Earnings Labs

Optical Cable Corporation (OCC)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Jan 28, 2016

$9.39

-11.42%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+3.00%

1 Week

-6.44%

1 Month

-3.86%

vs S&P

-8.62%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Krystal and I’ll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Optical Cable Corporation Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2015 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Palash. You may begin your conference.

Aaron Palash

Analyst

Good morning, and thank you all for participating on Optical Cable Corporation's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2015 conference call. By this time, everyone should have a copy of the earnings press release issued earlier today. If you don't have it, please visit www.occfiber.com for a copy. On the call with us today is Neil Wilkin, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of OCC; and Tracy Smith, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. The actual future results of Optical Cable Corporation may differ materially due to a number of factors and risks, including, but not limited to those factors referenced in the forward-looking statements section of this morning's press release. These cautionary statements apply to the contents of the Internet webcast on www.occfiber.com, as well as today's call. Now, I'll turn the call over to Neil Wilkin. Neil, please begin.

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

Thank you Aaron and good morning everyone. I will begin the call today with a few opening remarks regarding our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2015. Tracy will then review the fourth quarter and full year results for the three months and 12 months period and then October 31, 2015 in more detail. After Tracy's remarks, we will answer as many of your questions as we can. As is our normal practice, we will only take questions from analysts and institutional investors during the Q&A session. We will also offer individual shareholders the opportunity to submit questions in advance of our earnings call, we already have done that. And the instructions regarding such submissions are included in our press release announcing the date and time of our earnings call. Now turning to fiscal year of 2015. OCC demonstrated strong operational and financial performance in the enterprise market in fiscal 2015. Our consolidated net sales in this market increased by more than 9% to $38 million as we continue to execute on key initiatives that we believe will support future growth. Our development of new and updated product families for the enterprise market over the past two years, particularly our enterprise connectivity products contributed to our increase in sales in this market. Despite our strength in the enterprise market, our financial results were impacted by weakness in certain harsh environment in specialty markets, including mining, oil and gas and military markets as well as by volatility in the wireless carrier market. The strong U.S. dollar also impacted our sales outside of the U.S. Unusually slow sales activity in the United States towards the end of calendar 2015 was surprising and impacted OCC's fourth quarter, while weakness in the U.S. will impact -- while this weakness in the U.S. will impact OCC's…

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

Thank you, Tracy. And now, if you have any questions, we are happy to answer them. Operator, if you could please indication the instructions for participants to call in questions. If they have any, I would appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We have a question it comes from the line of John Adessa with Pinnacle.

John Adessa

Analyst

I was curious on the sales decline in the fourth quarter, about 33% or so. Could you break that down, perhaps provide some color as to what industries contributed to that decline? The release says military, industrial, mining, petrochemical and so forth. But perhaps you could provide some color as to where the bulk of that decline came from?

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

The bulk of the decline was in the wireless carrier market. So, you will notice when you compare this fourth quarter to last year’s fourth quarter. We had a significant record fourth quarter last year because of a large volume and wireless carrier sales. And in the fourth quarter of this year, that did not occur and that explains most of the difference.

John Adessa

Analyst

Does that reflect then the $6 million order I guess that you had last year that you didn’t have this year?

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

Well, yes, it wasn’t just one order to be clear.

John Adessa

Analyst

One customer.

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

It was one customer, but various orders. And if you look at the difference in Q4 last year versus Q4 this year, the difference in wireless carrier sales is slightly above the $6 million.

John Adessa

Analyst

Have you disclosed who that carrier is?

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

No, we don’t, we don’t typically disclose our customers and I mean this is one of the challenges that we have as we gone into the wireless carrier market. Most of our other markets are so diverse, while we have swings and differences and there's some volatility, normally that diversification evens out and eliminate any large swings. But the wireless carrier market is large enough and the orders are large enough that any swings can impact our top-line and that's what we saw between 2014 and 2015 as well as 2013 to 2014.

John Adessa

Analyst

Understood, but you intend to stay in the wireless carrier marketplace.

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

Correct, and also to be clear, we typically don’t sell directly to carriers themselves. I mean our products are usually bundled through value added resellers and so we're working with intermediaries that are selling a more complete solution to the wireless carrier market directly.

John Adessa

Analyst

Right, but just a follow-up on that, do you build the wireless carrier or do you build the value added…

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

Yes, we build the value added reseller who is our customer, we do not have direct contract with the actual wireless carrier.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] At this time, there are no further questions.

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

Okay. Thank you. Aaron, I want to check to see if we had any questions submitted by individual investors or shareholders.

Aaron Palash

Analyst

Neil at this time, we do not have any questions submitted by individual shareholders.

Neil Wilkin

Analyst

Thank you, Aaron. I'd like to thank everyone for participating on the call today. And as always, we appreciate your time and your interest in OCC. Have a nice day.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.