Optical Cable Corporation

Good morning. My name is Angela, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to Optical Cable Corporation's second quarter of fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remark, there will be a question and answer period. If you would like to ask a question at that Cable Corporation's second quarter of fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call, all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remark, there will be a question and answer period. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press star 2. Mr. Hoffman, you may begin your conference.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Optical Cable Corporation's second quarter of fiscal year 2024 conference call. By this time, everyone should have a copy of the earnings press release issued earlier today. You can also visit www.occfiber.com for a copy. On the call with us today are Neil Wilkin, President and Chief Executive Officer of OCC, and Tracy Smith, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. The actual future results of Obstacle Cable Corporation may differ materially due to a number of factors and risks, including, but not limited to, those factors referenced in the forward-looking statement section of this morning's press release. These cautionary statements apply to the contents of the Internet webcast on www.occfiber.com, as well as today's call. With that, I'll turn the call over to Neil Wilkin. Neil, please begin.

Thank you, Spencer, and good morning, everyone. I will begin the call today with a few opening remarks. Tracy will then review the second quarter results for the three-month and six-month periods ended April 30, 2024, in some additional detail. After Tracy's remarks, we will answer as many of your questions as we can. As is our normal practice, we will only take questions from analysts and institutional investors during the Q&A session. However, we also offer other shareholders the opportunity to submit questions in advance of our earnings call. Instructions regarding such submissions are included in our press release announcing the date and time of our call. I'm proud of the OCC team which has continued to execute and solidify OCC's position as a leader in our industry despite the macroeconomic pressures that OCC and other industry participants continue to face. We believe we delivered solid results in this environment. And while our results are down year over year when comparing the second quarter of fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2023, as well as the first half of fiscal 2024 to the first half of fiscal 2023, we are facing a tough comparison. As Tracy will get into in a moment, last year our net sales for the second quarter and first half of fiscal 2023 were boosted by higher than typical sales order backlog and forward load, which we believe normalized this year. Yet, sequentially, we achieved top line improvement with OCC's net sales increasing 8.5% during the second quarter of fiscal year 2024 compared to net sales for the first quarter of fiscal year 2024. This growth reflects sequential increases in both OCC's enterprise and specialty markets during the second quarter of fiscal year 2024 when compared to the first quarter. We believe this improvement is better than what many of our competitors are experiencing. OCC's gross profit also sequentially increased 8.8% during the second quarter of fiscal 2024 when compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2024. Looking ahead, the team has created a competitive advantage. As market conditions improve, we believe our decision to maintain headcount will serve our company well and position us to outperform moving forward. As we move forward, we continue to take steps to control what we can, operate efficiently, and optimally position OCC to meet rebounding demand. We remain committed to capturing profitable growth opportunities, meeting and exceeding the needs of our valued customers and end users, and advancing our strategy to enhance shareholder value. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Tracy, who will review in additional detail our second quarter of fiscal year 2024 financial results.