Q4 2025 Park Aerospace Corp Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Brian Shore; Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer; Park Aerospace Corp

Mark Esquivel; President, Chief Operating Officer; Park Aerospace Corp

Nick Ripostella

Presentation

Operator

Good day. My name is Claudia Avented, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Park Aerospace Corp fourth-quarter FY25 earnings release conference call and investor presentation. (Operator Instructions)
At this time, I will turn today's call over to Mr. Brian Shore, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Shaw, you may begin the conference.

Brian Shore

Thank you, operator. This is Brian. Welcome everybody to Park's fiscal '25 fourth-quarter investor conference call. I have with me Mark Esquivel, our President and COO.
Right after the close we announced our earnings. We did a news release announcing our earnings. You want to take a look at that in the, earnings release there are instructions as to how you can access the presentation either through a link or through a website. You want to take a look, you want to get that up in front of you to go through the presentation. And after we go through the presentation, which, could take maybe 45 50 minutes, just want you to be aware of that, Mark and I'd be happy to answer whatever questions you might have, okay?
So why don't we, go ahead, slide 2 forward-looking disclaimer language. We're not going to go through that, but certainly let us know if you. Questions slide 3, the James Webb Space Telescope. It seems like we're featuring this every quarters so much news as you probably know, the James Webb Space Telescope was built with, constructed with our Sigma struts, which is our proprietary, strut technology.
And so what's the news this time? We got a little bit of a picture of the James Webb in the L2 range orbit, which is about a million miles from Earth. I believe it's pretty far away. 97, sorry, 99.7, that's a pretty high percentage, pretty good odds. Chance of alien, listen to this alien life. This is no joke on a Milky Way planet that's in our, our galaxy, I guess we call it, K218, that's the name of the planet. I'm sure you've heard plenty about that. It's only 124,124 light years away from Earth. That's just right around the corner, it's in our own. Galaxy thank you James Webb. So what the James Webb apparently did was it detected certain kinds of gasses which are only produced by biological processes. So, it's quite incredible.
You know what's also kind of strange, do you hear about this on the news every night, like all day long, all night long, life on another planet, 99.7% certainty. I don't, I hear nothing about it, I mean, I don't know what they cover the news, but you would think this would be like 24/7 news, but it seems to not be. Anyway, table contents or investor presentation we're about to go through that and then we are supplementary financial info at the back and appendix 1. We don't go through that during the presentation, but certainly let us know if you have any questions about it, okay? Let's go on the slide 4, quarterly results for 23, 24, and 25, and thousands.
Let's go right into the right hand. Right over to the right hand column, 4, which is the quarter we just announced sales 160,939, important to mention that for we get to that later again, but $4.4 million of those sales were C2B fabric. And then we have a gross margin of 29.3%, which, considering, we'll go back to this, but the C2B fabric, we sold that and sold it only for a small markup considering that. Actually, I was surprised at how high our growth margin is.
As we don't like it when the gross margins under 30%, but under circumstances, and also the startup cost that we'll go through, I was surprised as as myself as how high it was. I suspect the main reason was the fact that production, was very strong, and it was, exceeded sales, which was our plan. We'll talk about that in a second. What do we say about Q4 during our Q3 investor call? Sales estimate $15.5 to $16.3 million. So we came a little bit ahead of that range, adjusted EBITDA estimate $3.3 million and $3.9 million. So we came in within the EBITDA range.
I got to stop and cover something which we used to cover every quarter and I figured, okay, fine, I've overdone it, but but we had a couple comments after our Q3 investor call. To the effect that, well, we should pad our forecast numbers, so we gotta go back, remind you that we don't do that, we don't do guidance, we don't like that. It's kind of a strange game that in other words, if we believe the quarter will be X, we're supposed to tell you X minus 10% so that we come out with X, we'll be heroes and we beat our numbers, and it, it's us it seems very strange.
Other people, they do whatever they want. I know most everybody else does, but we don't do that. We give you a forecast. What we're telling you is this is what we think is going to happen, not what's going to happen minus 10%. We don't do that. So we just want you to be aware of that, and we don't feel like changing it. We also feel it'd be a little bit strange for us if we're telling you what we tell you that it's going to be X minus 10%. Well, that's not really H1st, is it? When we have a, think about integrity. I'm not saying other people don't. I'm just saying that's for us. So when people say, oh, why don't you pad your numbers, understand we're not going to. Do that, so when we tell you, I give you a forecast, we're saying this is what we think will happen and we'll be wrong sometimes and some and sometimes we clearly are, but the time we tell you that we're saying this is what we think is going to happen so we just want to remind you that we should discuss it every quarter we haven't in a while, but maybe we need to remind you again slide 5, considerations for Q4. So let's get right to it, production versus sales, remember in Q3.
We explained that our Q3 sales value of production we call it SEP, that's not inventory value, that's a sales value. $1.2 million less than our sales at Park production, SDP absorbs a significant amount of cost into the produce inventory. As a result, just reviewing Q3 for perspective here, the Q3 production shortfall in quotes, had a significant impact on our Q3.
The Q3 production shortfall was on us. We said that during our Q3 call. In other words, we just missed a number. We had a production target, we didn't get it. That's on us. We missed our target, but we also said we tended to reverse that in Q4. Well, we did reverse it, and that is on us as well. So we take responsibility for missing a target in Q3. Our people should get the credit, I think, for hitting the target, our target in Q4 and doing a very great job with that actually. So in Q4, our production exceeded our sales, adjusted for. Ray carb fabric, which is not something to produce anyways, by $1.4 million that was our target. That's really helpful. That drops a lot of dollars to the bottom line, probably $350,000 or more to the bottom line of the quarter just as it had a big drag in Q3. There's a big plus in Q4, which is what we wanted. Onto slide 6, the excess production in Q4 had a significant positive impact on our Q4. But, and this is important, the excess production also allowed us to build back our finished goods inventory to more acceptable levels by about a million dollars compared to Q3. We're way too low at the end of that Q3, because we're selling off our selling from our inventory rather than production. Now we built back our inventory to to finish goods to levels we think are more acceptable. Aing group.
Just reviewing here, as we entered into this business partner agreement with them in 22 under which they employed us as their exclusive North American distributor for the Ray carb C2P fabric used to produce a blade of composite materials for advanced missile program systems. Now we already covered this, but we sold $4.4 million of C2B fabric in Q4. That's actually $500,000 more than we predicted, in our Q3 investor presentation end up being more than that. And believe it or not, $7.5 million in all of 25, that's a lot. That's a whole lot. It really, merges our P&L as we previously explained and so we sell C2B fabric to our defense customers for a small markup. They're buying a lot of the stuff you're stockpiling, obviously, doesn't take a rocket science, to understand that even though this is rocket science, that's what they're doing. So let's slide a 7, parks, so this is the flip side, $420,000 it's not, $4.4 million, but $420,000 of materials manufactured with C2B fabric in Q4 '25.
So that's really good because when we look at it incrementally, that contributes a significant amount to the bottom line, probably over $300,000. So that helped the bottom line a lot as well. The we said some C2B material sales, as we previously explained our margin for reducing and sellinglated materials manufacturing with C2B fabric are significant in bold.
Real recoal by one of Park's customers of C2B fabric. So I gotta stop for a second. You read those transcripts, you do your own recipes. We have no responsibility for those transcripts, there's an automated computer AI. I don't know what. But there's so many mistakes in this transcripts. Sometimes I'll go read a transcript. I don't even know what the hell I'm saying. I can't, what are we talking about here? I can't understand. There's so many mistakes in those things, so we don't take any responsibility for them. So the transcript was for Q2, Q3 or rather call, talked about a recall of C of C2 which is a real bad thing, no recall. When we went back there's no reference to anyre was all recall, no recall, both in the presentation as well as our comments, but then it was that it was picked up by articles. So then we talked about a recall of this product based upon the transcript was incorrect. So I just want to warn you, if you read those transcripts, you do it at your own risk because we take no responsibility for them. Now what's the status of recall? A lot of people ask me that. That's a hard question. So I'm asking, we'll get us Mark to help us, figure that one out. So Mark, can you tell us what the status of the recall is?