Ducommun Inc (DCO) 2013 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the first-quarter 2013 Ducommun earnings conference call. My name is Regina, and I will be your conference operator for today. (Operator Instructions). As a reminder, today's event is being recorded for replay purposes.

I will now turn the conference over to your host for today, Mr. Chris Witty with Ducommun's Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Chris.

Thank you and welcome to Ducommun's first-quarter conference call. With me today is Tony Reardon, Chairman, President, and CEO, and Joe Bellino, Vice President and CFO.

I would now like to provide a brief Safe Harbor statement. This conference call may include forward-looking statements that represent the Company's expectations and beliefs concerning future events that involve risks and uncertainties and may cause the Company's actual performance to be materially different from the performance indicated or implied by such statements. All statements other than statements of historical facts included in this conference call are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurances that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations are disclosed in this conference call and in the Company's annual report and Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2012. All subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements attributable to the Company or persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements. Unless otherwise required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise after the date of this conference call.

I'd like to turn it over now to Tony Reardon for a review of the operating results. Tony?

Thank you, Chris, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I will begin by providing a brief overview of the quarter, including some market color, after which I'll turn the call over to Joe Bellino to go through our financial results in detail.

When we last spoke two months ago, I reviewed many accomplishments we achieved in 2012 and laid out our path we would take going forward. The first quarter played out with strong shipments in our core aerospace and defense business, offset by weaker sales within our non-A&D markets, in particular, the industrial and natural resources segments. These are areas where we have put a great deal of effort aligning our total capabilities with the needs of our customers and are working hard to change some of the market dynamics in our favor as I will review further in a moment.

I'm pleased that our overall backlog remains solid and that our aerospace and defense sales increased 4% year over year and our segment EBITDA margins also rose.

In addition, as Joe will go over in detail, we took further steps to bolster our balance sheet this quarter, repricing our credit agreements to reduce interest expense and paying down another $7.5 million of outstanding debt. Deleveraging the Company remains a core objective for the quarters to come.

Now let me provide some more in-depth color on our markets, platforms, and programs.

Starting with our non-A&D business, sales fell 32% year over year due to weakness in our industrial and natural resources segments. As we've mentioned in the past, the trend of soft orders from key customers continued and unfortunately anticipate this case to be going forward for another quarter or two.

Our book backlog in the business here also fell slightly from the year-end 2012. That said, quarterly revenue in our non-A&D segments has likely bottomed out, so we expect some stability going forward.

We have several initiatives to identify and pursue new business opportunities across a number of industrial and energy markets. We are working with our customers to identify a number of product upgrades, utilizing our in-house engineering capabilities in support of our customers' design teams. So we're not only looking for additional follow-on and new business opportunities, but we are supporting the customer and aftermarket services, as well.

While we have many satisfied long-term clients, we are looking to further develop these relationships and substantially expand our customer base. We expect the economy will continue to improve in the months to come, and we are targeting specific submarkets for increased customer penetration. With our broad capabilities and technological expertise, we are confident in our ability to win new energy and industrial customers alike, particularly given the health of some portions of these sectors today.

We will continue to update you on the progress in addressing these markets and obtaining new business.

Moving to our military and space programs, we again saw strong revenue this quarter. Despite lower military helicopter sales reflecting some schedule slides, we saw increased underlying demand and customer acceptance of our defense electronic products, including higher shipments of radar racks, both domestically and abroad.

In Washington, the situation remains fluid. While we are certainly disappointed that sequestration has come into effect, we have not really seen any negative impact on our programs thus far. The Defense Department has given some flexibility to manage near-term priorities, which has mitigated the extent to which sequestration has affected key suppliers such as Ducommun, and we've said in the past we expect 2013 revenues across our defense programs to be flat to up slightly due to our strong strong product mix and diversity of programs.

Our total defense backlog is actually higher now than it was this time a year ago, but our visibility is still hindered by the lack of clarity in terms of federal budget. Although we suspect a deal will be reached before the end of the government fiscal year, no matter what happens, Ducommun's components and systems remain crucial to the ongoing needs for upgrades in advanced electronics content. We play a vital role in some top military aircraft, missile systems, and radar programs in operation today. We will be vigilant in managing costs and working capital no matter what actions are taken in Washington.

In our commercial aerospace business, our large aircraft sales rose on the strength of higher shipments for the 777 and 787 programs and continued robust run rates for the 737 program. As you may have seen recently, Ducommun announced it was again selected to provide spoilers for the Boeing's next-generation 737 program through 2018. We have produced spoilers for this family of jets for nearly 50 years, and the 737 is actually our second-biggest program in terms of overall revenue after only the Black Hawk.

Regarding the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the aircraft is back in service, and we expect build rates to increase later this year as deliveries commence again, which should bolster our backlog.

Our sales within the regional and business aircraft markets were nearly flat in the last year when we saw a decline in commercial helicopter sales, primarily due to timing of our orders. Overall, the commercial aerospace market is one that continues to provide growth opportunities for Ducommun, and our backlog remains near record levels. We see no reason to believe that build rates will slow any time soon and are meeting the demands of our customers while managing working capital effectively.

We're also seeing activity -- active bidding on new applications for both Boeing and Airbus across a number of different platforms and are targeting other programs and OEMs for increased content, as well. In that vein, we started to see greater opportunities within the general aviation market as a result of our capabilities to deliver a more diverse product offering.

Overall, we believe Ducommun will see improvements in our operating results as we move through the year, much as we did in 2012.

With that said, I'd now like to have Joe go through the financials in detail. Joe?

Thanks, Tony, and good day, everyone. After the market closed today, we've reported results for the first quarter of 2013. Overall sales of nearly $176 million were down approximately 5% compared to the sales of the $184 million in last year's first quarter. We traditionally see a softer first quarter compared to the rest of the year, and 2013 was no exception. Even with favorable sales trends in the large commercial aerospace market and solid demand for our defense technologies, we could not offset these positives given the softer revenues in our non-aerospace and defense or non-A&D end use market segments.

Net income grew to $3.7 million or $0.35 per diluted share compared with $2.4 million or $0.23 per diluted share last year. First-quarter 2013 results were aided by a $0.19 per share federal R&D tax benefit that we reported and discussed in our March 4 quarter and year-end results. This income tax benefit was recorded retroactive for 2012.

Importantly, the federal R&D tax credits have been extended through 2013, and we will record these benefits on a quarterly basis throughout the year.

Ducommun's lower sales this quarter impacted our Company-wide operating income in terms of both dollars and as a percentage of revenue. Operating income for the quarter was $10.3 million or 5.9% of revenues compared with $12 million or 6.4% of revenues in the comparable quarter last year. However, we were pleased to see operating segment margins improved 20 basis points year over year at both Ducommun AeroStructures, DAS, and Ducommun LaBarge Technologies, DLT.

Higher corporate SG&A expenses, primarily debt repricing transaction costs, benefit costs, and nonrecurring professional fees offset these gains.

In the first quarter, we generated $17.3 million in adjusted EBITDA or 9.9% of revenues compared to $19 million in adjusted EBITDA or 10.3% of revenues in the first quarter of 2012. Our backlog remains solid at $638 million, and we expect this to grow during the balance of the year. It appears our non-A&D markets have stabilized, and we also have a variety of opportunities in the works with our commercial aircraft and defense technologies businesses, as you heard from Tony.

Results by business segment, DAS or Ducommun AeroStructures sales for the first quarter were slightly less than $73 million, down about 2% year over year, primarily due to slower shipments of military and commercial helicopter products. But this was partially offset by higher sales of large commercial aircraft products, underscoring the continued strength in build rates in the commercial sector.

DAS's EBITDA for the first quarter of 2013 was $9 million, slightly higher than last year. And the EBITDA margin expanded 70 basis points to 12.3%, reflecting continued reductions in development costs for new programs versus a year ago. We now have more normalized cost levels for new programs, and it reflects actions we have taken in recent quarters to drive our productivity in this area.

Ducommun LaBarge Technologies, DLT, posted sales for the quarter of $103 million. It was down 6% year over year. The non-A&D revenues fell 32%, and it overshadowed the 15% increase in military electronics, which includes strong shipments of airborne radar systems and other military defense system products. For the quarter, DLT EBITDA was $12.6 million, slightly below the $13 million from a year ago. However, we expanded our margins year over year by 40 basis points to 12.2% as we continue to benefit from cost savings associated with our integration efforts.

Corporate, general, and administrative expenses that are non-identifiable to the two business segments where 2.4% of revenue for the first quarter compared to 1.6% a year ago. They reflected about $0.8 million in expenses, in non-recurring expenses which included $0.5 million for the recent debt repricing transaction and $0.3 million in nonrecurring professional fees. We remain vigilant on our cost reduction efforts.

In terms of liquidity and capital resources, as Tony mentioned earlier, during the quarter, we continued to delever our balance sheet, and in addition, we were proactive in reducing our bank interest expenses. We pre-paid $7.5 million of our debt, reducing it to $358 million and our net debt to $328 million. Given our trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA of $85 million, this equates to 3.85 times funded debt to equity. And we discussed in prior calls in 2013, we expect to pay down a total of $25 million to $30 million of debt this year with the goal of deleveraging our balance sheet to the 2.75 to 3.00 times range by the end of 2015.

We were also successful in reducing the interest expenses on our credit facilities by 75 basis points through a repricing transaction. The accommodative monetary policy by the Fed presented us with an opportunity to reduce the interest on our term and revolving credit lines by 50 basis points, and we were also able to lower our interest rate floor by 25 basis points.

As a result, going forward here in the second quarter, our pricing on these debt instruments will be LIBOR plus 375 basis points with a 1% floor.

In the year's first quarter, we used $6 million in cash from operations compared to approximately $5 million a year ago, a little bit more in investments and tooling as we support new program growth and some timing differences. We continue to focus our efforts on effective working capital management through higher inventory turns and better receivables management. We expect our $60 million revolving credit line to remain unused for the foreseeable future.

We anticipate capital expenditures for fiscal 2013 to be approximately $15 million, about the same level as we did last year. Our capital plans will support the expansion of our manufacturing capabilities and new contract awards.

So in closing, while we were challenged with softer revenues in our non-A&D end use markets again this quarter, we offset a large portion of this with solid gains of shipments in commercial aircraft products and defense technology applications.

In addition, operating and EBITDA margin levels expanded at the segment level as a result of manufacturing cost efficiencies, including better performance on our new program costs and benefits realized through our integration efforts.

I now would like to turn the program back over to Tony for his closing remarks. Tony?

Thank you, Joe. Before opening the call to questions, let me emphasize our major accomplishments this quarter.

We booked some great business across our end markets and kept our backlog solid at $638 million. We are seeing a number of new business opportunities in the commercial aerospace arena and are utilizing our broad product offerings to cross-sell into many of our major customers on new platforms. We continue to be optimistic about this area due to higher build rates, the potential for increased work content and expanded aftermarket opportunities. And across our military platforms, we have a solid diverse business, and we believe we still have room to grow.

As I mentioned earlier, we're focusing resources and efforts on new business development across our non-A&D segments.

We've made a conscious effort to continue cross-selling into these markets and are seeing positive reaction to the our engineering talent, expanded product offering and aftermarket sales efforts. While we clearly have more work to do in this area, we are comfortable that we have a solid strategy in place.

Lastly, we took steps to improve our balance sheet this quarter, as Joe mentioned, and we will continue to pay down debt to reduce interest expense going forward. We will remain committed to deleveraging the Company and providing enhanced financial flexibility, as well as increased earnings power.

With that, Regina, I would now like to open the call up for questions.

(Operator Instructions). Mark Jordan, Noble Financial.

I'd like to talk a little bit about the industrial and natural resource segments. Sequentially pretty significant declines there. I guess I have -- could you talk about the visibility you saw coming into the quarter for the level of business that you ended up having, and what visibility do you have in terms of seeing that stabilize or the recovery you allude to as the year evolves?

Well, I think, Mark -- this is Tony -- I think, Mark, that when we talked in the fourth quarter and again in the fourth-quarter results and previous to that, the third-quarter results, we saw a softening in the bookings coming into the year, and actually we started talking about that as late as last year, and we saw sequential declines during the year on the non-A&D side. So we took some steps to shore up some things.

Now, we talked about the destocking of both -- a couple of our major customers there, and that may continue. Today we did see some pickup in the last month or so of the quarter in terms of bookings. So I think that the marketplace has certainly stabilized for us, and really I think we've made some nice opportunities to grow that business as we work down some development programs with both our major customers in those marketplaces.

So we did see a softening, and I think we tried to forecast that. And it was unfortunate we couldn't offset it with some of our military and commercial sales that we anticipated in the helicopter market, but I think that we have a handle on where the market is. I think we are tied in with the key customers, and we've got an expanded opportunity to build a broader base in that marketplace as well.

Okay. A top overall question -- obviously you started the year with a softer first quarter, which is -- you had similar trends in the last year. Do you think just broadly that you have the opportunity to show an overall growth in revenue in 2013 versus 2012? Could you give us just a sense of where you see the order of magnitudes of -- marginally down, flat, marginally up, up? Is there any way that you feel comfortable in quantifying the general direction?

Well, it's difficult for me to -- without giving you a forecast going forward, but we do see the trend to improve, in particular on the natural resources and industrial markets. We do believe that we will see a pickup there.

We think that we are very solid on the A&D side of the business, and there's a potential for some pickup on some of the commercial business as we see it. So we believe that we will come out with higher revenue with the opportunity to have higher revenue across the year, and we believe it will look a lot like we did last year in terms of pickups and opportunities.

Just to add to what Tony said, Mark, you might recall when looking at the data last year, the first three quarters we were hanging around $184 million of sales each quarter, and then we wound up with $193 million or $194 million in the fourth quarter. And there was a lot of uncertainty in the December period as the budgets were going through all the things that eventuated. And as a result, we just started off the first part of the year slowly.

But traditionally, the second and third quarters, we get a lot of momentum. And it usually culminates with even a stronger quarter directionally in the fourth quarter. So our underlying business is strong commercial business, defense technologies, strong customer acceptance, increased shipments of the radar rack products and other missile defense systems is certainly very positive. And we really do believe that although our -- we do believe with our backlogs in the non-A&D sector about the same at the end of the first quarter than they were in December, we believe they bottomed, and we are starting to expect an uptick in those backlogs as we report subsequent quarters.

All right. Final question for me. Any change in terms of you feeling what your normalized tax rate will be in the second through fourth quarters?

Well, one of the facets about it that I commented upon is that we took the $2 million for full-year 2012 in the first quarter. But, in addition, whatever the normal tax rate we have of about 31%, it will also additionally benefit from about $0.5 million a quarter of additional federal tax credits here in Q2, Q3 and Q4, whereas last year we weren't able to record that until the end of the year. So we expect a favorable tax rate based on the work that we've done.

So you were implying that we would need to look at a 31% rate and then subtract $500,000 or --?

Yes.

Some of the additional $500,000 benefits?

Yes, correct.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, Mark.

Ken Herbert, Imperial Capital.

Just real quick, one more question on the industrial and natural resources commentary. Do you see with an expected rebound later this year, do you see those getting back to levels we saw maybe first, second quarter of 2012 by the end of the year, or are we still a ways off the peak when you look at those businesses?

Ken, we studied these non-A&D markets over the last six years in quarters, and they have an ability to expand over a period of time by 25% and then shrink by 18% to 20%. This quarter was a little bit unusual.

But the reason I say that is a lot of them can be tied to particular sector factors, like in the energy markets what those things are doing, and also the industrial markets which is related to capital goods formation. And those are components of G&P.

So we have to study where those macros are going. I mean I think it was somewhat positive that with the 2.5% G&P growth that was below expectations that the forecasts going forward were for a little bit more attractive. So when we correlate those with the macros, we think certainly there is a higher probability they will expand.

Let me just follow on a little bit, Ken. We do have a couple of opportunities in there that we think that we can -- that we are working with the customer on. It's really about timing in terms of implementation of the things that we have in place with them.

So we do think it's going to start to pick up, but there is some timing that is associated with that and clearing some of the engineering issues.

Okay. And it sounded like from your comments, Tony, that maybe this business or these businesses sequentially are flat into the second quarter before you start to see pickup into the second half of the year. Is that a fair statement?

Yes, absolutely. Yes.

And then if I could, just one final question. Last year's second quarter was a great quarter where you saw, especially in the AeroStructures segment, really a nice stepup in margins sequentially and then sort of level and drop down in the fourth quarter.

But Joe, when you look at margins within AeroStructures, do you see a similar pattern this year with maybe a nice stepup in the second quarter, or are we seeing maybe a little more opportunity to maintain higher margins as the impact of the new programs continues to roll off?

Certainly we expect higher margins in general in the second and third quarter in the AeroStructures business. But then in the fourth quarter because of less operating days in our manufacturing cost structure, which includes some fixed manufacturing costs, we see a compression sequentially in those, and we think directionally that is what we will see again.

Okay. So a similar pattern?

Yes.

And then just finally within the AeroStructures side, I know you've been talking about a lot of opportunities in terms of new business and potential capture. Can you provide any more details maybe on wins you have seen in the quarter or how that pipeline looks over the next couple of quarters?

Yes, the pipeline looks pretty strong, Ken. Actually I think that we are working on closing out a couple of programs right now that have some nice legs to them, if you will. But I think that -- and on pretty good commercial build rate programs.

So we've got some opportunities. We will see some capacity issues in some other areas, not ours, but our customers and the OEMs, and we see that we have an opportunity to pick things up.

So we have been pretty active on a couple of major programs that looked like we will be able to pick those up this year and potentially will have an impact on this year's revenue.

Okay. Great. Thank you very much.

Mike Crawford, B. Riley & Co.

I'd like to ask about the contract extension with Boeing on the 737 spoilers. So that is a five-year extension, or does that include annual option years that need to be exercised? How does that work?

It is a five-year contract with options beyond that.

Okay. And do you have any other important -- I guess you could classify this as a recompete? Is that --?

Well, it is a follow-on order, but Boeing's pricing requirements are such that they get some bids on the outside. So yes, you could say it is a recompete. It's ours to lose is the way I look at it, right? So we had to bid on it aggressively.

Sure.

And we have other --

Do you expect to have similar margins on that work going forward?

Yes, sir. That is the goal.

Okay. And then are there any other important programs with some follow-on orders and/or recompetes, whatever you want to call them coming up for the remainder of 2013?

Let's see, well, on some of the programs, we are already under long-term agreements. So I'm trying to think -- on the commercial side, I don't see any that would be in that category, possibly into the end of the year, maybe in 2014, but we have a couple of programs that we are working on that we will see I would expect we will be working on and close out this year and probably wouldn't announce in the first quarter next year based on when the contract ends.

Okay. Thanks.

Mike, that said, we are going through multi-year contracts on the Black Hawk, which is our largest program, about $75 million, and we have that set for several years. And we also with the airborne radar systems, the radar racks, we have that work through -- on the most recent orders that we received in the middle of 2012, we have that through 2014. And we are working on future orders for that here during 2013.

So sometimes the work that we do, the results don't show up until later by the time the procurement releases those. But those kind of legs on large programs are very significant in our portfolio.

Okay. Thanks, Joe.

Since you mentioned the Black Hawk, so it looks like the President's request is for 65 Black Hawk Ms in fiscal 2014. That would be up a bit, I think, from the last request. Is that something -- how closely would that affect your outlook?

I think it would be probably about the same, Mike. Because once they get through, once the House Armed Services and the Senate Armed Services get through negotiating the package with the President's requirement, you will see steady state -- the Black Hawk does have slated to come down about 14 aircraft in the last quarter this year, as I think we've said in the last call, and we expect that to be picked up by foreign military sales.

So I think that this would be a slight pickup if they were to get it, but I think it would level out in terms of production rate. So I think that we will see pretty steady rate coming out of the Black Hawk program for at least a couple of years.

Okay. Thanks. And then the final question relates to the commercial aerospace. So you thought there's a chance you could see an uptick in 787 production and revenue for you in the second half of this year. Are there other programs where you're looking for potential new work or other increases in content per platform?

Well, we are looking at -- again, we have a couple of applications that we are looking at on Airbus, which one of them -- I guess two of them are on some pretty high volume programs. So that is something that we are working on. And then we do have a couple of programs on Boeing that we are working on right now. So that would be a new business. And it depends on timing on the order release whether or not we would be able to impact this year.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Great.

J.B. Groh, D.A. Davidson.

I had a question on the strengthened military, and forgive me if you've addressed this already, but was that driven by aftermarket, or what was the big driver there, and was that in DLT or more DAS?

It was a little bit of both, but it was primarily in DLT. And most of the pickup, J.B., not most of it, but some of the pickup was on the radar systems. It was offset slightly by the downtick on the helicopter, military helicopter market. So we did have pretty strong performance on the DLT side. On the electronics, that was up, and the radar racks drove that. And that was a split between domestic and foreign military sales.

But is it OE, or is it retrofit?

It is both.

Both, okay. So one was -- (multiple speakers? Go ahead.

J.B., we had quite strong amount of shipments year over year in our defense technologies for the items, the products that Tony mentioned. But we went from slightly less than $55 million in last year's first quarter to $63 million. That's a big number.

That is DLT, right? Okay.

Yes, so that is on the defense technologies. And then I commented earlier about on the AeroStructures side, we shipped less military helicopters, but it was only about $1.5 million less. So we had really, really strong business. That is a $94 million business per quarter compared to about $80 million, $85 million a year ago. So we are really pleased with directionally where that's going and our capabilities.

And then you mentioned briefly on backlog, you expect the book-to-bill to get above 1.0 for the balance of the year and that backlog to snap back a little bit?

Yes, well, a lot of it that is the non-A&D. One was the study -- what we're doing with our core businesses of our commercial aerospace and our defense, both technologies and defense structures business, we usually have significant bookings in the fourth quarter. And always sequentially in the first quarters, we are shipping from some of that backlog, they go down. They went from, for example, $656 million to $638 million. But as we go through the year, we end up picking up more purchase orders during the course of the year. So we expect those to be quite strong.

Yes. I think that on the structure side, it is more lumpy. So you will get a large order and then ship out of it and then pick up large orders. And as Joe said, usually we see that in the last two quarters where we start seeing some higher orders to fill the requirements for moving forward in the next year.

Good. But the decline is mostly natural resources and industrial within DLT, correct?

Well, and some on the military side in terms of shipments out the door. So it's a natural ebb in terms of orders received in the last two quarters and then ship out of backlog, and then you will fill those as you come through the year.

Got you. Okay. Thank you for your help.

Okay.

Bhakti Pavani, C.K. Cooper & Co.

My question was, what percentage of the backlog, of the bookings came from the cross-selling opportunities? If you could shed some light on?

Well, that's a tough one to call for you. We don't categorize it that way, Bhakti, so it would be awful difficult. But I can tell you that there are some orders in there -- there are some shipments in there that came differently from cross-selling where we were able to pick up customer requirements. It would be very difficult for me to sit here because we don't actually categorize it that way.

But we do believe in general, Bhakti, that this in the first part of this year, we announced the AgustaWestland business. We had a strong relationship with them on the structure side, and we picked up some business for the electronic content. And I think that strong franchise we have had in Ducommun AeroStructures, we are able to leverage that with our strategic customers and able to supply defense technologies, subsystems, and that's what we are really working for. Those take a little while, and we will probably start seeing really the larger benefits of that perhaps in early 2014 because of the development cycle. But we are very, very favorably disposed on those opportunities.

And just a quick -- I can't give you the specifics on it because we haven't released any of it, but we were able to pick up from one of our business units that traditionally has a number of military programs. We were able to pick up some commercial work and a pretty significant development program for Airbus in another division that manages the commercial for us.

So we are able to go in and sell on both sides of the fence, if you will. So there are programs that are running right now that are active that have been picked up as a result of the ability to cross-sell into the customer.

All right. My next question was about the non-A&D market. I know you guys you already have a good relationship with the existing customers and you are working with your key customers, but what kind of initiatives are you taking for acquiring the new customers? I mean what is your strategy there?

Okay. So one of the things that we've done is we've really increased our value-added content across the board so in terms of what we bring into the market. And I think that as we looked across the businesses, I will use the oil and gas market because that is a lot easier. There's two major customers that we haven't penetrated as deeply as we'd like, and that is Baker Hughes and Halliburton.

On Baker, we actually have sales into there, and we've got a presentation scheduled with them so that we can go in and sell them the whole capabilities in terms of everything that we bring to the oil and gas market, which is very diverse and can be packaged in a cleaner package than what they traditionally buy.

And so we actually have a presentation scheduled on that. We have a couple of other major customers that would be new customers across the board.

So we are taking opportunities. We have a salesforce that is very enlightened in some of these other major OEMs that traditionally were not penetrated by the existing business units. So we spend quite a bit of time trying to develop the value-add to the marketplace, as well as the customer content and how we could penetrate those customers.

So we are very actively trying to do that, and there's activities going on as we speak.

Okay. So when talking about the salesforce, do you have any plans of hiring some sales specialists focused exclusively towards the non-A&D markets, including oil and gas, or are you still working with whatever you have existing?

No, we actually did that, Bhakti, towards the end of last year and into the beginning of this year. We have a couple of individuals that are primarily focused on those marketplaces, and one of them is an industry expert.

Okay. I am sorry if this question has been answered, but I was curious, on the last call, you had mentioned about increasing aftermarket sales opportunities. Just was curious to know how big of a revenue streams that could be for Ducommun going forward?

Well, that is difficult at this point in time because, as you know, as you enter into a market that you haven't traditionally penetrated, there are some opportunities. We have actually won a major contract on a retrofit program that we have not announced, and we have a couple of other programs.

So it is not something that's going to be, let's say, maybe 1% to 2% opportunities and then filter down from that. So if we are able to penetrate it by a 1% increase, why that would be something that would be significant.

Okay. That's it. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

(Operator Instructions). Michael Ciarmoli, KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Just on if I can on the defense portion of the business, I think you guys said you were expecting flat to up this year. We've got a lot of unknowns with sequestration. Certainly it looks like the DOD had pretty significant reprogramming requests out there. How do we get comfortable in that flat to slightly up forecast, and what would you say maybe are your riskiest or your higher risk programs that you were a little bit concerned about?

Let me give you some parameters around that, Michael, first of all. Even on our website, we say that because of the positive response we've had and the great market acceptance of our defense technologies business wrapped within the DLT portfolio, we expect those markets to average growth over the next three years, 3% to 5%.

Offsetting that, we've said on our defense AeroStructures business because of the cutbacks and conflicts and less of the need for military helicopters and fixed wing products, that those might shrink as much as 4% to 5%. And when you work that all out, the mathematics, it says that the market -- those defense markets, which is about 51% of our portfolio, should grow mathematically, it says 1% to 2% -- 1% to 3%.

And that is within the context that we look at at these things as opposed to seeing the markets shrinking that are in line with the DOD markets because also as an offset is some foreign military sales.

Any programs or contracts you guys would put in the higher risk, higher concern category for this year, or do you guys feel pretty confident about the portfolio?

Well, I think that there is always what I would say is higher risk, and this wouldn't have anything really to do with sequestration. We expect to see eventually a pullback in some revenue because of the war coming down. And so that would be primarily on some of the helicopter programs that we have. We've already seen some minor schedule slides on those, nothing out of the year, but moved to the right in terms of requirements.

So it's hard to say. I don't think -- none of those programs are at risk. And if you look at the budget, they are all pretty solid in the budget. So it's not from an OEM standpoint. It's more of a we support both the OEM and a little bit of the aftermarket there. So when you look at that, you would think that some of those sales would come down.

But when I look across and I see risk programs, clearly some of the programs we are on that are on upgrades and modifications will continue on in the future. And that's opportunities for more growth if things happen that way.

But we really have to wait and see how the final budget shakes out before we can identify those programs. There are opportunities on both sides, opportunities to grow, but there's also some things, like I said, on the helicopter market that we see could possibly shrink going forward. But I think we are looking at it not this year as being pretty stable through the year and probably would expect to see some impacts into 2014.

Okay. Perfect. And then just the last one I had, some of the new on the commercial aerospace space, some of those new opportunities you're seeing for new content, are the financial terms or the margins any different from any of your prior or previous programs? Are you seeing any pricing pressure out there or increased demands from some of those -- like a Boeing or an Airbus?

Well, there is always continued pricing pressure, but generally what we are winning is competitive bids. So we go in with an acceptable margin to ourselves, and then we create through our Lean and Six Sigma and continuous improvement platform, an opportunity to continue to try and drive to those margins. So we try to win a program.

Traditionally, commercial programs for us have been -- have carried a margin that is probably not as significant, not as well, or as high as the military programs. And I think that's probably pretty standard for people with that kind of mix. But we generally drive to a particular margin, and then we put the programs in place in order to be able to hit that. But there is a lot of pressure out there.

Okay. Perfect. That is helpful. Thanks a lot, guys.

Okay.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude the question-and-answer portion of today's event. I would like to turn the presentation back over to Ducommun's Chairman, President, and CEO, Tony Reardon, for any closing marks remarks he'd like to make.

Thank you, Regina. Once again, I would like to thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our broadcast for today. Thank you so much for your participation. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.