HEICO Corporation (NYSE:HEI) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Carlos Macau: So the one time stuff was $5.1 million, and what I was pointing out was that we took on some additional amortization for the month of January. It was close to $1 million. And that relates to new amortization. It has things in there such as inventory write-ups, purchase accounting amortization. So there’s an element of that is kind of short term. The inventory write-up only lasts for a quarter and a half or something like that or a couple quarters. So there’s an element of that additional $1 million, which it’s not really a one-time cost. We’re going to have the amortization going forward. But what the point I was trying to make was that if you kind of factor all that stuff in, the ETG is running around a 25% operating margin, which is what we posted last year at this time. That was the point of that statement.

Gautam Khanna: Yes. Okay. No, that helps. Thank you. I was also curious, on supply chain, we often hear about ETG having some challenges in the supply chain. Is flight support also seen supply chain challenges? And if so, kind of what is the past dues there if any?

Eric Mendelson: Yes, we €“ hi, Gautam. This is Eric. Yes, we definitely have seen supply chain challenges within FSG. Frankly, our sales and earnings would be even higher. If we got all these parts in which we’re not able to get at the moment. Look, I think we’re doing better than most, and that’s as a result of our decentralized structure. We don’t do Soviet Central planning at HEICO. We let the businesses figure out what they need. They stay very close to their customers. That’s how everything is designed. And as a result, I think we were ahead of the curve and you saw our inventories go up a year ago, and now you’ve seen the results of having that inventory on the shelf. And now our inventories are up again and we’re going to be in position to be able to support our customers is this level of sales hopefully continues to go up.

But yes, we are definitely seeing the same supply chain challenges around materials and in particular labor at our suppliers. There were aerospace products are made in relatively small quantities for the aftermarket. And you’d be surprised how many manufacturers around the world and very high quality, good manufacturers had people retire and they sort of, if you will loss the recipe on how to do certain processes; and I’m talking major companies. So they’ve struggled getting people trained to be able to replicate those processes. And often, they make parts that have not been acceptable. So, but I think things are definitely getting better in that regard.

Gautam Khanna: Okay. No, that’s really helpful. And then just Victor, if you don’t mind, maybe also just elaborating on how the supply chain has improved and where maybe incrementally things got worse, if any? Just curious where you’re seeing the bottlenecks still.

Victor Mendelson: I mean €“ thank you. This is, it’s still on the component side. And our businesses by so many different components, subcomponents plus raw materials, things like metals and silicones and so on. Those have been easier for us, but it’s generally on the electronic component side, I mean, an area that remains difficult, I think for everybody in the industry. Certain items, things like FPGAs, there are some other parts and components. I’m aware of where some vendors are slipping. I’d rather not call them out publicly on this and where they keep falling short rather consistently where we have effectively sole-source situations and it’s hard to dual source and things of that nature. But it is €“ our company is €“ about close to half of our companies report to us that it’s improving more than half at least static or improving, and it’s the minority who see it small minority going the other way.

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