Park Aerospace Corp. (PKE)
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Earnings Call: Q3 2022

Jan 6, 2022

Operator

Good morning. My name is Michelle, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Park Aerospace Corp . Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2022 Earnings Release Conference Call and Investor Presentation. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. At this time, I will turn today's call over to Mr. Brian Shore, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Shore, you may begin your conference.

Brian Shore
Chairman and CEO, PARK AEROSPACE CORP.

Thank you, operator. This is Brian. Welcome all. Happy New Year. Welcome to our Q3 Investor Conference Call. I have with me as always, as usual, Matt Farabaugh, our CFO. So, we announced our earnings this morning. There was a news release. In the earnings release, there's instructions as to how to access a presentation which we're about to go through. You wanna get that presentation in front of you. Well, it's also posted on our website. That's another avenue to get the presentation in front of you. Without actually doing the presentation, this call will be less meaningful, I think. As usual, what we try to do with these calls is mix it up a little bit, try to provide useful and interesting information to you, interesting perspective we can.

We're not into just going through a dry analysis of numbers and data. We can always do that for you later if you wanna call back. You know, this dilemma that keeps growing every quarter, which is there is stuff we cover every quarter, and then we do go through it again, and the problem is the presentations get longer and longer. We should wanna discuss new stuff as well. We're gonna skip over, at least skim over, a couple of sections on topics we've covered before multiple times in prior presentations and calls. I guess that's it. Just wanna warn you, I guess, going through the presentation, it's a long presentation.

We'll try to go through it as quickly as possible, but it could take, you know, up to 50 minutes, maybe a little bit more. That's 50, not 15. Then after we're done with the presentation, to the extent you have any questions, Matt and I will be happy to answer them. Why don't we get started? Slide number two is a forward-looking disclaimer information statement. If you have any questions about that, let us know. Slide three is our table of contents. And slide four, we can't go through slide four quite as quickly. This is a little bit of a busier slide. Let's talk about our Q3 results. Sales, $13.864 million. Gross profit, $3.863 million. EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA, $2.67 million.

Kind of interesting to look at the progressions from quarter to quarter. You can see that, at least in terms of bottom line, this is a down quarter from Q1 and Q2. Let's talk about what we said, what we predicted, if you will. Well, not really predicted. Our forecast estimates that we provide you when we did our Q2 call regarding Q3, we said our estimate for sales was $13 million-$13.5 million, and Adjusted EBITDA, $3 million-$3.4 million. It's kind of a strange thing. We actually exceeded our sales estimate, but didn't get to our EBITDA estimate, and that requires the explanation, which we're about to go into.

Before I do that, let me just remind you what you always do, our forecast philosophy when you provide your forecasts. We are telling you what we think is going to happen to the best of our ability. Obviously, we're wrong sometimes, but we're saying at the time, this is what we think is gonna happen. We don't play this kind of, well, we'll call it a game, where we give you a low number that we can beat and then be heroes. To us, that's not how we do it. We think that's kind of insulting. Other people that wanna do that, it's fine. That's just not how we do it. I think you know that by now. Let's go to the bottom of the slide here, the but. It's a big but. This is an important thing.

It'll come up a couple times or so during the presentation. There are $2.4 million of missile program essential component sales, which were expected in Q4 but occurred in Q3. Now, when we did our Q2 call, we told you about this. We said that's gonna be in Q4. That's what we expected. We now can call this product C2B. Until now, it's been kind of an anonymous product, but we just announced yesterday a deal with Ariane, and we'll talk about that later. We now can call this product C2B. It's a very specialized proprietary fabric that's used by us to produce ablative products for missile and rocket programs. We'll get into the product a little bit later.

Anyway, let's just call it C2B for shorthand rather than saying, whatever we call it, essential component sale, missile program essential component sales. It's kind of a mouthful. Anyway, this sale took place in Q3, not Q4. That wasn't really our doing. This is driven by the OEMs. Remember how this works. This component is a critical component for these missile programs or sole source on these programs. It comes from, well, we've been saying, a country that's an ally of the U.S. It's a, you know, French company. Ariane's a huge company.

I guess some of the OEMs are a little nervous, these are companies that maybe do missiles and rocket programs, about making sure they have a secure supply of the C2B, so they ask us to go buy the product from Ariane. We have the relationship with Ariane. We do that, and then we sell this C2B product to our customer, and we hold it for them. It's in our factory, although it's their inventory, they own it. And there's just a markup involved when we do that, so it's a very low margin sale as well. Now, the good news is, and there's a lot of good news here, is that ultimately we plan to use that product to produce our ablative materials, and those materials, when we produce those materials, very high margin.

Net-net, very good, but the first part of the transaction could be distortive because it's a lot of revenue and very low margins. It was supposed to be in Q4 and ended up being Q3, so that kinda throws everything out of whack here a little bit. Let's just think about that. $13.9 million of sales in Q3. Let's just for the purpose of kind of getting some perspective here, let's subtract that $2.4 million. It wasn't supposed to be Q3 anyway. That would say that it's more like $11.5 million without that C2B sale. $11.5 million. Now, $11.5 million compared to what we were predicting, $13 million-$13.5 million.

Well, that's $1.5 million below the bottom end of the range. Now you start to see what's going on here. Actually, understanding that and say, geez, that EBITDA is pretty good. It is pretty good considering these circumstances based on the top line. Let me see what else I have here. Just a little interesting point if, well, it may be interesting to you. We currently have over $5 million worth of this C2B product in our factory. It's not owned by us, it's owned by our customer. That's good because that means there's a lot of ablative sales that are coming. It won't be next quarter. That's not how it works. They want to have a secure supply for a long time.

Well, that's good because this is kind of money in the bank for Park, because ultimately the plan is that we would, when our customers tell us, we'll take that C2B product, and with our proprietary resin systems, produce this ablative material, and that's where the, you know, the sales, the margins end up being very good on those sales. I guess I think that covers that. Let's, why don't we move on to slide five. There are other factors which affected Q3 sales and margins, not just the C2 thing. Let's talk about that. Supply chain challenges, daily battle. We spoke about this when we did Q2, but we didn't see this coming exactly.

They're actually, from our perspective, worse in Q3 and worse currently than they were when we announced Q2. When people say it's getting better, you know, I hear reports about this, newspaper articles, Wall Street Journal. I don't know what world they're in. They're not in our world, that's for sure. Our world, it's not getting better. Under supply chain challenges, difficulty sourcing raw materials, international shipments, domestic shipments, freight issues, additional costs for expedited freight shipments. All together, we look at the first three bullet items, $600,000 of sales that we didn't have in Q3 because of these things. Either we couldn't get someone to ship the product domestically or internationally, and difficulty sourcing raw materials.

We couldn't get the raw materials to produce the product and ship them by the end of the quarter. My feeling is our people doing a really good job under very difficult circumstances, but we were not able to get all the raw materials we needed for the quarter. You take all those three things together, $600,000. We actually know exactly what the number is. It's like $593,000 or something like that. We're not gonna give you the, you know, breakdown. That's a little bit, you know, more information than is useful, we think. We can compute that number. That's a hard number. Remember I said there's a $1.5 million gap in the top line? There's $600,000 of it, but that's still a lot left.

What happened to the rest of it? What happened to the other $900,000? Now let's talk about that. Supply chain issues impact the aerospace industry generally. What does that mean? This is not our supply chain. It means we're not the only one. As far as we know, everybody's struggling with this. That really puts the brakes, you know, a drag on the whole industry, the whole aerospace industry. Because if we can't get stuff, other people probably aren't getting stuff either. If you're an OEM, you know, Park, they're good. They're on time. They can get you what you want.

Well, that's really nice, but, you know, I got 25 other suppliers that are getting me the components that I need for, from them, so what's the point of making these extra air planes or missiles, whatever, if I can't get all the raw materials? It kind of puts a drag on the whole industry. Now we're talking about our top line, not just the, you know, the $600,000, which we could compute. Can't really compute this item. Hard to know. But it's there. It's very palpable as far as we're concerned. Another item, cost and efforts associated with bringing a new plant online and equipment trials. As far as hitting the P&L directly, these are minimal costs. As far as the effort's concerned, major cost. Major effort, I should say.

The next one is another important item. The supply chain issues impacting aerospace industry and delays in approving defense budget. Those are two items which to me really explain why our market is soft right now and probably will be soft into Q4. This has nothing to do with GE, by the way. That's the one exception. GE is just going according to plan of GE programs. This is all other than GE. For us, other than GE, is gonna be largely a lot of it's gonna be military. You hear a lot about how the delay in approving the defense budgets has affected the defense and military industry. I just saw a report from a large company this morning announcing earnings that, yeah, they really had a...

They didn't make their numbers because of the lack of approval of defense budgets. The budget was recently approved. This is, you know, Washington stuff. It's. I don't understand this stuff very well, but that was the Defense Authorization Bill that was signed into law on December twenty-seventh. There's something else called Defense Appropriations Bill. That's not signed yet. I guess that's a big one because that means that's authorizing the actual spending of money. This has left the defense industry in limbo, and I've seen lots and lots of reporting about this. It's, you know, it's certainly not just our perspective. Let me just see what else. I'm looking at my notes here. Sorry about that.

The fact that the defense industry, sorry, the authorization bill has been signed. I hope that's a positive. I guess now people saying, "Well, I need the appropriations bill to be signed as well." Hopefully, that will be done, and then the defense industry will get back to business. Right now, I think some programs are still kind of on hold. Maybe some of the OEMs are waiting to see what happens. We'll look at that later as there's actually a little good news in the authorization bill. We'll talk about that later in the presentation. Let's go to slide six. Inflation. Okay, about inflation these days, everything. Raw materials, freight, supplies, utilities, pretty much everything.

We do pass a lot of costs on when we re-quote business to our customers, I mean. You know, the big question I think is, in my mind anyway, is how long can these increased costs be passed to the customers? Whether you're talking about consumers, you're talking about other businesses, how long? Because, you know, it's almost just physics. There has to be a limit, and it's always the same thing. You don't know where that limit is. How far can you push it? And the problem is sometimes with these things, nobody knows. They keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and it's like in one day, everything stops. We've had it. We're not paying these prices anymore, and that's usually. You know, we would.

Often in the past, anyway, there's been a kind of severe event. Now, a lot of people that are smarter than me say it's not gonna happen this time, so maybe they're right. I don't know. Now these are not our list of excuses. These are factors that we think you'd wanna know about. We think you'd wanna know about these kind of things we're struggling with, these difficulties. Not excuses, though. Not excuses. I hope it's clear, we're not apologizing for the quarter. Actually, I think our people did a pretty damn good job under the circumstances of how difficult things were. I think you know this, but maybe it's just it's worth just taking a second to explain.

For us, quarter to quarter top line, there is only a limited impact we can have on the quarter to quarter top line short term. It doesn't really work that way. Because we can't tell Airbus how many A320s to make. I can't call the CEO of Airbus and say, "Look, you know, we're a little short on top line this quarter. Could you produce a couple more A320s?" Or call some airlines, "Could you order some more A320s?" Or some missile program, "Can you make a couple more missiles this quarter? Because, you know, we wanna get our top line up." Obviously, I'm being a little facetious. That's ridiculous, but that's kind of the illustrative of the situation.

For us, we need to run our business real hard every quarter, really tight, really hard, and then make sure we're working on developing new opportunities and not getting into that bunker mode. Oh, things are tough. We're gonna go hide somewhere, which we see a lot in, I guess, in the world, maybe in our industry. It's real important we don't do that we keep pushing, and we keep looking for opportunities because that's the key. We have little control about the top line quarter to quarter because we can't tell the OEMs, you know, when to order stuff, when to not to order stuff. We can't control the fact the defense industry is kind of down in the dumps because, you know, Washington hasn't approved the defense budget.

We can't really control the supply chain mess that's really seemed to has seemed to affect the whole industry. We really can't do that. There's other, you know, we have program issues. You know, there may be a reason why a certain, you know, the OEM is gonna wait till next quarter to produce more missiles. I mean, that's their prerogative, of course, and they may have their own reasons. Those are things we really can't control. What we can control, again, is running our business really tight, really hard, and working hard to develop new opportunities and not letting ourselves get into the bunker mode. Oh, things are bad, so, you know, we'll emerge from the bunker whenever. You know, the problem is, in reality, people never emerge from the bunker. We'll talk about that later. Okay.

Why don't we keep going because you know we got a long way to go here and a lot to cover. Slide seven. This is just annual stuff. Just to put in perspective, you'll see on slide 25, but the forecast for the 2022 fiscal year sales, $53.8 million-$54.3 million and EBITDA, $13 million-$13.5 million. It's interesting. We'd all get back to that fiscal 2020 year in terms of top line, but it seems like we probably get around the EBITDA number for that fiscal 2020.

Also interesting, looking at the first nine months compared to fiscal 2019, and you see that EBITDA is about the same in the first nine months compared to 2019, but the top line there was $51 million compared to $41 million. That means something. Probably means that our margins are better. Maybe our, you know, product mix is better. Maybe we're developing and introducing products at a higher margin. Maybe. Let's go on to slide 8. Try to keep moving here. We'll try to, you know, skim over this pretty quickly. We cover this every quarter. Balance sheet, cash dividend history. You know, this $110 million in the second arrow item, it's kind of interesting because that C2B sale kinda distorted our cash as well because we had a sale of the C2B.

The sale of the C2B occurred in Q3, but we didn't get paid for it until last month, till Q4. So the invoicing and the payment was, you know, the end of Q3 straddle those two items. So really, in a way, that $110 million is short by a couple million dollars because that sale occurred in Q3. The payment of that big item, special item, didn't occur until Q4. But in any event, you know, you might wanna do a little math, and you could take that number, and you subtract how much we have to spend on the expansion and the transition taxes, all the payments. You'd say, "Yeah, conceptually anyway, maybe we have about $96 million." That's a conceptual kind of discussion analysis.

At the bottom of the page, your cash dividend history. We'll just go to the last checked item, $550 million in cash dividends since the beginning of 2005. So I normally comment that's a lot of money for a small company like Park. Let me just cover the first check item. I should do that. While others were canceling their dividends or cutting their dividends during the economic crisis of pandemic, we did not do that. We maintained our regular dividend throughout. Let's go on to the next item. Slide 9 is our top 5 customers. We do that every quarter. Let's not get too hung up on this. Most of these names you're familiar with because, you know, you see them quarter after quarter.

AE Aerospace, that's the Raytheon SM-2 Missile. Aeromatrix Composites, we do multiple programs for them. GKN, that's the Sikorsky helicopter program. Kratos obviously is the Valkyrie at the bottom left. Middle River, MRAS, is the 747-8 engine assault program. Let's keep moving here. Slide 10, I think we have. The interesting thing to me here, to give a little perspective, look at the bottom, right, pie chart. You say, "Yeah, well, this is the quarter. This is only a quarter, not year to date." Just Q3, $13.9 million was the revenue. Look at military, 41%. That says about $5.7 million of military.

You say, "Well, that's not too bad," except the $2.4 million, back to the C2B, that's in the military part of the pie chart. We were expecting that in Q3, but then in Q4, if we back out to $2.4 million, that's only $3.3 million. That's a pretty low number. Look at the history. That's a pretty low number, not just percentage-wise, but absolute-wise. It goes back to the discussion, what's going on with the market? We're quite sure we haven't lost any business, any market share. That's not the story at all. We think we're, you know, we're getting opportunities, new programs. That's not the story at all. It's the end market itself that we believe is the driver here. Let's go on to slide 11.

Our niche military aerospace programs. Again, we do this kind of just for entertainment purposes, almost kind of the fun programs that we share with you. The JSTARS, that's parts we make with our material. The ESSM, ablative materials, that's for rocketry. The Standard Missile 3, that's also ablative materials. Just so you know, a kind of fun fact, that is a Mach 16-Mach 18 missile. That would be considered to be fast. I know that's a, you know, technical term, but let's call it fast. Military, affected by supply chain, budget delays, and also the choppy nature of military, as we were talking about before. You know, some programs will be active this month and then next month they won't be, or this quarter will be active, next quarter they won't be.

That's not an indication of the program going up or down. That's just how the, for us anyway, the military business is. There's an important footnote at the bottom. We still do love our military aerospace programs. Slide 12. Okay, so what we're gonna do here, this is one of the things we cover every quarter for the last several quarters, and it's slide 12 all the way to slide 16. We're gonna skip over this. We're not gonna go through each item. I'll just say this is the discussion as to how the aerospace industry, especially commercial aerospace industry, got into the predicament it's in now. You know, the whipsaw effect, we talked about it many times.

I think that we try to lay it out pretty clearly in the slides themselves, so why don't we skip over it and just if you have any questions, let us know. At the end of this little group of slides, we do point out that this is what everybody else did. They got into the end-of-days mode, Armageddon mentality. Those terms I know are kind of cute terms, but I don't think I'm exaggerating. The industry just died. Not Park, not Park. We never bought that end-of-days stuff. We never laid anybody off. We didn't let go of our people. We didn't stop our spending on our expansion budget. We didn't cut our dividend. We didn't do any of that stuff. Of course, we didn't know if we were right at the time.

You know, you run a company, you have to make decisions. I think history will prove that we were right, and the rest of the world was probably not right. At least the rest of the world, they got into that Armageddon kind of mentality, which is most of it, the aerospace industry. Okay, you can pat me on the back later for that, but I just wanted to mention that we didn't go that way. Let's go to slide 17. This is another topic we cover every quarter, so we'll kind of skip over this. This is basically saying that, yeah, domestic aviation is recovering more quickly than international aviation. Commercial, I'm talking about commercial. Domestic translates to single aisle, international translates to wide body. We think single aisle is where it's at for now.

Just for now, not for always, but for now. Okay. Next we'll go on to slide, looks like it's 18. GE Aviation jet engine programs. We give you this slide every quarter because it's kind of, I know it's not new stuff, but it's good for context, for perspective. Maybe some people haven't been on the call before. The top item, top left, firm pricing LTA through 2029 with Middle River Aerostructure Systems, MRAS. That's a subsidiary of ST Engineering. Let me stop for those of you who don't know. This was a subsidiary of GE Aviation for a long time until GE Aviation sold the sub to ST Engineering in Singapore a couple years ago.

The history is why all the programs you look at here are legacy GE programs. Redundant factory, we said, "Look, as soon as you sign this LTA, we'll build you a redundant factory." We did that. Next item, sole source for composite materials for engine nacelles, thrust reversers on multiple programs. I'm not gonna go through all of them. The top five we call the A320neo family, A320 aircraft programs. We've got the 747 COMAC programs. We'll talk about that later. Both the C919 and the regional jet, the Global 7500, top right. The top right just says this is a different kind of structure. It's a primary structure for this Passport 20 engine, and this is through GE. It's not through MRAS. Sorry, slide 19.

Let's go through some updates on what's going on with GE Aviation, the key programs. The slide 19, this is actually something that was in the prior presentation, Q3 presentation, maybe even Q2, maybe in Q1. This is a really important statement, and it came from the Airbus CEO, where he kind of lays down his plan, lays down the law. This is what we want. This is what the supply chain is expected to do. Airbus maintained they're not going below 40% per month of A320neos throughout the pandemic, and there's all these doubters and analysts, "Oh, they're gonna have no, shit's gonna drop. They're not gonna be able to maintain it." That was really not good because, you know, people read the analyst reports. They wouldn't believe Airbus.

They believed the analysts, and they wouldn't ramp up their business, you know. It ended up making things worse from that perspective. They never went below 40%. Now they're saying 45% by the end of last year, and then they go to 64% in 2023, 70% by 2024, 75% by calendar 2025. I'm rushing, so not being clear. Slide 20, let's just continue. We're still on the A320 topic. As of the end of October 2021, CFM, that's the manufacturer of the LEAP-1A engine, had a 60% share of firm orders for the A320 family of aircraft. That's based upon Aero Engine News, which is kind of the bible.

A lot of really interesting and detailed data in the Aero Engine News. That's pretty good information. Now, just so you know, there's a lot of balance in that percentage. This program is shared with Pratt, CFM- Pratt. Why is that? Just over 10,000 firm orders. In other words, if somebody gets an order of 50 up or down, it's not gonna move that percentage that much. A lot of ballast. You know, the long big backlog for these engines and also for these airplanes. Assuming the bullet item here, a 60% CFM market share, those 75%, A320 aircraft family per month, that rate represents approximately $30 million per year of revenue to Park starting in 2025 when they say they wanna be at the 75% per month rate.

We haven't given you this information before. Kind of danced around it and say it's like bigger than a bread box, that kind of stuff. We decided to give you this information because it's just gotten to be such a significant program for Park that we thought the right thing to do would be to communicate that information to you. Continuing, there's some tension with Airbus suppliers. Some tension has developed over the aggressive Airbus A320 aircraft family forecasted ramp up. You know, kind of public stuff, which to me is kind of strange. You think they'd have these discussions, you know, behind closed doors somewhere. Airbus continues to indicate it's not backing down, it's doubling down. They're being pretty firm about their intentions for the A320, and I think they're in the catbird seat here.

I think they are because of the fact they have two engines on the program. They can leverage one off the other, and there's a lot of evidence they've been doing that as well. They see to it the supply chain supports them to get to that target of 75. Slide 21. We're still going on the A320 family, the A321XLR. So kind of the newsy here. Airbus completed the first assembly of the first test aircraft, final assembly rather. First flight expected this year. Certification entry into service next year. That's pretty fast. A321XLR is currently positioned as the only single-aisle aircraft with 5,000+ mile statute range, statute mile range at 225+ seating capacity. That's a big deal. Is it a game-changing aircraft?

I don't know, but a lot of people think it is. Why is that? Because this aircraft has the ability to replace wide-bodies on certain missions. You know, that kind of range, that kind of seating capacity replace wide-bodies, which are much more expensive on certain missions, and that's a big thing. At this point, Boeing doesn't have a response to this airplane. Whether they're working on one or not is, you know, not clear. People say they are, but the problem is that this air plane, the XLR, is coming out in 2023. Takes a long time to develop a new air plane.

I hope Boeing will get into the game, but even if they do, it's gonna take many, many years for them to get an aircraft that would be in production and available for sale that could compete against the XLR. The A320neo aircraft family sold well in Dubai. Airbus recently received large A320neo aircraft family orders from KLM and Qantas, which are traditionally loyal Boeing customers. That's kind of a big thing. You know, Airbus is peeling away the Boeing customers. Now, we all know, everybody knows that Boeing had trouble with the MAX, and we wish them well. We'd like to get on the MAX program. We're not on the program, so we have no problem with the MAX.

My sense is that Airbus and their CEO are trying to capitalize on the opportunity, this window to gain market share, and are being pretty aggressive. That's just my sense. I think it's maybe commonly believed that to be the case. So they're going after Boeing, you know, customers is, you know, nothing's sacred, I guess. A320neo recently surpassed the A320 as the aircraft in the A320 and neo family with the most firm orders. That's really interesting because, you know, Airbus is really focusing on the A321. Not that they're not focusing the A320, but really focusing the A321neo. I think they're setting up a new plant in Toulouse maybe just for the A321. It's interesting that that's actually a more popular air plane than the A320 at this point. The last item, here's a little concerning thing.

Pratt recently announced an enhanced version of its GTF engine for the A320neo family, deliveries to begin in 2024. Now, this is the engine that the other engine option for the A320neo. CFM shares a program with Pratt. So far, CFM shares 60%. You know, Pratt's coming out with enhanced engine. Should CFM be concerned? I hope they are because I you know I would take Pratt seriously if I were. No, they're not asking me, but it's my opinion anyway. Slide 22. Let's go on to some other GE program updates here. COMAC 919. COMAC, this is the Chinese aircraft company, the 919, so it to be a competitor to the A320neo and the 737 MAX.

Until very recently, until the beginning of December, COMAC was maintaining that they were gonna get a certain point certified in China anyway, and begin deliveries in China before the end of last year, you know. Then, just very late in the year, in December, the CAAC, let's call it that, announced that the COMAC 919 is not expected to complete certification until 2022. That's this year. The announcement indicated that as of early December 2021, the 919 prototypes had completed only 34 of 276 required certification flights. That, you know, that's kind of good information because it's not just delayed a little bit, but they have a long way to go in terms of certification.

I just saw a report this morning, not from COMAC, only from CAAC, that, yeah, in fact, the program's delayed. They're not talking about when they plan to get it certified, you know, although the CAAC is talking about this year. COMAC, I think, talked about COVID delays, you know, last year's lockdowns in China as a reason, one of the reasons anyway, for the delay in the certification. Skipping over in this presentation discussion of the Global 7500 and the ARJ21. It's not that they're not important, it's just there are not really many changes in those programs, and we're trying to move through the presentation here. Slide 23. Okay, the 747.

We're gonna include this until the end, you know, a discussion about the 747. Boeing has announced it will terminate production of the Queen of the Skies in 2022. The last 747 expected to be delivered in October 2022. That's, you know, around the corner. A sad day for one of the best, maybe the best, my opinion is it's up there, commercial aircraft ever built. Long live the Queen. This is really a sentimental favorite for us. This is the first program we got on, GE Aviation program we got on back in 2014. My favorite air plane. I'd always wanna remind you, even though it's a sentimental favorite, it's a little less than $2 million of revenue for us.

There are two new photos on left and right. These are our current photos of a 747 in Anchorage, Alaska. You see a lot of 747s in Anchorage. Those are appropriate. Slide 24. This requires us to slow down a little bit. A lot of information here. Let's look at the top part of the slide for perspective on what happened with. Let's use this as almost a proxy for the commercial aerospace industry. On fiscal 2020, we had about $29 million of sales. It's really about, let's call it 28 because there was $1 million of sales on the GE9X program, which is not an active program for us right now, dormant. Let's say $28 million.

The reason I like $28 million, divide by 4, that's $7 million. That kind of works nicely. $7 million per quarter. Then you can see in 2021, you know, now the pandemic is starting to affect us. 1, 2, the numbers are going down a lot. You know, use $7 million as a starting point. By Q3, fiscal 2021 Q3, $1.8 million. That's 25% of $7 million. It's a 75% drop. That's a pretty precipitous drop, I would say. Then look what happened. We go from Q3 of 2021 to Q1 of 2022, Q1 of this year. That's just two quarters. It goes up from $1.8 million to $7 million. That's a lot harder going up than going down, you know? That's 4 times, 4x in two quarters.

That's a big, big ramp-up. You know, we handle it obviously. Those are our sales. We're kind of at that $6 million-$7 million per quarter right now. Good perspective. You know what's interesting here, it's a little bit of a different story because Airbus never went below 40 A320 units per month, and the 747 was flat during this period. The other programs are ramping up, so it wasn't really an end market program issue. What was it? It was destocking. It was this kind of end-of-days Armageddon mentality where the supply chain shut everything down. Not only that, they wanted to get rid of all their inventory. They're just selling off their inventory. They're not only not producing, they're selling the inventory, whatever they could sell.

That really, I think is the kind of message behind our numbers. It wasn't almost so much the end market, the end program markets, it was the destocking that was just kind of widespread and rampant throughout the industry. Of course, that puts the industry in a tough position because, you know, we go back to that part we skipped over, they're back on their heels. They laid off lots of people. Not so easy to hire them back. Guess what? They have no inventory left to cushion the ramp up. The supply chain got itself into a real predicament here. To Q2, let's go to the bottom. This is the top portion of the group of numbers of fiscal 2022, Q3.

The quarter just ended, $6.2 million. Our forecast when we did our Q2 presentation for Q3 was $6.25 million-$7.25 million. We're kind of at the bottom of the range. I wouldn't read anything into that. These things, numbers move up and down a little bit based upon, you know, if something shifts to being in a quarter, then the quarter. But I wouldn't read anything into that. Going down to the lower part of the page, our Q2 fiscal 2022 Q4 forecast, the current forecast is $6.6 million-$7.1 million. In Q2, that was $6.25 million-$7.25 million. We're kind of tightening the range. We're not really changing very much, tightening it because it's a, you know, it's this quarter.

We have more information about it. That makes the total forecast for the fiscal year 2026 $26.3 million-$26.8 million. We go back to fiscal 2020, $28.9 million, but maybe adjusted to $28 million. We're getting close. We're not quite there, but we're close. Certain factors that may affect the forecast. Well, how about supply chain? How about the COVID disruptions? Those are two. All those factors we talked about, discussed at the beginning of the presentation, slides 5 and 6, they apply. I would say supply chains and maybe COVID disruptions are the things that should have the most impact on the forecast. The orders for Q4 are booked. If those orders aren't shipped, that means something happened that prevented them from being shipped.

Let's talk about when I say orders are booked, I'm talking about for GE, not for the, you know, not for everything with Q4, for power. Let's go to slide 25. A little more to discuss here. We've got to go back and talk about that $2.4 million of C2 sales. Let's go right down to Q4 and at the bottom, fiscal year 2022, Q4. Our forecast is $12.75 million-$13.25 million top line. What's going on here? In Q2, we predicted $15.75-$16.75. Now, if you subtract out that $2.4 million, what it's supposed to be in Q4, that won't be in Q4.

That still doesn't get us there. That would bring us to 13.35-14.35. Instead of saying, take what we gave you in terms of forecast for Q4 and Q2, subtract the 2.4, it still gives us 13.3, let's say, to 14.3, which is higher than the 12.75-13.25. Why is that? These are things that affected Q3, we think are continuing into Q4. Now you see it's not GE, it's all the other stuff, especially military. We talk about the bottom line, $3 million-$3.5 million, again for Q4, for the current fiscal year, Q4. In Q2, our prediction was $3.5 million-$4.5 million.

We're bringing that number down, obviously driven by the top line. That's really the story. Nothing about the bottom line, the top line. One piece of good news I want to share with you for Q4. We told you about this in Q2, when we did the Q2 presentation. We still expect about $1 million in ablative material sales in Q4. That's not the C2B, that's our materials, where the margins are quite good. Long-term forecast. Sorry, let me not skip over certain factors and risks which may affect the forecast. Those are similar to the factors which affected Q3 listed in slide 5 and 6. Again, go back to those risk factors, supply chain, end market for defense, non-GE, COVID disruptions.

Those are things that, you know, I would probably highlight as the biggest risk items. Long-term forecast. People have asked us, when are we gonna reissue a long-term forecast? We'd like to do that, but at this point, we just feel there's a little bit too much uncertainty in the market for us to do that. We don't want to just give you something that's a guess. You know, we want to have some level of confidence that the forecast makes sense. You know, it's possible. I'm not promising, but it's possible when you ask Q4, which is in May, maybe at that point, some of the dust will have cleared, you know, and we'll be able to give you some kind of longer term forecast. Let's keep going here. We're running late. Slide 26, our expansion in Kansas.

We could just skim through this stuff. The numbers speak for themselves. The film line trials are complete. That's a good thing. That's a big accomplishment. Tape line trials in progress. Plan to begin qualification in January. I'll just make the point, while many others are slashing their capital spending or cancelling their capital budgets altogether, we pushed forward with and completed our major expansion. Good thing we did, because at this point, if we hadn't, we'd be in a world of hurt, especially if you look at things like that 75% per month prediction from Airbus, we'd be way behind power curve, not just for redundancy, but for capacity. Update on Park's people, slide 27. Our people count is 112. It was 114 when we did our Q2 presentation.

Went down, not up. We're trying to push it up. It continues to be very difficult to hire the people we wanna hire. That's not a minor issue. It's a major issue. I know we're not the only one, but we're talking about Park, so we'll let you know about that. You know, we know we're not the only one having difficulty hiring people. Park's people are facing many challenges, and they're doing it short-handed. Major supply chain. We're viewing things that we've discussed, but just wanna put in a context of these are things our people have to deal with every day. Major supply chain and freight challenges, a daily battle, a lot of work. What does this lead to? It leads to abrupt adjustments and changes to production planning and scheduling required to accommodate supply chain issues.

You know, people who run a factory, they like to have some kind of predictability, so they can plan the factory, you know, maybe a couple of months out or so. That's the ideal. That's not for us because, okay, we're planning to produce, you know, this product next week, but we didn't get the raw materials, so we're gonna switch everything around. We're gonna move our people around. We're gonna produce something else where we have the raw materials. So it's a big challenge. Lot of extra work and effort that goes into managing a business under those circumstances. COVID challenges, still living with them o r you know, it's been a difficult quarter for us with COVID, and we're off to a rocky start at the beginning of the new year with COVID. I guess it's Omicron, quite contagious.

You know, with two concerns, one obviously the most important is our people. Most of our people done fine. I mean, they're okay, they recovered. It also causes pretty big disruption for our production. You know, we're dealing with these supply chain issues. We're gonna move production around. People, you know, somebody at home tests positive or they test positive, they may be okay, they may be fine, but they're out. They have to quarantine. It's not like a vacation where you give somebody notice. It's like, yeah, somebody calls in, "I just tested positive for COVID," or, "I'm not feeling well, and I'm getting tested, and I have to wait for my test results." That, it's definitely in a category of a challenge. Stress and anxiety caused by vaccine mandates.

I know you hear a lot about this stuff, how wonderful it is, but for people who actually work for a living, it causes a lot of anxiety because they're thinking, "What, am I gonna lose my job now if I don't get vaccinated? I wanna get vaccinated." Maybe they've already had COVID. I'm not gonna get into a discussion about the merits of the vaccine. That's not my area. I am in a discussion about our people. We told our people, no, you're not getting fired for not getting vaccinated. A lot of people spoke up and said they were very relieved because they thought they were gonna get fired. They thought they were gonna lose their jobs.

Now, with this OSHA rule, you probably know this, if the Supreme Court doesn't strike it down, there's supposed to be a testing option, which is good. In other words, people the way I understand it, people not vaccinated can test as an alternative. We'll do it for them. We'll buy the test. We're not gonna pay for the test. We'll bring them in. We'll probably do it once, you know, once a week, maybe on Monday. We'll have to figure that out, if we can get the tests. You know, it's an if right now, so we'll see what happens with that. Bringing the new plant up and online, new equipment trials, this is a big, big, big deal. The major consuming project that our people are handling short-handed without reinforcements. Let's go on to slide what is it? 28 here.

Still dealing with our people, dealing with the managing, Park's new projects and initiatives. We'll talk about some of them. That takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, to do that. That's what I was talking about before. A lot of times when companies feel pressed, they're, you know, stressed, they have a lot of challenges, they go into a bunker. We don't go in a bunker. We don't stop. We don't sit still. We keep going. We look for opportunities. We pursue opportunities. It's a lot of extra work. Our people are handling that. Major consuming projects our people are handling without reinforcements. Again, short-handed. No matter, in fiscal 2022 Q3, Park's people once again stepped up. That's what Park's people do.

Everything that could be produced and shipped, got produced and shipped, notwithstanding the many obstacles and roadblocks which our Park people had to overcome. Once again, thank goodness for Park's customer flexibility program. I talk about this, usually, you know, every quarter, so I'm not gonna go into details, but it's really a godsend. It was a godsend when business was going down, a godsend when it's going back up. Slide 29. Most importantly, thank goodness for Park's great people. Park is very fortunate and blessed to have these great people. While others laid off their employees by the thousands and thousands, Park held on to and kept all of our people throughout the pandemic and economic crisis. We neither asked for nor took any government money for keeping our people. We don't need government money or government incentives to keep our people.

We keep our people because we wanna keep our people. Park's people are precious. Park's people are what makes Park Park. These pictures is from our holiday party. Every year, we have a paper air plane contest. These are the winners, day shift and night shift. It's actually taken pretty seriously. These guys are like, you know, kind of, almost aeronautical engineers in how they design their paper air planes. The contest is who can throw it the furthest. Those are the winners of our holiday paper air plane contest. Slide 30. Let's talk about some of what are we doing that's new, not being in a bunker. We got the James Webb.

This is just really an exciting thing, launched from French Guiana Christmas Day, on top of that Ariane 5 rocket. That's that same company, by the way, that we have the distribution agreement with. It's currently en route to its Lagrange point 2 orbit point, located approximately 1 million miles from the Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope. Just for perspective, the Moon is about 239,000 miles from the Earth. The Sun is about 93 million miles. Now I don't know about you, but I never heard of Lagrange points until about 2 or 3 weeks ago, and now I hear about them about 20 times a day because there's a lot of news about the James Webb.

Actually, if you're on Facebook, there's a—I don't know what you call it, like, a page on Facebook that you can go on to, or you can join, I guess, where every day there's a lot of really interesting news about the James Webb. There's a website where you can track its progress to the Lagrange point 2, which is kind of, at least for us, it's fun. You know, it's fun and exciting. James Webb Space Telescope mission is to look back to the beginning of time, the universe, existence. This is kind of a big thing, you know. There's a lot of theoretical beliefs, scientific theories about how the universe began, but we've never actually been able to see how the universe began, how existence began.

For instance, what did exist before the beginning of existence? Those are interesting questions, and this is maybe not the topic of an investor call. We can talk about numbers and stuff like that. Nevertheless, for us, it's a very big deal, this James Webb Space Telescope, that we participate in the structure. Let's go on to slide what is it? 31. Sorry. I can't see the slide numbers at the bottom of my page. If the James Webb Space Telescope succeeds in its mission, again, same kind of topic, where will it stand in the achievements of the human race? Well, that's a pretty big one, I would say.

You know, going back to the very beginning of time, of the human race anyway, pretty big achievement if it's successful to really see back to how life began, how the universe began, how existence began. It's a big deal. You can fill in the blank here. But I would say it's, you know, it's up there. The bottom of the page. Our proprietary Sigma Strut are incorporated into the structure of the James Webb Space Telescope. Park is along for this ride of rides. To say that Park is honoured to play a part in this incredible mission of the James Webb would be the understatement of a lifetime. Really, a very. You know, it's hard to describe how big a deal it is for us. This picture here is kind of interesting.

That's a little, you know, diagram of these Lagrange points. The James Webb is gonna be orbiting around this L2 point on the right side of the little diagram there. Let's go on to slide 32. There was a news release about this yesterday, so you might have seen it about the business partner agreement that we entered into with ArianeGroup in France. We've purchased our C2B type product from this company for a long time. I've actually personally visited them in Bordeaux, I think around 2005. We've been working with them a long time. Love this company, great company, very special company. They asked us if we could be their exclusive distributor for this product.

We'll keep buying it for our own account, but they asked us if we could be their exclusive distributor for it in the U.S., and we're really honoured to say yes, of course. That's a really big deal. We're very happy about that. Let's go on to slide 33, I guess it is. Another what's new at Park. A major potential project initiative is a new plant. Yeah, sorry, we can't give you much more detail about it. We're just not in a position to do that now, but these are big things we're working on, so at least we want you to be aware of them. Somebody asked, what the heck.

Somebody who visited our plant, "What the heck are you doing with that huge new plant?" It was an interesting question posed by an observant and smart person because this person saw the huge plant and some of it, you know, as we've spoken before. We have our new lines, new tape line, new film line. We have freezer space. We have slitting. We have a warehouse. There's still a lot of space in there. There's also a space, remember we talked about this before, for another hot melt tape line or solution line. That would be to add to our current capacity. But that's for something we're currently doing. Some other line, you know, a hot melt line or solution line, that would be another line that would be added to our equipment inventory to increase our capacity.

That would be something we're already doing. We talked about that before. That's not what this page is about. There's additional space in our new plant which is set aside for new project initiatives, including two potential project initiatives we're currently working actively on. Both these projects involve the purchase and installation of major new equipment lines, which would bring new capabilities and market offerings to Park. One relates to a joint development project with an important customer. Another project, something we would do on our own. We're currently reviewing both projects with equipment suppliers. Just for perspective, if we went forward with these projects, it's probably about $69 million of purchase of equipment and installation costs. Let's go on to the next slide. That's slide 34, I believe. Continuing on the same topic.

There's no hard deadlines for final decision-making on these projects, but they're both front-burner projects, and we'll keep you posted. Although these projects relate to the manufacturing composite structures, so it's not a big departure into something totally different, they both would bring new capabilities and market offerings for Park. These are things we currently do not do. Let's go on to slide 35. Still on the what's new at Park topic. The formal partnership with an established aerospace manufacturing company. Partnership in quotes because it's not a formal partnership. It's not a formal agreement. It's a collaboration kind of arrangement. Again, sorry, we can't say much about this one either. We can't give you details, but it's a little preliminary. We wanna tell you about some important things we're working on, so we're gonna tell you about this.

Park believes this established aerospace manufacturing company has important capabilities which are complementary to Park. They do things that we don't do, we do things they don't do. That often could be the formula for a great quote unquote "partnership or collaboration" anyway. Park and this informal partner have been collaborating on certain defense programs. This is about defense. This collaboration has already led to an important new defense program award for our partner and us, and our partner and we are currently collaborating on an RFP for another significant defense program. Hope we'll get it. We'll see. We'll keep you posted. We believe this informal partnership has the potential to open up significant new opportunities for Park and our informal partner.

Let's go on to slide 36. These are the kind of last slides, so sorry we're taking so long, and as you can tell I'm rushing and probably stumbling over some of it by rushing, by going too fast. Let's just start with the top here. Some say the economy's doing great, and that all is well with the world. You know, we hear this a lot, I read about a lot, you know, in the press, the financial press, and all we can say is that's not our world. You know, maybe somebody else's world. Maybe it's the world of Wall Street investors, but not the world for us, you know, the Main Street world. That's not the world we live in. Park's world is full of challenges. Gonna review some of the challenges just for perspective here.

Nevertheless, major supply chain and transport challenges. Some say these are improving. We don't see it, not yet anyway. Daily battle and abrupt adjustments to production planning and scheduling. Very difficult to hire the people we need. Still living with COVID and its many challenges. Vaccine mandates, we talked about that. Bringing new plant online, new equipment trials, major effort. Our people are facing these challenges shorthanded. We can't hire people. Let's go on to the next slide, which is 37. Here's the key thing, even in the face of these many challenges which our people confront and deal with every day, our people continue to press forward with major initiatives. That's the key point here. We got a lot going on, a lot of challenges, a lot of difficulty. Just how it is. We're not complaining about it.

It's just our world. We want you to know about it. That doesn't mean go into a bunker and hide until things get better. We keep pressing forward, pressing forward. That's what we do. That's what our people do. Our new business partner agreement, these are some examples we just spoke about with ArianeGroup. The two major initiatives and development projects, we're pursuing a new plant. Major new opportunities we're pursuing through collaborations with our informal aerospace manufacturing company, quote-unquote, partners, numerous other initiatives. The point here is all these new things take a lot of effort, a lot of dedication, a lot of time. We could say, yeah, we're really tied up with all these difficulties and all the challenges we're facing. We'll do this some other time. We don't believe in that. That's not who we are.

To us, the other time never comes. We do it now. We press forward. We keep developing opportunities. That's what we do in the face of challenges and difficulties. Other mates may seek shelter in a bunker and wait for things to get better. At Park, we do not do bunkers. We do not wait. For us, the bunker is where you go to die. I guess the last slide, it's 38. At Park, even in a world full of challenges, we press forward, we attack, we don't stop. This is all we know. This is what we do. At Park, we're swinging for the fences. We're not like the others. At Park, we play for keeps. Now, at the end of every presentation, we show you a little picture of one of our departments or groups or teams. This is a little unusual.

This is a bunch of different departments. These are people taking responsibility for equipment trials and bringing new plant online. This is a major effort. These people are from R&D, engineering, facilities, production. There's about four others that didn't make the photo op. They were in the wrong shift or something like that. I'm gonna read the names to you. The back row, Christian, Dexter, David. Front row, Philip. There's Devakar, Kelly, Dave. There's Dave, Wade, Mo, Martine, Leo. Like I said, several people didn't make the photo. What's going on here? These are not new people. These people all worked for us a long time. Four months ago, there was no new plant to bring online. There were no trials. These people didn't have a lot of free time than I can remember.

These people are the people that are doing this major project of the trials and bringing our new plant online, even though they have a day job. It's not one department. It's not like, okay, we tried to hire people. We couldn't hire people. Our existing people are dealing with it and dealing with it very effectively, very aggressively. Doing the trial. As I said, the film line trials are complete. We're in the tape line trials now, the qualification. A lot of other aspects of bringing a new plant online. That's just kind of an example we're talking about. All right. That concludes our presentations. Again, I apologize. It took a whole hour. Operator, if anybody has any questions, Matt and I'd be happy to answer them at this time.

Operator

Our first question comes from Brad Hathaway with Far View. Your line is open.

Brad Hathaway
Managing Partner, Far View Capital Management

Hey, Brian. Thank you for the detailed presentation. Especially appreciated the commentary on what the MRAS programs would look like with the A320 in 2025. That was really incremental and helpful, so thank you for that. One quick question for you and then one longer one. The quick one is, can you give us any kind of thought on the materiality of the Ariane space sales relationship that was announced yesterday?

Brian Shore
Chairman and CEO, PARK AEROSPACE CORP.

We can't quantify it. I guess we'll answer this way. First of all, we already buy a lot of this product. From my perspective, it's a big deal already. In terms of being a distributor and selling this product to others, we're just really getting started. We'll have to see. It's hard to predict.

These are the very critical component, this fabric, the C2 fabric that's used in a lot of missile programs. If other companies wanna get involved with these missile programs, they're gonna need this material. They'd have to get it through us, sole source in North America. I can't really quantify it. I mean, yesterday I think the news release, I think we signed this agreement with them just about a month ago. Maybe not even a month ago, sometime mid-December. I'll have to get back on that. We'll have to update you as we go. I wouldn't expect, though, because the way the nature of how aerospace works, and particularly defense, that next quarter we're gonna tell you we've got $5 million of sales of this product.

I think it's kind of more of a long-term effort to develop this business.

Brad Hathaway
Managing Partner, Far View Capital Management

Got it. Understand. Well, any future detail you can give on the materiality over the long term would be greatly appreciated. All right, so the second question is on capital, and we've discussed it many times, but you know, in this presentation, you talked about, I guess, you know, a project that could use $6 million-$9 million of capital. But you still have, you know, even with the conservative calculation, you have basically close to $100 million of capital on the balance sheet. You know, how do you think about, I guess, your alternatives to use that capital going forward? What are you seeing in terms of things you're excited about or things you're less excited about compared to where we were, you know, six months ago?

Brian Shore
Chairman and CEO, PARK AEROSPACE CORP.

We certainly don't need that kind of amount of money to run our business on a day-to-day basis. I mean, normally we generate cash. We like to be conservative, so, you know, we wanna have some working capital available. That's our opportunity money, really, and I know $6 million-$9 million, I mean, for some companies, that would be a lot. For us, it's probably not that much. I mean, it's important money because we had to earn that money. You know, nobody gave it to us. That's kind of our mindset in our money, you know, that we don't spend it casually. To your point, it doesn't make a huge dent in the cash position now.

You know, this is probably a little bit of a maybe frustrating discussion for you and some other shareholders because all we can do is say we're working on things, a number of things, but we really can't identify or quantify what those things are, including acquisitions. I know we've been talking about that for a long time, so I wouldn't blame some, you know, shareholders being a little skeptical of that. I wouldn't blame them at all. You know, our standard's a little different. We're not looking to just, you know, buy something to buy something. We covered that, you know, probably a dozen times. You know, let me just go back to what I said. To us, this is our opportunity money for the future.

You know, whether we do something other, you know, we've done a lot of dividends in the past. We continue to pay a regular dividend. That's something that, obviously, we always consider. My hope would be that we still are able to use a good portion of cash to develop opportunities for Park for the future.

Brad Hathaway
Managing Partner, Far View Capital Management

No, to be clear, my preference is always that if you can find a high return use of that capital, whether it's an acquisition or whether it's a joint venture or whether it's an investment in another factory because the returns of that new factory looks like they're gonna be incredible, that would be my preference. Just to push a little bit more, you know, you've got. As you say, the aerospace industry was dead, you know, a year ago and is now recovering. I guess if you couldn't find a deal that worked for Park in the last, you know, 18 months, you know, at what point do you say, "You know what?

It's gonna be actually even harder to find something that fits your valuation criteria going forward," and say that, you know, you're not gonna be able to put the cash to work?

Brian Shore
Chairman and CEO, PARK AEROSPACE CORP.

Good question. You're right. We thought that when the, you know, the market collapsed, that there would be a lot of great opportunities, maybe companies that were good solid companies, but had, you know, too much debt or that kind of thing, and the valuation would be really good. That didn't happen. I'm not, you know, the expert in that topic, Brad, but I understand that there's just so much free money, so much Fed money around that people were able to hang on, rather than selling at these kind of distressed levels, bargain basement levels, hang on, and get through the difficult times, which is I think what a lot of people did.

You're quite correct that the valuation never went down to as much as we would have liked, but they certainly are very high right now. Everything's high, any asset. The cars, houses, boats, planes, and businesses. And that's obviously not our friend. That's not good for us. You know, maybe with interest rates going up, then maybe I know nobody wants interest rates to go up except us because we're the ones who have the cash. Maybe that'll help us a little bit. You know, it seems like the 10-year is up a little bit again, so that might actually be good news for us. But the more direct answer is that we have to keep adjusting our focus and looking other ways and other things, which is what we've done, what we're doing.

Because, you know, you're right. I mean, what did Einstein say? Keep doing the same thing, expect different result. That's the definition of being insane. Just to keep at it and saying, "Oh, we're still doing the same thing," there's not very much logic to it when your point is correct. I mean, we have not had that success. What we do is we keep adjusting our focus and refocusing, retuning, looking, you know, from other perspectives. We're pretty actively doing that actually right now. You know, the frustration with M&A stuff is obviously, there's only so much I can say. We can't really give any specifics. I'm sure you understand that. That's not something that's possible.

I don't know what to say except, you know, I'm hoping that, you know, you'll see some interesting things in the future on the M&A side. We're continuing to work at it. You know, very good point, not just continuing to beat our head against the wall doing the same thing, adjusting our focus as we go so that we have a better chance of being successful.

Brad Hathaway
Managing Partner, Far View Capital Management

Great. Excellent. Thank you very much for your efforts and for the efforts of all the Park team.

Brian Shore
Chairman and CEO, PARK AEROSPACE CORP.

Happy New Year, Greg.

Operator

Again, to ask a question, please press star then one. I'm not showing any additional questions. I'd like to turn the call back over to Brian Shore for any closing remarks.

Brian Shore
Chairman and CEO, PARK AEROSPACE CORP.

This is Brian again, of course. Happy New Year to all. Thank you very much for listening to our very long presentation. Every time I wanna make it shorter, it gets longer. Matt and I wish you a happy New Year and all the best. Feel free to call us if you have any follow-up questions. Always happy to talk to you. Thanks, and goodbye.

Operator

This concludes the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.

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