Earnings Call Transcript - MPTI Q3 2025

Operator, Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jay, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the M-tron Earnings Call for the Third Quarter of 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Linda Biles, EVP of Finance. You may begin.

Linda Biles, EVP of Finance

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our 2025 M-tron Q3 earnings call. Please note that this call will be recorded, and we will make the recording available on our Investor Relations website shortly after the call. Yesterday afternoon, we released our earnings for the third 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 10-K which was filed on March 27, 2025, with the SEC. This discussion may contain forward-looking statements within 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 filings within the SEC. 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 CEO, Cameron Pforr.

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Thank you, Linda. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for attending our third quarter FY 2025 earnings call. We are pleased to discuss our strong results for the first 9 months of the fiscal year and our outlook going forward. As a reminder, M-tron 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 3 manufacturing sites in the United States and in India. The company's primary markets include aerospace and defense, commercial avionics, space and industrials. We're pleased to report that the company continued to perform well with continued strength in M-tron Q3 sales and backlog. Our revenues continue to be driven by defense-related orders. However, we did see some growth this quarter in other areas as well. With consistent operating performance, we have been able to continue to make strategic investments in research and development and continue to improve the market profile of the company and position it for future growth. Yesterday, we reported the following Q3 2025 results. The total revenues for the third quarter were $14.2 million, which was a 7.2% increase over the $13.2 million for the third quarter in 2024. This increase was primarily due to strong growth in avionics, space and industrial product shipments. Gross margins for the third quarter were 44.3% compared with the elevated 47.8% gross margins in Q3 2024. The decrease was primarily due to product mix and also higher tariff-related costs, which we've discussed in the past. Net income for the quarter was $1.8 million or $0.63 per diluted share compared with $2.3 million or $0.81 per diluted share for the 3 months ended September 30, 2024. This decrease was primarily due to a large reversal of a deferred tax asset called for by the tax law changes in the recent legislation. That was almost $1 million of expense or a little bit more than $1 million expense plus the P&L, the lower gross margins from the year prior and also slightly higher OpEx expenses consistent with our growth. Adjusted EBITDA was $3.2 million for the 3 months ended September 30, 2025, compared with $3.3 million for the prior year's September quarter. The slight decrease was primarily due to lower gross margins and a relatively small investment in SG&A. Backlog ended as of September 30, 2025, was $58.8 million, which was an increase of 48% from the $39.8 million for September 30, 2024, and was a 24.5% increase from the end of year December 31, 2024 figure of $47.2 million. The increase in backlog from December reflects robust demand across aerospace and defense programs, new program launches and a recent surge in avionics and space orders. On October 23, 2025, the company announced that the dividend of warrants that were granted in April 2025, achieved its early trigger condition and is exercisable through 5:00 p.m. on December 11, 2025. 5 warrants are exercisable to purchase 1 common share of stock. The strike price is $47.50 per share, and the warrants have an oversubscription feature, which allows warrant holders who have exercised all of their warrants to potentially seek and acquire additional warrants if the offering is undersubscribed. Warrant holders are encouraged to review the warrant agreement in the FAQ page on our Investor Relations website. We continue to execute on our strategy of continuing and expanding into more program business, which now makes up the vast majority of our aerospace and defense revenue. We are involved in over 40 programs of record, and many of these programs are sole-source programs where we stand to reap many benefits as defense spending in the areas we support continues to grow. Just to give you a little bit of flavor for that. This year, we've had some significant wins in electronic warfare and radar systems. That's an area where we expect to double our revenue next year just reflecting those wins and some of the programs moving to higher rates of production. In addition, we've been asked to provide plans to dramatically increase our precision guided munitions production for certain programs as well as a new UAV program, which we're very excited about. We continue to innovate, as evidenced by the high rate of revenue from newly designed products. To give you an example of some of this innovation, we and other vendors in this space produce compensated oscillators, which are used in airframes with a significant amount of vibration, such as helicopters or fighter aircraft. This compensation is done to reduce the drift of the timer. Traditionally, they were externally compensated and a typical size or unit like this was 16 inches by 16 inches. We've developed an internally compensated oscillator, which is a little bit more than 2 inches by 2 inches and performs the same function, and we're seeing dramatic demand for this line of products. This type of innovation is what keeps M-tron at the forefront of the industry. I'd like to thank our dedicated customers for their continued business and partnership and our loyal employees for supporting the company and its mission of serving the nation and its capability to defend freedom. M-tron plays a critical role in the sense of our nation by providing U.S.-sourced highly engineered components for U.S. and allied military programs, and having U.S.-based advanced manufacturing capabilities to support our joint forces is more important than ever. And before I open the floor to questions, I wanted to mention that we will be presenting at the IDEAS conference next week in Dallas, Texas, at the Sidoti Year-End Virtual Investor Conference later in December and at the Oppenheimer Conference in February of 2026. Information for these events will be posted on our investor website, and I hope that many of you can join us for some of those presentations and meetings.

Operator, Operator

Your first question comes from the line of Anja Soderstrom of Sidoti.

Anja Soderstrom, Analyst

Congrats on the appointment, Cameron.

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Yes. Thank you, Anja.

Anja Soderstrom, Analyst

You noted the increased spend on research and development. Is there a specific area you are increasing it within? And can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there?

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Yes, we are focusing on hiring design engineers. We are a filter and oscillator company, and each type of filter oscillator requires different expertise. This is a key area in our recruitment efforts, which is essential for driving revenue. As an engineering-focused company, our sales teams engage our engineers early with customer prospects to collaborate on solutions. So, hiring is a major priority for us.

Anja Soderstrom, Analyst

Okay. And then also, you mentioned industrials have started to pick up for you. What are your sort of main programs there within Industrial?

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Yes. I think the biggest area in the short term, that's an area that we've put in several markets. So test and measurement is one of the bigger ones, oil and gas, like downhole drilling, telecom also fits into that area. But what's been driving us recently were some test and measurement revenues.

Anja Soderstrom, Analyst

Okay. And then you also mentioned the recent surge in Avionics. How are you seeing that trending in the fourth quarter?

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Right. So I mentioned on some earlier calls that we supply through several other primes, really all the Airbus and Boeing aircraft builds. Those companies have really started reengaging. Their backlogs are increasing dramatically, and they're moving towards higher production rates. We did see orders from Boeing, for example, earlier in the year, and maybe earlier than we expected, frankly, just kind of given the events there and the inventory we thought they had. We did have a big order and a large contract for commercial aircraft earlier in the year, and we're starting to see orders against that contract.

Anja Soderstrom, Analyst

Okay. And then lastly, we've been talking about tariffs before. What can you do there to sort of combat that?

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Yes. That's a great question, and it's kind of an ever-moving target, as most of the people on the line probably figure out at this point in time. We really anticipate tariffs remaining in place for the next 3 years unless the Supreme Court takes some action there. So it may be something we have to live with at this point. It's costing us about 1% to 1.5% of revenue in terms of the impact on gross margins. There are a couple of things we're doing. So one is we're examining the materials that we order and what has to be shipped into the country and what can be for certain parts we order can they be shipped directly with customers. So we are making some changes in that regard. We are actively working with our customers to invoke a clause of the FAR, which allows us to get tariff relief for defense products that are specifically for U.S. forces that doesn't apply to shipments to other NATO countries. We've also passed along some tariff charges, and we think that's fair and that's part of our contract. But we are, at this point in time, looking to incorporate tariff charges into much of our pricing for new orders. So that's just a reality.

Anja Soderstrom, Analyst

Okay. And like when would that become effective then? How much longer are we going to have this headwind?

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Yes. We're starting to implement the FAR exemptions now, mainly due to the program's setup. This needs to be done upfront when ordering materials for future shipments. Therefore, we couldn't apply that exemption to the inventory we had in stock, but we are using it for new orders. We are currently considering this in our pricing.

Operator, Operator

Next question comes from the line of Otto Haeg of Farnam Street.

Otto Haeg, Analyst

Congratulations on your appointment. I have a question about the Indiana Microelectronics partnership you announced. How do you envision the integration of their tunable products with MPTI? What specific products are we discussing? Can you share more details about that partnership?

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Yes. We're actually very excited about it. It's a company we've known for a long time, and we've been keen to work with them in the past. We're glad we've come to an agreement about how to do it, how to support each other. They're a really great design team. They've won some very interesting contracts, primarily with the military but in other areas as well. One of the issues, I think, for them was really how do they scale their business. So we've really formed a partnership where we'll work with them on the sales and marketing of their designs, and then also working with them once we procure an order on the manufacturability of the product. So when we go to the market, we provide a quote for someone, our engineers working with their engineers to make sure that we will be delivering products that can be manufactured effectively. They make a number of tunable filters. They're really kind of software tunable, and the processes are not too difficult. So we spent time with their team, really understanding that. We think that's something we can stand up pretty quickly without a lot of capital expenditure on either party's side. And we've already actually had some sales wins. So we're excited about where that can go.

Otto Haeg, Analyst

Do you think this is something where these could turn into rather large orders over time, programs? Or is this going to be kind of smaller programs or smaller products, if you will, runs? Can you just elaborate on that a little bit?

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Yes. I mean we're obviously very early in the relationship, but we actually think it can grow into some fairly large contracts. They have already made great headway with several customers of their own that would like to scale production. We think that just with the size of our manufacturer representative sales force, we'll find a lot of other opportunities to work together.

Otto Haeg, Analyst

Excellent. One additional, if I can. Can you give us an update on Connectivity partners? It doesn't appear we've made any investments there? Or what's happening in terms of them raising capital? Any update on what's happening with Connectivity?

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Yes. There's no investment on M-tron's part to date. I do know that they've been meeting with companies and identifying potential targets, and so they're trying to really build up a backlog of opportunities to grow their fundraising marketing and just prepped in terms of standing up the firm, but no current news in terms of how it impacts us.

Operator, Operator

With no further questions, that concludes our Q&A session. I'll now turn the conference back over to Mr. Pforr for closing remarks.

Cameron Pforr, CEO

Okay. Well, thank you all for joining, and I appreciate the questions, Anja and Otto. Wishing everyone on the call a great day, and I appreciate your interest in the firm.

Operator, Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.