Earnings Labs

Park Aerospace Corp. (PKE)

Q4 2020 Earnings Call· Fri, May 15, 2020

$34.03

+0.32%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Chris and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Park Aerospace Corp. Fourth Quarter FY 2020 Earnings Release Conference Call and Investor Presentation. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. At this time, I will turn today's call over to Mr. Brian Shore, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Shore you may begin your conference.

Brian Shore

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everybody. This is Brian. I have with me Matt Farabaugh, our CFO, of course. Welcome to our fourth quarter conference call. As you probably know, there's a presentation that we're going to go through today. It's posted on our website. And you really want to get a hold of that presentation, get it up on your screens, so the call will be much more meaningful that way, as we walk through it. Also, there's some supplemental financial information that's attached to the presentation as Appendix 1. So what we're going to do today is, cover our fourth quarter numbers. We'll talk about the pandemic and the economic crisis and the impact on the aerospace business from our perspective. We'll talk about the impact on Park and our perspective on it. And then, we'll also talk about what's going on at Park. I just want to warn you that this is a pretty long presentation. There's a lot to cover we think. And, sorry, it could take -- I think it's going to be an hour, but it could be close to an hour so just be prepared. At the end of our presentation, of course, we'll take any questions that you might have. So I think that covers the preliminaries. Why don't we just dive right into it, because, like I said, we have a lot to cover today. So the slide two is our forward-looking disclaimer information. We're not going to read it or discuss it. But if you have any questions about it, you let us know. Slide three, so right into our Q4 results. So let's just talk about it. The sales for Q4 were $15.494 million, you can see that in the right-hand column. And what we said in our Q3…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Sarkis Sherbetchyan with B. Riley. Your line is now open.

Aman Gulani

Analyst

Hey guys. Thanks for taking my question. This is actually Aman. I'm jumping in for Sarkis. So I wanted to ask you mentioned that your -- that military makes up 35% of your business. Whatever you could comment, how do you expect the military and space program to grow for Park in the medium to long-term?

Brian Shore

Analyst

So we really want to get on more military programs. And it's an important question because we're not looking to get on these big programs like the F-35, high visibility which means that they're very over budget and very delayed. And they're susceptible to reductions, cancellations. Look what happened to the F-22. All of the military programs run -- are niche programs, which I think are very safe and very important programs. We'd like to get in more of those programs. I don't -- it's not going to -- to me it's not going to be like a GE Aviation thing where you get a $30 million per year military program. It's probably going to be a lot of programs one after the other. We're very delighted with the Kratos program. We're very delighted with the ablative programs for the rocket nozzles. We're delighted with the drone programs, other drone programs. So we need to get out there and go find the opportunities, which we believe are there. But I don't want to somewhat give you a feeling that it's going to be like a one big event where -- great we got a $20 million program. We actually are not really looking for that kind of thing, which is what we don't want to do is set ourselves up or getting the rug pulled out from under us when these big programs, which are high visibility in Congress and everyplace else, we have the rug pulled out from under them. The programs that we're on nobody even knows about them. Nobody is interested, but they're very critical defense programs for our country, and we'd like to be on more of those. So this is a little bit of a wake-up call in a sense not that we're pulling back on commercial, we're doubling down on it. But I think we didn't have a real focus on military, we always like military but it wasn't a main focus for Park. Now it's becoming more of a focus for Park. I know that doesn't give you a real hard answer to your question, but I think that's probably the best I can do to give you some perspective.

Aman Gulani

Analyst

No. No. That's very helpful. So I wanted to ask given your strong balance sheet and the current market dislocation, I mean, you did talk about M&A. But I mean do you anticipate putting that dry powder to work via M&A? And like where do you see Park doing M&A? Do you think it's somewhere where you can maybe expand in your military business, or would it be somewhere in the bay of the commercial side?

Brian Shore

Analyst

So -- okay. So that's a good question. It may be both, because we're a materials company, and often materials companies aren't going to be focused on one end market or another. Now we're actually a little unusual, because we only focus in aerospace. A lot of our competitors, they'll do aerospace. They'll do windmills. They'll do construction and do automotive. We don't do any of that. We're just do aerospace, but when you're in materials, aerospace materials are often going to be in defense and commercial biz jets. So I really look at it like that. We look at, okay, what is more strategic? What is more unique? What kind of products that we want to be in that we're not in now which we feel absolutely kind of strategic maybe niche let's call it for the future? So, it's not like a discussion you have with an investment banker, where they just say, okay, when you put a nice graph on the screen and this is our chart. We want to be in this segment and that segment. We're way, way beyond that. We're much more into the nitty-gritty of what does this really mean? What would this acquisition mean three years, four years, five years down the road? What kind of programs do we want to be on? What kind of technologies do want to be in? We want to be in hypersonics as an example. So, again, I'm sorry, I'm probably not giving you a real great answer, but that's probably the best we can do, but going back to the main point about acquisitions, yes, we think that the cash is a great asset for Park now maybe once-a-lifetime kind of asset. And we feel like the world has turned on its head maybe even a good way for us, because we told you three months ago we were very frustrated with the valuations. Now we expect when we're told the valuations would come down, I mean, some companies don't even have a choice, because they're distressed. A lot of companies expanded by doing what? By taking out -- by putting a lot debt in their balance sheet, and I suspect that their banks are going to want to get that paid -- money paid back. So we'll see, see what happens. But we're definitely being overt about our interest in these kind of things, and I hope people are aware of it. Maybe it's good to have this conference call, because maybe other people aren't aware that we're looking.

Aman Gulani

Analyst

Got it. Thank you. Last question for me. I just wanted to get a bit of color on your supply chain. Do you feel comfortable with the flow of raw materials to support Park's operations in the near to medium-term?

Brian Shore

Analyst

Well, it's an excellent question. We probably should have touched on that during the presentation. It's a real challenge managing our supply chain. We did have an issue about six weeks ago, and we scrambled and we worked with MRAS. We qualified somebody else really quickly. So it's a lot of managing now, because the supply chain has all issues that everyone else does and some are doing better than others. Right now, it's okay. Right now we're fine, but we need to be paying a lot of attention and we need to be looking at alternatives and contingency plans and that kind of thing. So I would guess if I was going to -- asked to predict something that if you look for a year that you asked me a year from now, I'm not going to say, oh, yes everything is smooth everything is great no issues. I would probably say, yes, we've had a lot of challenges along the way. Hopefully, I would also say, we -- kind of way to overcome and manage through them. But I got to -- I would say, it was just a walk in a park and we had no issues.

Aman Gulani

Analyst

Got it. Thank you. I’ll pass it on.

Brian Shore

Analyst

Thank you. Thanks a lot for your questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And the next question comes from the line of Christopher Hillary with Roubaix. Your line is now open.

Christopher Hillary

Analyst · Roubaix. Your line is now open.

Hi, everyone. How are you?

Brian Shore

Analyst · Roubaix. Your line is now open.

Good. How are you doing, Chris?

Christopher Hillary

Analyst · Roubaix. Your line is now open.

Good. Thank you. Good. I'm going to miss some of your comments, I apologize. But I just wanted to ask, as you go through this period of kind of disruption and slowdown, is it presenting some opportunities for you to just increase your efficiency as you don't have to be in that rush mode that I think had been a challenge for some time? Do you see some ways to just run more efficiently restructure your factory floor a bit those types of things?

Brian Shore

Analyst · Roubaix. Your line is now open.

Yes. It's a good question. So it's kind of a two-edged sword. As our revenues go down, then there's a part of it, where you say you're using your factory and resources less efficiently, because your fixed costs are just being absorbed over less revenue. But it's a very good point. We talked about fiber in the fourth quarter. It just drives us crazy. We got way behind. And we had a forecast that this fiber supplier wasn't able to quite make it and really made it very difficult for us in the fourth quarter. And there is economic inefficiency, in getting everything out the door in the last two or three weeks. That's not a smooth and efficient way to run an operation. So right now, of course we don't have that problem. We don't have the issue with shortages anymore. I'm sure a supplier would be happy to give us more if we wanted it. And so it does give us an opportunity to do exactly what you're talking about. And not just in terms of raw materials, but also in terms of how we operate the business. And it's something we're -- I'm actually glad you brought it up. This is something we spent quite a bit time is actually we kind of thinking through, how we do this? How do we better optimize our situation? So, it's a two-edged sword. There's part of it, where you say there's going to be less revenue running through your factory, less production, less coverage of fixed cost. But the other part of it is that at some point, you're running so hard that you're over the -- you're on the other side of the curve where your efficiency is going down.

Christopher Hillary

Analyst · Roubaix. Your line is now open.

Okay, great. And then, you talked about it a bit. But just are there any other areas you might highlight where you think, the business development opportunities are improving more? I mean, I think you alluded to it. But if you could comment further that would be great. And thank you again. And I hope you all stay healthy and safe during this period.

Brian Shore

Analyst · Roubaix. Your line is now open.

Thank you and same to you and yours. Well, I guess, let me answer that question two ways. There’s a kind of internal opportunity that we're working on internally in the factory. And those are interesting. Because they are things that were kind of always on the back of our mind we wanted to do. And I'm not just talking about internal efficiencies. I'm talking about going into other areas like you have new product line offerings, or other service offerings, that we were just never able to get to. Because our emphasis for the last couple of years was just get the stuff out the door, gets the stuff out the door, keep the customer going, never disappoint that customer. And that emphasis has changed to the point where we have the opportunity to look at these other opportunities. And we have been doing it too. I think probably for the last three weeks, Ben and a couple of our folks in Kansas are kind of working together on -- we have a whole list of things. And we update it every couple of days. And we're doing stuff too. We're pursuing some of these things. I really can't talk about them. Because they're a little sensitive right now some of these opportunities. And then of course the M&A area, we've discussed it already. But what we want to do is not compromise and just buy something because – okay, it's aerospace. But the question is always going to be, how does this make Park better long-term? Why does this make sense? That's why I said, we're interested in buying highly strategic companies as acquisitions rather than just "Oh, they're in aerospace." So -- and obviously at good values. So hopefully that answers your questions, at least a little bit. Operator, are there any more questions? Operator?

Operator

Operator

And at this time, I'm not showing any further questions, on the phone line.

Brian Shore

Analyst

Okay. Thank you very much everybody for hanging in there. This is a record for Park over an hour a call. I'm kind of surprised any of those still even on the call got to ask questions, when we got done with the presentation. But thanks again for your interest. Appreciate it very much. Call us any time. And we'll be talking again pretty soon, because our first quarter ends at the end of this month. And we'll be announcing I don't know when, but my guess is end of June early July. Okay. Take care, everybody. Good wishes to all of you and your families. Take care of yourself. Be safe. But would be good to get the country open as well a little bit I think. Okay. Take care. Thanks again for your interest. Bye.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. And you may now disconnect.