introductions. However, when compared sequentially to our second quarter, the Automotive vertical was up by double digits from the growth in all of our geographic markets. Our Medical vertical was up 27% in the current quarter compared to Q3 last year primarily from strong demand for existing programs. Our Industrial vertical was also up 27% from a year ago as a result of an increase in demand for existing programs, including climate control…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from John Choi of Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question.

John Choi

Analyst · Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question

Hey, Don. Hey, Mike. My first question is regarding gross margins can you help us understand some of the components of the 40 basis point gross margin expansion? I mean how much of it was Romania versus mix versus say raw material costs?

Mike Sergesketter

Analyst · Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question

Well, I think in general, a big part of that was mix within the quarter. We commented that our automotive sales were down a bit, and we were up in our other end-markets, industrial and medical and we think that had a big part to do with the shift in the gross margin.

John Choi

Analyst · Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question

Okay. And my second question is regarding the GES acquisition, I know we were expecting, call it, 4% to 6% revenue growth from this acquisition, but it’s only been adding about 2%. So help us understand some of the drivers behind why the revenue contribution has been a little bit less than we initially expected?

Don Charron

Analyst · Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question

Yes. So the overall number that we have provided was sort of to the annual run-rate and kind of looking at a 12 month sort of view. And as we mentioned on previous calls, there is some seasonality in the GES current portfolio of business. And as we spelled out before in the last webcast, their low season, if you will, has typically been the October, November, December timeframe and their high season has typically been the April, May, June timeframe. And so there is some seasonality there. So, the 4% to 6% number we provided was really looking at a full 12-month view of the business, performing somewhat in a similar way as it did in the prior 12 months before our acquisition. I will say that the business has gotten off to a slower start. I think that we are seeing some cyclicality also with the slower revenue numbers here in our first couple of quarters. Again, their current portfolio of business primarily supports smart mobile device assembly in the semiconductor industry. And so I think both of those end markets, if you will, are also cycling lower at this point in time and so we are off to a slower start than we had expected, but we look for that to improve in the future.

John Choi

Analyst · Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question

Okay. Well, thanks for taking the questions.

Don Charron

Analyst · Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And I am not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Don Charron for any further remarks.

Don Charron

Analyst · Medina Singh Partners. Mr. Choi, you may proceed with your question

Thank you everyone and that brings us to the end of today’s call. We appreciate your interest and look forward to speaking with you on our next call. Thank you and have a great day.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. At this time, listeners may simply hang up to disconnect from the call. Thank you and have a nice day.