Comtech Telecommunications Corp. (NASDAQ:CMTL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Joe Gomes: Okay. And one last one from me and back in queue. So, I know that you’ve talked about this in the past, but again if the effective interest rate is over 10% in the quarter, cash borrowing rate is almost at 9% in the quarter. Maybe you can give us a little bit better of an update of what you guys are trying to do to minimize that or bring that back down a little bit, understanding that rates have been going up overall. But you guys are paying some pretty high interest expenses here?

Mike Bondi: Yes, it’s definitely something, Joe, that we are focusing on as we said in our last earnings call. We’re not going to sit idle, we have a credit facility that comes current in October of 2023. And so we want to use time to our advantage and we certainly at this juncture don’t have something specific to say about capital structure and alternatives, but we are evaluating them. We are looking at this from a holistic point of view. We want to do something that’s durational in nature. So we’re not renegotiating a facility say in one or two years from now. We definitely heard feedback from our investors and lenders. And we’ll take that into our calculus as we navigate through the next steps there. On top of that, as part of our benchmarking processes and bringing process discipline to the table, we are looking at our investments in working capital and we did a test this quarter to see that we can get down to proper leverage ratios that we have to plan for July and we did that.

So, I think that’s a great achievement on the team’s part here. No small task there. But certainly, as we go through — we’re trying to grow the company and making investments to grow, we want to be disciplined to bring down our AR and inventory levels and bring our payment cycle with our vendors more in line with industry standards. We do recognize interest costs are 3 times what they were about a year ago and certainly taking that into consideration for sure. So I can tell you we’re focused on that.

Joe Gomes: Thank you again for answering the question. Much appreciated.

Mike Bondi: Thanks, Joe.

Ken Peterman: Thanks, Joe.

Operator: Our next question will come from George Notter with Jefferies. Your line is open.

George Notter: Hi, guys. Thanks very much. I guess I wanted to ask about margins, obviously a softer quarter on gross margin here. And certainly, it’s coming from the satellite and space business, I heard what you said regarding Tropo, but can you talk about kind of the puts and takes there? And what do you expect for the margin trajectory going forward?

Mike Bondi: Sure, I’ll take that, George. So yes, in Q3, we did experience significantly higher net sales of our Tropo and Satcom solutions to the U.S. government and customers. I would want to point out in the details of it that there were three main items that we were delivering this quarter. One was the VSAT equipment to the U.S. Army there, that equipment is coming off a contract where it’s cost reimbursable. So as we have said in the past, those types of contracts, while they’re good and they’re good cash flow payers, they come with low profit margin. So that’s just a legacy type transaction, if you will, that we had come through this quarter. We also, as a second theme, we did ship out or started to perform on our U.S. Marine Corps project.