Park Aerospace Corp.
Q4 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 14 May 2021

[Operator:]

Good morning, my name is Justin and I’ll be the conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Park Aerospace Corp Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Release Conference Call and Investor Presentation. 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 call.

[Brian Shore:]

Thank you very much, operator. Welcome everybody to Park’s fourth quarter conference call. With me as usual, of course, Matt Farabaugh, our CFO. We announced – published our earnings release earlier this morning. So, if you haven’t checked it out, you want to do that. In the earnings release, there are instructions as to how I guess access the presentation. We’re about to go through our presentation. You also can find it on our website, but you really want to get that presentation in front of you in order to make this call more meaningful. Without the presentation in front of you, it might be a little confusing. Also, there is a supplemental financial information that’s attached as Appendix-1 to the presentation. Matt used to read that for us, but these presentations are going on for so long, that we don’t do that anymore, but feel free to access it, ask any questions you like about it.

[Operator:]

And our first question comes from Brad Hathaway from Far View. Your line is now open.

[Brad Hathaway:]

Thank you very much and congrats. Brian getting through such a tough year, really very impressive.

[Brian Shore:]

Thank you, Brad.

[Brad Hathaway:]

I appreciate your willingness to give us a 2022 forecast and all the commentary about kind of the ramp up that you’re seeing. Given that things seem to be getting better and you kind of previously commented on kind of prior forecast just being shifted a little to the right. I was curious if you had any thoughts on kind of those prior forecasts and also kind of when you will feel comfortable perhaps giving us a long-term forecast again?

[Brian Shore:]

So as we just commented, we’re forecasting for the current fiscal year. It looks like 2020 fiscal year before the calamity happened for the world and the industry. Our forecast maybe a little bit better particularly EBITDA kind of right on that – in that range for the top line. I don’t know how to answer that question except maybe one way to look at it is that’s kind of our restarting point. Obviously, before we go out with a new long-term forecast, we can’t just kind of take off and going to roll it out or push it back by to the right by two years. That really wouldn’t be right. We have to take into account everything we know now and all the updates and all the new developments and there are significant new developments I think most of which are positive actually. When will be ready for that? I don’t know, I don’t really feel like it will be next quarter but let me just say I would hope that before the end of the year this year we’ll be able to roll out the forecast for more than just one year. Even the one-year forecast as I said, there are uncertainties that we’re still dealing with, it’s not like kind of a stable world right now. We felt good enough that we’re able to provide something to you. I don’t know how to answer that second question. I would just say I’m going to hope by the end of the year because you know what’s happening is, we feel like we’re getting a lot more useful information and what we’re doing is we’re really listening to what Airbus says, what Bombardier says, what Comac says, what Boeing says, for commercial I’m talking about and kind of tuning out all the analysts and everything and the commentators. These statements really have not been helpful and have been kind of wrong, but it’s really great like the A320 to be on that program, because forget about what everybody else says, how about Airbus CEO, it’s so helpful to be able to tie what we’re doing to what Airbus says and we can do it. We can do it with a pretty good precision once we know what they are talking about. So, I don’t know, sorry to not give you a better answer but that’s all I can think of right now.

[Brad Hathaway:]

No, it’s good. Anyway it’s good to see everything after a tough year moving kind of – all the programs seem to be moving pretty positive. So that’s great. In terms of M&A, is there anything you can kind of update on what you’ve seen there?

[Brian Shore:]

Yes, so I think last quarter we talked a little bit and we thought that last year we’d be able to get some distressed sales that didn’t materialize. Our advisors told us that’s because the Fed made it possible for people to hang on. We’re pretty active into areas we’re actually putting a preliminary bid on one company I think later this week. We’re still looking. We’re trying to find niche ones. We’re trying to find things that everybody and their brother and all the financial buyers are not piling on because it just drives the price up so much, but the other thing is that we are – we have identified a certain product area that’s very closely related to composite structures and composite materials and we’re doing some pretty good research I would say in that area and we’ve actually reached out to several companies that do have operations in that area. I guess at this point, we won’t specify, but it’s something that will be used by company producing composite structures in addition to the composite materials. So we think it’s really good tie-in and some of our customers have actually helped us in that regard as well. So we’re optimistic, we’re talking about – not optimistic, that’s probably no the way to say it these days. M&A is more difficult, but we feel better about that than just going to the auctions. Let me put that way. These are companies, some are private, some are divisions of large companies. They are probably not going to be for sale. So we’re trying to initiate the discussions and we’ll see how those go. And then the other area, I just want to mention is, there are projects we worked on and we know about the joint venture discussion in Asia, but there are other projects that we work on with some of the large customers that wouldn’t be really M&A, but would involve a significant investment of capital. So I guess I would talk about those maybe three things. We certainly haven’t given up or let down all even though we have this concern about these companies being bid up right now with I guess M&A inflation. I don’t know, maybe it won’t less, maybe that will reverse, we’ll see. So obviously, we’ll let you know as soon as we have something to report and we don’t have anything to report right now, but I guess the message I would send is that we’re still working on it. We haven’t given up or just decided to take a year off or anything like that or wait till valuations come back down.

[Brad Hathaway:]

Understood. And in your mind. I mean, obviously if things continue to improve, one, with the M&A environment might become harder in the future unless you can one of these deals that kind of push to you or something, really niche, is there a point at which you decide that the cash on the balance sheet is not going to be usable for some kind of investment and you consider other alternatives?

[Brian Shore:]

Sure. There is a point, I don’t know what that point is but sure there’s a point. So that’s kind of an open question for us. I understand exactly what you’re getting at, at least I think I do. I don’t have – can’t give you a date, but it’s something the back of our minds, absolutely.

[Brad Hathaway:]

I mean obviously my preference would be that you find an excellent bolt-on acquisitions. So if you can do that would be fantastic.

[Brian Shore:]

Thank you. And just you know, we feel the same way about it, but thanks for the comment. Go ahead, sorry.

[Brad Hathaway:]

No, I was just going to say thank you very much, I appreciate all your efforts to generate the results you did in a year like – a pandemic year like last year. It’s pretty incredible. So thank you very much for the effort.

[Brian Shore:]

Thanks for your comments.

[Operator:]

Thank you. And our next question comes from Leonard Cooper , a Private Investor. Your line is now open.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Hi, Brian. Sounds like you’re busy bees.

[Brian Shore:]

Yes, hey, Leonard. How are you doing? Haven’t heard from you in a little while.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

We’re doing okay. We’re hanging on. I just noticed a story saying that we’re going to go – the U.S. is going to have a wind turbine farm. I think it will be the first authorized by the government. Are we involved in that or can we be involved in that?

[Brian Shore:]

We’re not and we don’t want to be. Wind turbines are not the market area for us. It’s actually if you look at companies that are involved; it’s not really a very happy story. Those are low margin programs. We’re aerospace and that’s pretty much it. We decided to go in aerospace, we realized right from the start that we didn’t know what the heck we’re doing, you don’t know, you don’t know. Aerospace is such a huge complex field that we felt small company, we don’t have a pin with to get involved in other areas boats or wind turbines or skateboards or whatever. Composites are used obviously in a lot of things. We’re an aerospace company, that’s it, no wind turbines for us.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Okay. It’s just there is a lot of aerodynamics in those blades.

[Brian Shore:]

Yes, you’re right and I think they’re getting more sophisticated. I’m not an expert in it, but I think they’re getting more sophisticated from an aerodynamic perspective as well.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

Okay, thank you very much. It was a very interesting conversation. All the best.

[Brian Shore:]

Okay, well thanks for checking in Len, nice to hear from you. So hopefully we’ll see you soon.

[Operator:]

Thank you. And I’m showing no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back to Brian Shore for closing remarks.

[Brian Shore:]

Okay, thanks operator. Thanks everybody for listening. I’m sorry, I said 45 minutes. I think we went past 45 minutes. I try to rush through it, but there are always a lot of things you want to cover to help with perspective. So thanks again for listening in. Have a great day and feel free to call us. Matt and I are available anytime you want to talk. So we’ll be talking to you fairly soon because our first quarter is actually just a couple of weeks. So I think probably early July we’ll be doing our first quarter announcement. Okay. Take care. Have a great day. Good-bye now.

[Operator:]

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.