Michael Hartnett
Analyst · Sidoti & Company
Thank you, Adam, and good morning. First 9 months of our fiscal 2012 continued to show strong organic growth in both our diversified, industrial, and aerospace markets. We continue to see solid order volumes across our key markets and good execution by our manufacturing facilities.
During the third quarter, our sales were $95.1 million, an increase of 17% over the same period last year. The strength in our industrial markets continued through the third quarter, with sales of our industrial products up 18% on a year-over-year basis. This increase was driven by strong demand from both distribution and OEMs, with year-over-year rate of 12.6% and 20.1%, respectively.
Our major markets continued to respond well for our product offering, engineering support, and service levels. Sales of industrial products for the period represented 52% of our total revenues, and aerospace and defense represented 48% of those revenues.
Last call, we discussed the strength and breadth of demand from our served industrial market. The picture today remains is strong now as it was then. Market leaders in this sector continue to be mining, oil and gas, ground defense and general industrial distribution. Orders from our customers in the oil and gas markets remained strong and building. New products are being added to support equipment in the hydraulic fracturing markets, as well as both onshore and offshore energy development. Construction of large equipment for the mining sector continues to expand through the period as reported by the equipment builders during their conference calls.
In Europe, we are also encouraged with the reception we see for our new products for the Machine Tool industry and the results of new marketing initiatives for sales of these products in Asia. Finally, we are experiencing volume expansion at our industrial distributors in the United States. This is driven by replacement markets of mining and oil and gas, as well as an overall improvement in company coverage in these markets.
Relative to our aerospace and defense business, these businesses grew 16.1% in the third quarter compared to the same period last year. The positive development in the aircraft markets we spoke about last call continue today.
Strong book-to-bill ratios at large aircraft OEMs was again demonstrated in calendar 2011. As you can see from our third quarter results, this sector continues to perform very well for us.
As reported on our last call, we remain busy in the sales, marketing, engineering, and manufacturing, preparing for the next leg of the expansion to support the manufacturing plans of the plane builders. There are numerous new products under development or entering the manufacturing cycle. Frequent customer visits to our facilities, some visits to gauge our readiness to support production ramp up, some visits are to approve added processes and products. Considerable activity is expended to support these visits, as well as plan for increases in production throughput and to develop multiyear contract supply agreements. These are daily topics of our discussions.
As I stated previously, manufacturing capacity worldwide is being measured, rationed, and taxed to support the production requirements.
Relative to RBC, we are carefully reviewing our order book, relative to our client base, given our current and projected capacities to ensure our best clients see no disruption in service levels, and our manufacturing efficiencies are not compromised by any loss of economies of scale as a result of industry planning, perturbations, and capacity constraints.
We fully expect that in the coming years, should the number of planes planned today actually be produced, there will be a shortfall in worldwide qualified manufacturing capacity to support these objectives. We think of that as a wonderful concept.
These are interesting times and a company can be easily overwhelmed with the demands from this industry. And believe me, we are doing everything we can to be cautious in our commitments and deliberate on planning our growth through this phase of the cycle.
In summary, we ended the third quarter of fiscal 2012 with $215.7 million of backlog compared to $180 million for the same period last year. Gross margin performance for the third quarter was 35.4% compared to 32% for the same period last year. This is an improvement of 3.4 percentage points better than last year’s third quarter. As we discussed on our last few calls, our internal target is to add 1% to 1.25% of gross margins in fiscal 2012 over 2011.
For the first 9 months of fiscal 2012, we are much better than planned and exceeding our internal target. These margin improvements are the result of improved pricing on new contracts, as well as process improvements, better execution, and of course greater production volumes.
Looking ahead, we expect the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012 to hit a high watermark in terms of sales and to be slightly over $100 million.
I’ll now turn the call over to Dan, who can provide more color on the quarter and the full year.