Textron Inc. (NYSE:TXT) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

That hasn’t been formalized yet on the Navy side of things. I mean there’s a lot of dialogue around that. But what you’re seeing in the House Appropriations is those five CMV 22s, which would be above program or record is because of the versatility and the desire ultimately of the Navy to have more of these crafts. So, we’ll see how this plays out over time, but we’re obviously — we’re very happy with the performance of the aircraft. The Navy is very happy with the performance of the aircraft and so hopefully, we’ll see some continuing level of production now that we’re sort of beyond the program or record.

Sheila Kahyaoglu: That’s great. Thank you for that color. And then maybe a bigger picture one. Frank, if you could start, and I know you’ll be for both, so give Scott some time on this, too. You announced a pretty large repurchase program in the quarter. How are you thinking about capital allocation? And then Scott, obviously, with Ascent, capital allocation for repo versus new products?

Frank Connor: So capital allocation, it really remains the same, Sheila. We’ve obviously continued to generate very good free cash flow. We’ve talked about, obviously, we invest significant capital back into business in R&D and CapEx, that’s going to continue, but beyond that, we’re generating a lot of free cash flow that we’ve been returning through share repurchase activity. We talked about kind of baseline of 5% to 6% or so of our share base a year from a repurchase standpoint. We came out of the pandemic more liquid than we usually are and need to be and you’ve seen in the first half of the year, we’ve repurchased a lot of stock, and we expect to continue to be in the market opportunistically and the 35 million reflects kind of the need to have the shares available — authorization available to do that. We were down to 2.7 million shares on the last repurchase and we’re rolling through it pretty quickly.

Sheila Kahyaoglu: Cool. Thank you.

Scott Donnelly: That’s right. As Frank said, Sheila, I mean, I certainly don’t see it as a trade with R&Ds. As you know, we’re a fairly high R&D company. We think investing in new products is the key to growth. I think we’re seeing that play out right now and if you look at Aviation with the investments in Latitudes and Longitudes, a lot of the upgrades, a lot of our current products both on the jet and the turboprop side, SkyCourier now driving nice growth for us, the Ascend that we just announced. So if you look at Bell, obviously, we’ve made a huge investment over the years in the FLRAA program and the FLRAA program, that’s obviously now turning into a great growth driver for us. So across all the businesses we’re not going to change our strategy here in terms of R&D.

We’ll keep making the investments that we think we need to make in the product side. But despite all that, we’re obviously making strong profits and strong cash flow and that gives us a great deal of flexibility to allocate and drive some of that back through the share repurchase program and do what’s right we think for the shareholders.

Sheila Kahyaoglu: Great, thank you.

Operator: Thanks. We’ll go next to the line of Jason Gursky with Citi.

Jason Gursky: Hi, good morning, everybody.

Frank Connor: Good morning.

Jason Gursky: Scott, I was wondering if you could provide kind of a general update on the general aviation market. I think there was a show here recently up in Oshkosh. I was wondering if you had any general learnings from either that show or your general view of the general aviation market? And then second one would be just kind of an update from your perspective on the market for pilots both for, as they come in through the general aviation market and make their way maybe up into the biz jets and other aircraft that are more important to you?