These communications infrastructures will increasingly demand not only assured connectivity, interoperability between terrestrial and wireless networks and advanced analytics, but also need to meet the highest security standards as well. These are all core competencies for us at Comtech. And the work we’ve done to combine and harmonize our own businesses under One Comtech means that we can bring our native fluency in all aspects of communications network infrastructures to bear on our clients’ most complex problems. When I first started as CEO a little more than a year ago, it was obvious that maintaining the status quo was not an option. The onus was on Comtech and its leadership to regain the confidence of investors and the only way to do that was through accelerating the decisive and total transformation of the organization.
Improved operational performance combined with the collective technology advantage we deliver to our customers as One Comtech across an expanding range of applications in an expanding set of growth markets is one of the reasons I’m so excited as we look to the year ahead. With that said, I’ve asked our Chief Operating Officer, Maria Hedden, who some of you may remember from our Investor Day this summer, to speak to the significant progress we are making as we implement our One Comtech transformational initiatives. Maria?
Maria Hedden: Thanks, Ken. Having spent my career driving continuous improvement in business execution, I found that it is important to be able to not only point to actions and change, but more importantly, genuine, measurable improvement. The internal metrics we use to gauge our performance are compelling. And looking at this quarter’s financial performance confirms it’s working. Following the implementation of One Comtech and excluding restructuring costs, our consolidated operating income this quarter was 10.1% of net sales. That’s a 410 basis point improvement on a comparable year-over-year basis and $1 million sequential improvement from last quarter. As we shared before, upon launching our One Comtech transformational journey, we first initiated an appropriate period of discovery wherein we visited each of our 14 siloed businesses and conducted a thorough assessment that included operating policies, processes, tools, platforms and skill sets.
Following this discovery phase, we analyzed the collected data and rapidly launched standardized best practices, common tools, processes and platforms across the entire enterprise. As we continue to execute, we are already realizing measurable improvements in operational performance as well as identifying opportunities to collaborate and exploit synergies and ways that were simply not possible before. Importantly, we identified key performance parameters and institutionalized the methodology necessary to quantitatively measure and empirically assess our ongoing operational improvements. We are increasingly exploiting performance metrics and extending their applications to drive continuous improvement across the enterprise. While we have much work ahead of us and the implementation phase is far from over, we are making significant progress in nearly every aspect of our operations.
There are many examples of the transformational changes underway across our enterprise. We have instituted a formal Program Management Office to standardize best practices, which is having an impact on not only our ability to efficiently manage existing contracts with customers but bring more effective budgeting, controls, risk and timeline management to future projects, all of which I believe will expand margins over time. We have launched an Internal Finance Academy to ensure that all our business leaders have a clear understanding of the economics that impact our contracts, programs and proposals. We have consolidated our enterprise-wide engineering functions under a single leader, which allows us to prioritize staffing and resource deployment across the organization.
This streamlines decision-making, optimizes resource deployment and improves efficiencies, while simultaneously improving employee career progression. We have strengthened our operational finance team with additional leadership with a proven track record in all aspects of financial planning, forecasting, execution, analysis and capital allocation. In parallel, we’re applying lean manufacturing and operating principles to everything we do enterprise-wide. We are synchronizing our technology roadmaps to lever technology inflections and make the most of market convergence, which is improving every aspect of our new product development process. It’s a lot of work, but when we look at the results, like the meaningful improvement in our operating income it’s clearly worth it.
Thanks for the opportunity to share our progress and let me turn it back to Ken.
Ken Peterman: Thank you, Maria. While there’s much yet to do, it’s clear we’ve made remarkable progress over these past few months and you and your team are critical to driving the transformational change that is already making a difference to our bottom line. Thank you all. It’s also noteworthy that we’re continuing to attract proven leaders and great people and we expect will make significant contributions to Comtech’s growth. We recently appointed industry veteran, John Ratigan as our Chief Corporate Development Officer. With three decades of leadership experience behind him, including the creation from scratch of $100 million a year annual revenue satellite communications business, John’s leadership experience and track record clearly indicate that he is uniquely well suited to help drive Comtech’s strategic business trajectory, accelerate our transformational journey and lead our expansion into new growth markets.
I’ve known John for many years and I’m thrilled to welcome him to our Comtech team. Finally, and before I turn to Mike to discuss our financial performance in detail, I want to speak about the importance of proactively managing our balance sheet, which I talked about last quarter. Our credit facility matures in October 2024, and we’re continuing our engagement with multiple parties as we make steady progress in evaluating a variety of alternatives, negotiating terms and working toward achieving a favorable outcome for our steadily improving business. On that point, it’s particularly noteworthy that we’ve grown revenue every quarter since I took on this role of CEO. We’ve expanded EBITDA margins and have generated positive operating income growth for the past two quarters.
And we have good visibility into approximately $1.7 billion of future revenue. We are undoubtedly making steady progress in our transformational journey. Our performance clearly indicates that we are on a favorable business trajectory that has delivered sequentially improving performance each quarter. With that, let me turn to Mike.
