BLOOMFIELD, Conn. (AP) — Kaman Corp. on Wednesday reported first-quarter earnings of $14.1 million.
The Bloomfield, Connecticut-based company said it had profit of 50 cents per share. Earnings, adjusted for non-recurring costs, were 57 cents per share.
The results beat Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of three analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of 37 cents per share.
The industrial distribution aircraft components company posted revenue of $457.4 million in the period.
Kaman shares have climbed 11% since the beginning of the year. The stock has climbed 3% in the last 12 months.
Neal J. Keating, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, commented, “We were pleased to start 2019 with very strong first quarter results. Diluted earnings per share for the quarter of $0.50, or $0.57 adjusted, resulted from sales and operating profit growth at Distribution and improved profitability at Aerospace.
“At Distribution, sales increased 2.5%, or 4.1% on a sales-per-sales day basis to $4.6 million, our 6th consecutive quarter of sales-per-sales day growth and our highest first quarter daily sales rate since 2015. Higher sales growth increased our ability to leverage our fixed cost base and contributed to operating margin of 4.4%, an increase of 20 bps over the first quarter of 2018 and 30 bps over the fourth quarter of 2018. Highlighting Distribution performance was top line growth across all three product platforms and year-over-year growth in a number of our end markets, including paper manufacturing, merchant wholesalers durable goods, primary metal manufacturing, and food processing. In addition, during the quarter we increased our backlog 5%. Overall this is a strong start to the year and provides us confidence in our 2019 outlook.”
Chief Financial Officer, Robert D. Starr, commented, “We generated operating cash flows of $22.6 million, and Free Cash Flows of $15.2 million during the first quarter, further reducing our debt levels while ending the quarter with a debt to capitalization ratio of 30.7%, a 100 bps reduction from the fourth quarter of 2018 and leverage at approximately 1.9x. We are well positioned to meet our full year cash flow forecast and our strong balance sheet allows us to continue to make investments in key projects that support the long term growth of the business while seeking strategic acquisition targets that continue to broaden our engineered product offerings.
“Our outlook for 2019 has improved. For Distribution, we are maintaining our prior outlook as the strong start to the year provides us confidence in achieving our full year expectations. At Aerospace, performance for the year is ahead of our prior expectations and, based on the progress we have made to date, we are increasing our outlook for sales and operating profit for the remainder of the year. We now expect sales in the range of $730.0 million to $760.0 million and operating margin in the range of 16.7% to 17.2%, a 20 basis point increase over our prior expectations.
“Additionally, we are lowering the full year expectation for net periodic pension benefit from $1.5 million to $0.4 million to reflect the finalization of our pension assumptions for 2019.
“Finally, our first quarter earnings were ahead of expectations and we note that approximately 50% of this was due to a shift in earnings previously expected in the second quarter, with the remainder representing incremental earnings for the year. We continue to expect nearly 40% of our full year earnings in the fourth quarter. As previously discussed, the back half weighting of our earnings is largely dependent on the timing of sales and profit for our specialty bearings products and JPF DCS units.”
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