Scott C. Donnelly
Analyst · Morgan Stanley
Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everybody. I believe our first quarter financial results represented a very solid start to the year, reflecting growth in our commercial aircraft and industrial end markets and continued operational execution improvements across all of our businesses. We also secured a number of key program wins and made some important strategic moves in the quarter that should help provide growth in the long term. Starting with systems, we won 2 important unmanned aerial systems fee-for-service contracts from the U.S. DoD. The business model for these fee-for-service programs is different, and we normally -- in that we will be investing CapEx in the platforms upfront and in turn, we'll be receiving cash over time as we operate the assets to deliver services to our customer. These 2 contracts were important for a number of reasons. First, the addition of what we expect will be meaningful revenue streams over the next several years at Textron Systems. And second, both these awards are based on our Aerosonde unmanned aircraft, which is a smaller air vehicle than our traditional Shadow models. So we'll now have a second product platform deployed with the U.S. military, which should lead to future opportunities. Finally, these contracts provide an opportunity to demonstrate the attractiveness of fee-for-service UAS arrangements for additional U.S. and foreign military applications. Moving over to our Finance segment, we continue to have success with our non-captive exit strategy as we liquidated $171 million in non-captive finance receivables during the quarter, including $67 million reduction in our Golf portfolio. This included the disposal of 13 golf course mortgages and one owned golf course at favorable prices. Our non-captive portfolio now stands at $780 million. We generated income in the quarter, which reflected profitability in both captive and non-captive portfolios. Shifting to Industrial. Operating performance was solid, with revenues up at each of the business units. We did see some softness in European auto and tool markets as expected, but this was more than offset by strength in North America. Moving now to Cessna. We delivered 38 jets in the quarter, up from 31 last year and saw a double-digit growth in our aftermarket business. More importantly, we continue to see improvement in customer activity. New orders were higher than last year's first, second and third quarters combined; and our customer prospect list continues to improve. We had several additional positive developments at Cessna in the quarter, including an improvement in the range specification of the new Citation Latitude from 2,000 nautical miles to 2,300 nautical miles, the first flight of the new Ten, the first flight of the M2, delivery of our 400th Mustang and the announcement of new service capabilities in China. Expanding our Chinese service capability is part of our accelerated China strategy for which we also announced a very important agreement with AVIC to develop a Chinese general aviation business. We expect that this agreement will lead to a number of business opportunities. We expect to form a JV with AVIC and the Chengdu municipal government, which will focus initially on final assembly and completions of our Sovereign product line for our Chinese customers and will ultimately evolve to include a number of activities, ultimately including the development of a new aircraft. We're obviously very excited about this opportunity and believe this positions Cessna very well to participate in what will be a significant growth market. To wrap up with Bell, we delivered 10 V-22s, 7 H-1s and 30 commercial helicopters in the first quarter versus 9 V-22s, 4 H-1s and 15 commercial units in last year's first quarter. Solid execution on the ramp up in these deliveries allowed us to post another quarter of excellent financial performance. The commercial demand environment of Bell continues to strengthen and based on order activity underway, we still expect to see a significant increase in deliveries this year. During the quarter, we also expanded the addressable market of Bell with an important product announcement at Heli-Expo, the 525 Relentless. This new 16-passenger super-medium helicopter will offer best-in-class capabilities, including superior payload, range, cabin, and cargo volumes. The 525 will have a fully integrated glass cockpit featuring the Garmin 5000, integrated avionics suite, a pair of GE CT7 engines and a BAE fly-by-wire flight control system. The Relentless will be especially well suited for deep water offshore applications in oil and gas and will also serve as a great platform for search and rescue, emergency medical services, and VIP and corporate missions. The 525 is a strategic new product for Bell, which we will expect will meaningfully contribute for future commercial growth. To wrap up the quarter, we are seeing encouraging signs in our commercial aircraft markets at both Bell and Cessna. We posted strong results at Bell and Industrial and much improved results at Cessna. At systems, we had 2 important program wins in a challenging defense environment. Overall, I think we're focused on continuing to prove our tactical execution, at the same time, we're also investing in making strategic moves to grow our business over the long term. With that, I'll turn the call over to Frank.