M-tron Industries, Inc.

for Q1 2025. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the call over to Linda Biles, M. Tron's EVP of Finance. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our 2025 M. Tron Q1 earnings call. Please note that this call will be recorded and we will make the recording available on our website, .mtron.com shortly after the call. Yesterday afternoon, we released our earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2025. Before getting underway, we are required to advise you that the following discussion should be taken in conjunction with our most recent financial statements and notes as contained within our 2024 10K, which was filed on March 27th, 2025 with the SEC. This discussion may contain forward-looking statements with the meaning of 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements contain known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which are detailed in our SEC filings. Although the company believes that the forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions regarding its business and future market conditions, there are no assurances that the company's actual results will not differ materially from any result expressed or implied by the company's forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as the result of new information, future events or otherwise. Readers are cautioned that any forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. With that, I will now turn the call over to our interim CEO, Cameron Foer.

Yes, good morning, everyone, and thank you, Linda. First of all, I wanna thank all of our shareholders and interested parties for attending our first quarter FY25 earnings call and your interest in the company. We're pleased to discuss our strong start to the fiscal 2025 fiscal year and our outlet going forward. As a reminder, Imtron designs and manufactures highly engineered RF solutions, including electronic components and subassemblies used to control the frequency and timing of signals and electronic circuits. We're a global company with three manufacturing sites in the United States and India. The company's primary markets include defense and aerospace, commercial avionics, industrials, and space. We are pleased to report that the company continued to perform well with continued strength in Imtron sales and good financial performance for Q1 fiscal year 2025. Our revenues continue to be driven by defense-related orders and we also saw some growth in the commercial avionics market, something we believe bodes well for the future recovery of that market. We are pleased to see Boeing resolve its labor dispute early in the year and expect orders from the major airframe manufacturers to pick up throughout the year. With consistent operating performance, we have been able to continue to make strategic investments in research and development and continue to increase the market profile of the company. Part of that effort was the recent rebranding of the company as Imtron, updates to our logo, our websites, sales materials, as well as the initiation of advertising and some of the leading publications for our sector and also enhanced lead generation activity. We also continue to make investments in our production facilities and we've seen good initial results in a program that I mentioned I think on the last call to deploy greater automation on the factory floor to improve yields. It looks like we have gotten through some of the choppiness in the defense market caused by some of the conflicting messaging from the administration on the defense budget. We at Imtron have seen no disruption to our business and expect to continue the company's revenue growth throughout the year. The continuing resolution passed and signed in mid-March 2025, extended government funding through the end of the federal fiscal year and largely preserved the defense spending as it was, actually increasing the defense budget by, I guess relatively small, about six billion. The administration is now proposing increasing the defense budget for this fiscal year by 150 billion through a reconciliation process. And also substantially increasing procurement spending in the federal FY 2026 budget. Many of the areas targeted for investment such as next-gen aircraft, shipbuilding, loitering and precision-guided munitions, border security, and the Golden Dome anti-aircraft, anti-missile defense. All require a significant amount of RF subsystems and components, highlighting the continued growing need for Imtron's products. The importance of filters and oscillators has only increased as the electromagnetic spectrum has become a more contested part of the battle space. And communications between systems and commanders and combatants are subject to electronic countermeasures such as jamming and interference. We believe that we are well positioned to continue to perform well with the anticipated changes in military procurement focus. Now, Wendick, would you mind giving our audience the highlights of our fiscal year Q1 performance?

Yes, total revenues for first quarter were 12.7 million, a .8% increase over the 11.2 million of revenue in the same period last year. The revenue increase in the period primarily due to strong defense program product and solution shipments. Gross margins for the first quarter of 2025 were 42.5%, a 20 basis point decrease over the .7% gross margins in Q1 of 24. The decrease is primarily due to additional manufacturing costs with the initial production runs of several new products. In addition, we saw the initial impact this quarter of duly initiated federal tariffs on imports of foreign source materials and partially finished goods. Net income was 1.6 million or 56 cents per diluted share in the first quarter of 2025 compared with 1.5 million or 53 cents per diluted share in the first quarter of 2024. The increase in revenues discussed above was partially offset by higher manufacturing cost of sales consistent with the growth in revenues and the introduction of new products as well as higher engineering, selling and administrative expenses related to continued research and development investments, higher sales commissions from an increase in revenues and an increase in administrative expenses consistent with the overall growth of the business. Adjusted EBITDA was 2.5 million in the first quarter of 2025 compared with 2.3 million in the first quarter of 2024. The increase was primarily due to higher revenues resulting in higher income. Backlog was 55.5 million as of March 31st, 2025 compared to 47.2 million as of December 31st, 2024 and 46.1 million as of March 31st, 2024. The increase in backlog reflects several large defense and avionics orders received during the quarter and the continued broad demand for our products. In early February 25, for example, we publicly announced one large order supporting shipboard systems for over 10 million that was expected to been received in the fiscal year 2024. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Cameron.

Yeah, thank you, Linda. So in March 2025, MTRON saw the initial impact of the recently announced federal tariffs on the import of goods and materials from outside the United States. And while MTRON is a United States-based manufacturer with a great degree of vertical integration, something we pride ourselves on, we do import some materials from Japan, China, South Korea, and a very small amount from Europe. And we also perform some finishing work at our facility in India. It's difficult to predict the long-term impact of this trade policy on our financial form as it changes regularly. We are working with many of our defense customers on acting parts of the federal acquisition regulations, which potentially exempt materials received for defense production from entry tariffs. In addition, we continue, as always, to analyze our supply chain in order to make sure that we have redundancy of suppliers where possible and can source from reliable suppliers at the best price as possible. Today, we have seen no impact from tariffs on demand for our products. Also, I wanted to highlight the recent distribution of warrants. On April 25, 2025, the company distributed the dividend of warrants. The stock holds a record as of March 10, 2025. The warrants are listed on the New York Stock NYSE American Exchange. Under the ticker MPTIWS, the warrants may be listed on certain financial websites under the ticker MPTIWT or a similar nomenclature. Pursuant to the warrant agreement, the warrants contain the following terms, which I'll summarize, and we're happy to answer questions about this later. But five warrants are exercisable to purchase one share of common stock. The exercise price is $47.50 per share. The warrants are exercisable at the earlier of 30 days prior to the maturity date of April 25, 2028, or on the date when the average volume weighted average price or the VWAP of M-Tron's common stock is greater than or equal to $52 per share for the prior 30 consecutive trading days. We call this the accelerated trigger or early trigger. The warrants expire at the earlier of April 25, 2028 if they run to full maturity for 30 calendar days following M-Tron's public announcement of the date of the accelerated trigger being triggered. And warrants holders exercising their full allotment of warrants can apply to subscribe for any and all shares of common stock issuable pursuant to any outstanding but unexercised warrant. This is called the oversubscription feature and it's included on your warrant agreement. Further information on the warrants is available in a FAQ found on our M-Tron investor website which is .Mtron.com. Just to highlight some of the strategic activity, we do continue to execute on our strategy of continuing moving into more program business which now makes up the vast majority of our aerospace and defense revenues. We are involved, for example, in over 40 programs of record, a very significant amount. Defense and aerospace has been an amazing market in the past several years and it does remain one with plenty of room for us to grow. We seek to maintain close relationships with our customers and be their first line resource for them as they plan upgrades to current systems or compete for the design of new systems to meet government program needs. And the same can be said in our other sectors like avionics and industrials. We have also ramped up our pursuit of complementary acquisitions and strategic partnership opportunities in both the RF component and subsystem space as well as some tangential subsystem and solution companies that focus on the same markets. We are focused on finding deals that would be a credo for shareholders and help both companies strengthen their financial performance and customer base. Strengthening the U.S. defense industrial base is one of the goals of the administration's trade policy and current budget focus. They've actually dedicated budget dollars to the strengthening of the defense industrial base and the anticipated increase in this year's defense budget. Having a U.S. based advanced manufacturing capability to support our joint forces is more important than ever before and we thank our employees for their dedication to their jobs and the mission. We also thank our dedicated customers for their continued business and the trust they place in Imtron and our people. Imtron plays a critical role in defense or nation providing U.S. source highly engineered components for many U.S. and allied military programs. Before I open the floor to questions, I wanted to mention that we will be holding our annual meeting on June 10th, 2025 at 10 a.m. in the morning at the Harbor Club in New York City. The meeting will be open to all shareholders of the company's common stock. In addition, we will hold an investor presentation and question and answer session before the annual meeting. And information for both of these events will be posted on our investor website. For those interested in attending in person, you'll need to get a QR code from our IR site to pass through the Harbor Club security. Operator, can you please open the lines and allow the first question?

At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Anna Soderstrom with Siddoti. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for taking my question. So in terms of the growth margins, that was a bit muted due to the ramping of your program. And how is that going to sort of develop? And with those new large contract wins, are we going to see that being a ramp for a longer period of time or will it pick up pretty quickly?

Yeah, good question, Anna. Thank you for joining. So the gross margins were impacted by really three factors. One was just product mix. We had less products being shipped for two of our long-term missile programs, which have very, you know, relatively high margins. And that is expected to return very shortly, or that part of the mix was going to increase in Q2 throughout the rest of the year, due to some of the orders we received in Q1. The thing I mentioned earlier was that we did ship some new products. And whenever you're working on new products, the first couple runs are a little bit less efficient than when all the kinks have been worked out in the process and you're running at a higher yield. So we shipped some new space products, which require rigorous testing. And they've been successful, but the first couple of runs of those take more labor than you would hope to do use later. And also we shipped a new type of oscillator in the border that's used in EW and radar, which I think is great for the long-term prospects of the company. And I think that those yields will improve over time. So I do expect the yields to improve and the margins to improve throughout the year. We also did see some impact to the tariffs. We had a little bit less than 100k of tariff charges in March. And it's kind of difficult to predict how much we should anticipate receiving there for the rest of the year. And we hope that a lot of the progress that's been made over the past couple of weeks reducing the tariffs will have a positive impact there. So I do anticipate this to go up in the rest of the year.

Okay. For those new programs that you shipped in the space and the oscillators, are they higher than the average?

Yeah, they'll be very strong margin products that they're just early to develop.

Okay. And then in terms of the tariffs, you're not able to pass that on at all?

Right. Yeah, we do have the capability on our contracts to pass that on. The reality is that in the market, there are a lot of mistakes being made in terms of how the tariffs are applied. And then also the whole thought of passing on tariffs to vendors is relatively new. And I do anticipate a fair amount of pushback, although I think ultimately many customers will pay per their agreements. So we're really hoping that we can work through the tariff situation. In the short term. But we do have in our contracts the ability to pass on taxes and tariffs. And so I think over time, this will work out. But there'll be some disruption in the industry in terms of cost for the short term.

Okay, thank you. And then also, these large contracts you've been winning, and congrats on those. Are they also higher margin programs then?

They are. And they were actually some of the programs that I mentioned. We didn't ship a lot of it to one, which did impact our margins. So return to that.

And then what does the pipeline look like for other large deals like that?

We actually have a pretty strong pipeline for the year. So we don't really talk about bookings per se and give numbers on that. We've had two very strong quarters of bookings. And we do have a lot of large programs that we think we'll be announcing over the next quarter or two. So both missile programs, as well as some in the avionics space. And then back after the year, we're working on some really significant drone bookings and programs, which I think will be exciting for the company.

Okay, thank you. I'll get back in here.

At this time, there are no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to Cameron Ford for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Okay. Well, thank you, operator. I appreciate you helping us manage the call. And I'm going to like to thank everybody for participating today. And if there are no further questions, please have a great day. If you want to follow up after the call, after you've kind of read the transcripts or you've had a chance to kind of go through the earnings release in more detail, feel free to contact us at ir at mtron.com. And we will respond in kind. So thank you again.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining, and you may now disconnect.