Maxar Technologies, Inc. (MAXR.CA) Q3 2019 Earnings Call
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Corrected Transcript 04-Nov-2019 Maxar Technologies, Inc. (MAXR.CA) Q3 2019 Earnings Call Total Pages: 20 1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com Copyright © 2001-2019 FactSet CallStreet, LLC Maxar Technologies, Inc. (MAXR.CA) Corrected Transcript Q3 2019 Earnings Call 04-Nov-2019 CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS Jason Gursky Biggs C. Porter Vice President-Investor Relations, Maxar Technologies, Inc. Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, Maxar Technologies, Inc. Daniel L. Jablonsky President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Maxar Technologies, Inc. ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... OTHER PARTICIPANTS Benjamin E. Arnstein Richard Tse Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC Analyst, National Bank Financial, Inc. Steven Li Jason Hahn Analyst, Raymond James Ltd. Analyst, Principal Global Investors LLC Doug Taylor Michael Francis McCaffery Analyst, Canaccord Genuity Corp. Analyst, Shenkman Capital Management, Inc. Thanos Moschopoulos Analyst, BMO Capital Markets (Canada) ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... MANAGEMENT DISCUSSION SECTION Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Maxar Technologies Q3 2019 Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jason Gursky, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir. ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Jason Gursky Vice President-Investor Relations, Maxar Technologies, Inc. Great. Good afternoon, and thanks, operator. Welcome to Maxar's third quarter 2019 earnings conference call. I'm joined today by the company's Chief Executive Officer, Dan Jablonsky; and Chief Financial Officer, Biggs Porter. Both will make some opening remarks, after which we're going to open up the line for your questions. We're shooting to wrap up the call in a little under an hour, and as such, we're going to ask callers to limit themselves to one single-part question and one single-part follow-up during the Q&A session. Before we get started, I'd like to refer listeners to the accompanying slides for today's call, which can be found on the company's website, maxar.com, in the Investor Events & Presentations section of the site. 2 1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com Copyright © 2001-2019 FactSet CallStreet, LLC Maxar Technologies, Inc. (MAXR.CA) Corrected Transcript Q3 2019 Earnings Call 04-Nov-2019 Finally, I would like to remind you that part of today's discussions, including responses to various questions, may contain forward-looking statements, which represent the company's estimates, future plans, objectives, and expected performance at today's date. These statements are based on current assumptions that the company believes are reasonable but are subject to a wide range of uncertainties and risks that could lead actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking information. You are referred to the advisory regarding forward-looking statements contained in our quarterly earnings release, the earnings call slide deck, and the company's most recent MD&A section found in our Form 10-Q, which is available online under the company's SEDAR profile at sedar.com, under the company's EDGAR profile at SEC.gov, or on the company's website at maxar.com. With that, I'd like to turn the discussion over to Dan Jablonsky. Dan, go ahead. ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Daniel L. Jablonsky President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Maxar Technologies, Inc. Thanks, Jason, and good afternoon, everyone. I appreciate you joining us for a review of our third quarter results and an update on the outlook for the company. I'm pleased with the results that we were able to deliver this quarter, and with the progress that we've been making throughout the year. Please turn to slide 3 of the accompanying presentation for the key highlights of the quarter. We generated $479 million in revenue, and $128 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q3, with EBITDA up year-over-year from Q3 of 2018. Biggs will go into further detail during his portion of the call, but I feel this is a good outcome and demonstrates the traction we're seeing in our efforts to position the company for sustained revenue, profit, and cash flow growth. Importantly, we garnered several key wins during the quarter across our businesses. I'll go into these in more detail a little later, but the headline is that we continue to play a key role for the most demanding government and commercial customers out there. We are proud that they have entrusted their critical missions to Maxar. We also continue to make progress on all our key initiatives for 2019, including a real estate transaction in Palo Alto that will be de-levering in nature. And finally, I note that we are maintaining the key elements of our outlook for 2019. Please turn to slide 4. As you know, our top priority for the year has been to reduce our debt and leverage levels, and I'm pleased to announce that we have entered into a sale-leaseback agreement on our Palo Alto manufacturing facility, pending closing conditions. We expect the roughly $291 million in gross proceeds from this transaction to reduce debt levels and improve leverage metrics. The de-levering from an economic perspective is expected to be in excess of $200 million. Importantly, the sale-leaseback arrangement will provide us with a stable way to manage current and future programs, even as we continue to reengineer the business. We plan to exit an office and light manufacturing building over the course of the next two years as part of this transaction, and have entered into a 10-year lease on our primary manufacturing, assembly, integration and test facility. We also announced the launch of a bond offering today to better align our maturity schedule with our expected cash flow streams. In the quarter, our debt levels remained flat from Q2 as cash flow was roughly breakeven. That said, our leverage ratio ticked up from Q2 on lower trailing 12-month bank-adjusted EBITDA. Finally, we also continue to drive on alternatives to reduce overall debt and leverage levels. As I said in the past, we are leaving no rock unturned, and the team and I will continue to work diligently on this initiative. Please turn to slide 5. Our efforts to reengineer the Space Solutions business continued this quarter, and I'm pleased to announce that we had some success on the order front, with an award from NASA to host the agency's TEMPO payload on a commercial GEO Comsat. We were also awarded several civil, DOD, and 3 1-877-FACTSET www.callstreet.com Copyright © 2001-2019 FactSet CallStreet, LLC Maxar Technologies, Inc. (MAXR.CA) Corrected Transcript Q3 2019 Earnings Call 04-Nov-2019 classified study contracts that should help shape future requirements for potential production contracts down the road. And turning now to performance, adjusted EBITDA improved year-over-year and ended the quarter just under breakeven. We also continued to reshape the organization and our footprint this quarter as we look to drive toward sustained profitability. I'd like now to offer an update on the GEO Comsat market. Clearly, 2019 has been better, with industry awards year-to-date higher than the entirety of 2018. We garnered an award with Ovzon, who was planning to use our Legion-class architecture in a digital payload in a geosynchronous orbit earlier in the year. And I am pleased to announce that we were recently awarded a GEO Comsat utilizing our 1300-class architecture with an undisclosed customer. We're still working through the contract details, and we'll be sure to provide more information when appropriate. Going forward, I am confident that we will continue to book additional GEO Comsat orders over time as the market recovers. Please turn to slide 6. I'd like to provide an update on our current strategy for our Space business. As you all know, Space Solutions has historically been largely single-threaded to the commercial GEO Comsat market. This is no longer the case. We are aggressively pursuing opportunities in the civil market, both here in the US and abroad, to expand beyond programs like Restore-L and Psyche, which are already in backlog. And we've had some good success of late with the PPE, Artemis, and TEMPO awards from NASA being good examples. At this point, we continue to pursue other programs across NASA space exploration and earth science, as well as programs with other agencies inside the US and international governments, and we expect the civil market to be a source of growth for us going