Annual Meeting 2001
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20011
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Bob Brady, Chairman and CEO begins:
In the presentation that we’ll make this morning, we’ll talk a little bit about fiscal year 2000 and try to put it in perspective with respect to the recent past and what we expect in 2001. Then I’ll ask Bob Maskrey, Warren Johnson, Jay Hennig and Marty Berardi to talk about some of the important aspects of our operations and describe the recent flurry of acquisition activity. Bob Banta will summarize our financial situation. Then I’ll come back and wrap up and we’ll take questions.
Before we begin, we call your attention to the fact that we may make forward-looking statements during the course of this annual meeting. A description of these risks, uncertainties, and other factors is contained in our Form 10K for the year ended September 30, 2000, and in certain of our other public filings with the SEC.
For a number of years, I began this part of the meeting by announcing that sales were up, earnings were up and our stock price is up. Well, in this meeting, we can say that sales were up in 2000, but only a little. Sales of $644 million were up 2% from the year previous.
Earnings were up by 4% but, because we had fewer shares outstanding, on an earnings per share basis, they were up by 6% to $2.85 per share - what we described in the Annual Report as a modest, but welcome, increase since sales were up only 2%.
Our stock price which is sitting today at around $30.00 per share is up substantially from last year at this time. Last year, we were at $20.00 per share, so we’re up over 50%. But we’re still at levels that we think are way lower than they should be. On the other hand, looking at a 50% improvement compared to the year 2000 declines in the S&P and the NASDAQ, perhaps we ought to be delighted.
We have substantially brighter prospects for our performance in fiscal 2001. Incidentally, you may have noticed that, where historically we have predicted sales for the fiscal year just begun, we’ve now begun projecting earnings as well. This is in response to the SEC’s Fair Disclosure directive. We certainly intend to keep the analytical community as well informed as we can and it seems to us that the real point of all the information that is supplied to the financial community is to arrive at an estimate of the Company’s earnings prospects. So, as a way to make sure that we’re all on the same page, and to take out some of the guess work, we’ve decided to project what we think earnings are going to be as a result of our consideration of all of the relevant factors.
But, before we talk in more detail about 2001 and the future, let me put fiscal year 2000 in perspective. As we said, sales in fiscal 2000 were $644 million, up only 2% from the year previous. However, this is the seventh year in a row that sales have increased year over year and, if we look over the last three years, sales have increased at a compound rate of about 12%. I think that’s a sensible way to look at fiscal 2000. This was a year in which we closed no major acquisitions and we relied completely on organic growth. We had a number of product lines that exhibited good growth rates in fiscal 2000 – the F-18, our Business Jet Product Line, the whole Aircraft aftermarket business, our Industrial Product lines for Gas Turbines and Plastic-making Machinery, but we also had a number of big programs that finished up, like the F-15 and the B-2, and the Universal Simulator Project, and we experienced noticeable declines in the production of satellite hardware and the flight controls for the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Product Line. Given all the factors at work, I’m happy that we had a small increase in 2000. As you recall, in ’99, we closed a number of acquisitions. Sales increased by $93 million, or 17%. That sort of thing is not going to happen year after year and, so, I think that looking at the compound growth rate over the last few years is a sensible way to consider the Company’s progress.
Similarly, in terms of earnings, we had a modest increase in earnings per share this year, 6%, to $2.85 per share. I think a 6% earnings increase on a 2% revenue increase is a job well done. Once again, if we look at the history over the last three years, our compound growth rate has been about 15%.
We’ve had 17% per year growth over the last few years in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. In fiscal 2000, we had EBITDA of $102 million, of which a little over $30 million was depreciation and amortization.
If we look at the behavior of our stock price over the last 12 months, it’s been a wild ride. In January, just before we reported our first quarter for 2000, our A stock was selling for about $24 per share, or about nine times the earnings of the previous 12 months. As we reported the first quarter results, which were right on target and exceeded analysts estimates by a penny, we did advise the analyst community that, given what was going on in the satellite business and some disappointments we’d come to expect in the Electric Drive and Electric Simulator business, we could now foresee that our sales for fiscal 2000 would be less than $660 million they were projecting and our earnings increase would be in low single digits as opposed to the 15% projection that was on the street. As happens these days in the market, in response to that news, our stock price declined temporarily from $24 to $17. At the time of the Annual Meeting it was about $20 and, over the course of the year, it has climbed back up to nearly $30. So, once again, we’re currently selling for about ten times the previous year’s earnings per share.
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