RF Industries, Ltd.

Industry's Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Margaret Boyce, Investor Relations. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Matt. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to RF Industries' fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. With me on today's call are RFI's Chief Executive Officer, Rob Dawson, President and COO, Ray Babisi, and CFO, Peter Yin. We issued our Q4 earnings release after market today. The release is available on our website at rfindustries.com. I'd like to remind everyone that during today's call, management will make forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Please note that this information on the call today may constitute forward-looking statements under the securities and exchange laws. When used, the words anticipate, believe, expect, intend, future, and other similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. These statements reflect management's current views with respect to future events and financial performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from the outcomes contained in any forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these forward-looking statements to differ from actual results include the risks and uncertainties discussed in the company's reports on Form 10-K and 10Q and other filings with the SEC. RF Industries undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. Additionally, throughout this call, we'll be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures. Today's earnings release and the related current report on Form 8K describe the differences between our GAAP and non-GAAP reporting. With that said, I'll now turn the conference over to Rob Dawson, Chief Executive Officer Rob, please go ahead.

Thank you, Margaret, and welcome to our fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2024 conference call. I'll start with our fourth quarter and year-end highlights and some comments on our market opportunity. Our President and COO, Ray, will discuss some sales and operations highlights, and our CFO, Peter, will cover our financials before we open the call to your questions. Before I begin, I want to take a moment to share our thoughts and prayers with the communities devastated by the recent fires just up the coast from us in Los Angeles. We're grateful to the first responders for their total dedication and incredible bravery as they faced the indescribable fury of several fires. And we're here to support our partners and customers in any way we can as they work hard to restore the critical communications infrastructure that we all depend on. Now turning to our results. Throughout fiscal 2024, our team delivered improving performance, which put us on solid ground at the year end. Fourth quarter net sales rounded out to $18.5 million, up 16% from the $15.9 million in the fourth quarter last year, and up 10% sequentially from $16.8 million reported in the third quarter. Our gross profit margin for the fourth quarter increased to 31.3%. For the first time in several quarters, we delivered an operating profit, which directly reflected our commitment to driving greater profitability even as our key markets are still in recovery mode. Our adjusted EBITDA was $908,000, and non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.04. We ended the year with a strong balance sheet after paying down our debt to just above $8 million, a significant improvement from $14.1 million at the end of last fiscal year. During the fourth quarter, we shipped a large amount of hybrid fiber products that had been in our backlog for quite some time. Importantly, this started to clear out some older inventory from the backlog. Moving forward, we have a much fresher backlog that consists of more current bookings with a more diverse product mix. Even with a tight market throughout the fiscal year, our financial performance demonstrated that we've been executing well on our continued transformation. We believe in our overall strategy and we stayed the course even through a challenging market over the last couple of years. This focus helped our company transform further into a full solutions provider by adding to our strong interconnect product offering with turnkey systems and applications like small cells, distributed antenna systems, industrial connectivity, and DAC thermal cooling. Today, RFI is in a much stronger position thanks to our team's dedication and hard work. We have the right products and solutions, the right relationships, and the right positioning within our customer organizations. To optimize our potential, we rebooted our sales team with experienced talent who can really help us make a difference in our target markets. And we did this with minimal impact to overall expense. Going into fiscal year 2025, sales growth is a top priority. but we're also laser focused on profit improvement and achieving our goal of at least 10% adjusted EBITDA margin. To accomplish this, we're reviewing some creative approaches to the overall structure of our production and fulfillment operations. Over the next several quarters, we expect a vastly different operations infrastructure, and that will give us a competitive edge in the market, allow us to scale more quickly, and deliver sustainable profitability with an adjusted EBITDA goal of 10% of sales or greater. Transformation is a continuous process, and we did a lot of heavy lifting during the cyclical downturn to position our business for the rebound. We think we're set up well for 2025 and beyond for several reasons. First, as I mentioned, we've strengthened our product offering with higher demand and higher value products, which in turn creates more leverage to fulfill a larger percentage of our customers' bill of materials. In addition to our core standard and custom interconnect offering, we have further transformed into a solutions provider with our state-of-the-art small cell solutions and DAC thermal cooling systems. Our ability to provide these solutions has become the tip of the spear for RFI to deepen our relationships at higher decision-making levels within large and complex organizations. Achieving the status of a key vendor partner has been a long-term strategic goal that's now materializing. Second, we continue to see opportunity to grow in the Tier 1 wireless carrier ecosystem. In the short run, we expect our bigger wins to be in this space. Pentas demand for 4G and 5G connectivity will be an evolving topic. To stay competitive, our customers need to continuously improve their infrastructures to meet customer expectations for speed and coverage. Not only are they focused on the 4G and 5G macro sites, but also on network densification, which is needed to address coverage gaps and increasing consumer demand for reliable high-speed connections everywhere. We've been at the forefront of the discussion around densification for years, and our leading edge products are a competitive advantage that should translate into getting our fair share of the pie. Third, with our new product innovations and additions, we're continuing to explore new market segments outside of the wireless carrier space to diversify our opportunity set. Here we see some favorable trends ahead for RFI. They're not quite at our doorstep, and it's not going to happen overnight, but they're growing, and we're ready to capitalize on these future opportunities. One example of the recovery is that we're starting to see the return of stadium and venue builds, which is a sign that overall spend is improving. Those stadiums are coming back smarter and more connected, and that requires innovative interconnect solutions to meet the ever increasing expectations of stadium customers. This revitalized market is expected to be worth $42 billion by 2029. Examples include sporting events like the World Cup, the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and new baseball stadiums in markets like Las Vegas, as well as new venues and upgrades on the horizon for college campuses, medical facilities, and casinos, to name a few. Right now, we've accelerated our go-to-market strategy and assigned industry veterans who have relationships with the right key contractors and suppliers in this space. Importantly, RFI's strong reputation as a dependable and collaborative partner with a comprehensive range of connectivity solutions is a door opener for customers who want to limit their dealings to a handful of trusted vendors. We believe we're positioned correctly in our key target markets, and that has expanded the pipeline of opportunities we're chasing and continuing to win in various markets. Looking forward, we feel good going into fiscal 2025. And in addition to our heavy focus on profitability, we expect the top line to be better than 2024. We're starting to see momentum, and while it's not perfect, we have more clarity going forward than when we started fiscal 2024. While our fiscal first quarter is typically our weakest due to seasonality, with what we know today, we expect our fiscal 2025 first quarter to be roughly in line with fourth quarter's revenue of $18.5 million. a significant increase over the $13.5 million that we reported in the first quarter last year. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ray for further commentary on sales and operations. Ray?