Redwire Corporation (RDW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Well, good afternoon, and thank you so much for being here. My name is Bruce Davis. I'm the General Manager for the Longmont site, and I have the privilege of leading a fantastic team here. But overall, I really wanted to thank you for coming out. This facility represents a 26,000 square foot expansion to our organization. It's a 70% growth to our footprint here in Longmont. And it's really the culmination of years of hard work and continued trust of our customers. So I have the honor and privilege of leading an extraordinary team of engineers, managers, technicians and support staff. They come to work every day with a singular focus, and that is to execute with excellence and to deliver to our customers. It Is with this spirit and determination that we have arrived at this incredible moment. Now I'm going to start off and introduce some key members of our -- some key guests of our team here today. I'm going to start off with James Thomson, who is a Regional Director for U.S. Senator of Michael Bennett, thanks for being here. Next, I'll introduce Chris Rork, Front Range Regional Director for U.S. Senator of John Hickenlooper. Next is Maxwell Coker, Special Assistant and outreach coordinator for U.S. rep, Joe Neguse. And finally, Joe Wood, the outreach Director in the U.S. rep for Diana DeGette. Thank you. And I'd also like to recognize our speakers, we'll have 3 speakers today in addition to Adam Biskner. First is Robert Beletic. He is the Aerospace and Direct Defense Industry Manager for the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. Next, we'll have Les Johnson, who comes from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. And finally, Dr. Brad Tousley, Senior Partner at Elara Nova. So thanks again. I really appreciate each of you being here. Your support today plays a crucial role in our success, and we honor your presence today. So thank you. Really appreciate you being here. All right. So looking ahead of our agenda. We're going to start off with remarks from Adam Biskner. He's our President of Space Systems U.S. at Redwire. And then we're going to do a photo op and a ribbon cutting on the stage. We'll have 15 folks on stage. I really looking forward to making it official opening the doors. And then we're going to go around and we have some tour groups set up for exhibits. We have 3 different regions, and we have experts in the field at Redwire, who're going to talk through the products we're working on and why these technologies are so crucial to both civil, national defense, and commercial. And then finally, we'll close out with reception over at the far side over here, where we can mingle and talk about the great work that's being done. Also note that we have exits in the back corner over there and exit behind here. There's bathrooms both in the office space and in the high bay space. There's 4 bathrooms there. So please don't get caught just with the 2 over there, feel free to sort of grab the whole area there. All right. Well, I look at this technology, and I'm just so inspired by seeing solar cruise are out there. It kind of reminds me of some words that Gene Cernan said back in, I think, 2017. For those of you who don't know, Gene Cernan is the last person to walk on the moon, Apollo 17. And I'll rephrase that. He's the most recent person to walk on the moon because we're going back, it's going to be great. But he did a really great job in his latter years of just talking about the importance of space and why we do this, right? And he said to Congress, the space pursuit has never been an entitlement. It's an investment in our future, an investment in technology, jobs, international respect and geopolitical leadership and perhaps most importantly, it's the inspiration of our next generation. And so when I look at this solar sail, it's an exact -- I think those words really ring true on what we're doing here. We're trying to go above and beyond what has been done before and think about the impossible. A good way to reflect on that is, our team here in Longmont started off just doing small composite booms, right? And we never at the time thought that those booms would transpire into something like this, something that is pushing the most extreme form of the technology, doing things that we've never done before. And likewise, those same exact booms deployed out little apertures, little antennas. And we didn't think at the time that, that would essentially create a whole product group that would lead to this RF chamber that provides a very unique capability serving the war fighter and our international partners. So it's a great sense of responsibility and demands that bring us here every day. And our Longmont team, Redwire as a whole, it's in our DNA. This is what we do and we do it with excellence. So I'll close. Thank you so much for coming here. I'm going to turn the mic over to my colleague, Adam Biskner, President of Redwire Space Systems. Adam?

Thank you, Bruce. Very well said. I can't be more excited to see all the growth we've had, not just in Longmont, but in Redwire as a whole over the last few years. We have a shared history, I've been in Redwire for 3 years, but I've been working on the exact technologies that they do at this location, my entire career. So it's been a lot of fun for me to come into this site and then see the growth here, have a lot of the same knowledge that Bruce has of where we started with booms and antennas and then getting into this bigger programs as a company. So good afternoon, everybody. Bruce said it like 4 times, but I'll say it again, I'm, Adam Biskner, President of Redwire Space Systems. I want to issue another warm welcome and sincere thank you for you taking time today to join us as our special guests. And this event as well as the growth of our company could not be possible without the trust of our partners and our customers. It's what makes what we do at Redwire, incredible working with you all. Our team is relentlessly focused on delivering mission success and reliable space products to our customers. Over the past year alone, we've launched sensors on 16 missions. We've successfully deployed 100 kilowatts of solar arrays on orbit. We had 5 antennas launched and delivered equipment to 3 different rocket launches, all with 100% mission success. And during that same time, we've delivered hardware to over twice that many missions that we'll launch just this year. So very proud of that of our flight heritage, our reliability and our on-orbit success. Today, we celebrate Redwire's commitment to investment in the future. This new facility significantly expands our footprint and a capacity that will offer great capability to our customers. But it's just 1 representation of the investments that Redwire has made into our technology portfolio, our production facilities and our testing capabilities that position us as one of the industry's leading mission partners. Now I can assure you we do not take that role lightly as most of our systems are critical to missions of national importance. For example, the Space Development Agency transport layer is a constellation of 300 to 500 satellites in low-Earth orbit that provide assured, resilient and low-latency communication to the war fighter. The Longmont team has already delivered antennas to over 50 spacecraft that support that constellation. And thanks to the investment in this facility along with the custom RF test chamber, we expect we can triple the amount of hardware throughput in this location in just the next few years. So very proud to be a trusted national security supplier and very committed to expanding our capability as the demands for those customers grow in the next few years. Further, we continue to build on a very strong working relationship with NASA and the agencies prime contractors that will also benefit from this expanded facility. We're developing a deployable solar sails system on display behind you, that you'll see on the tours later today. But it spans over 1,600 square meters for the solar Cruiser program, and it will allow missions to reach novel and otherwise difficult or impossible locations. We're very excited to deliver this innovative capability to a future flight demonstration mission. I've been in the space industry my entire career and the change that we've seen in that time, particularly in the last 10 years, can really not be overstated. But we're still a relatively niche industry that counts on teaming and very strong team relationships to deliver the mission needs. So Redwire is very proud to demonstrate our willingness to invest not only in our own capabilities, but in furthering the American space industrial base and developing more new capabilities for our team members as we partner with cutting-edge aerospace firms to meet our national security needs in the emerging years. So thank you all again for taking time to help us celebrate this important milestone today. And thank you to the entire Redwire Space Systems team. We're extremely proud of our people. Without them, none of this is possible. I applaud you for your commitment to our mission and to execution excellence. Thank you to the Redwire executive leadership team. We appreciate our company's commitment to long-term growth. But most importantly, thank you to our customers and our partners. We truly appreciate the trust you place in us, and we're excited to grow with you. I am personally looking forward to filling the rafters in this building with mission banners from our shared successes. And now it's time to get to work. Thank you.

All right. Should we cut a ribbon. All right. I would love to invite our executive leadership team. I'm up, starting with Pete Cannito, our CEO; Jonathan Baliff, our CFO; Al Tadros, our Chief Technology Officer; Mike Gold, our Chief Growth Officer; Tom Campbell, our Chief Operations Officer; and Dean Bellamy, our EVP for National Security Space. In addition, I'd love to invite our special guests, our congressional delegation here. Please come on up as well as our guest speakers. All right. We're going to have 3 short talks from thought leaders within our industry. We're going to start with Robert Beletic from the OEDIT office in Colorado.

Thanks. Pete, look what you've built? This is amazing. Congratulations to you. And Adam, I'll tell you that list you gave in your speech, most people would like to just have one of those accomplishments where you listed all the things your company is doing, congratulations. So I'm Bob Beletic. I work for the State of Colorado as the Aerospace and Defense Industry Manager. On behalf of Governor Polis and Lieutenant Governor Primavera, I just want to really say congratulations to Redwire and to everybody who's part of this effort. As a guy who spent 34 years in the military, I can tell you the war fighter, thanks Redwire for everything you do. It's really important. A couple of things about Colorado, I'd like to brag on. You know Colorado has the best aerospace ecosystem on the planet. And that is not an exaggeration. I'll tell you why I say that. We have more people working in aerospace per capita than any other state or nation on this earth. And we have the second largest aerospace economy here in the United States, California is a little bit ahead of us. We're going to catch them but they also have 7x amount of people. So here, what we have here is really dense. Obviously, it goes from here at Redwire through Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs is where probably 95% of it. So it's very dense, and we're very proud of it. Here in Colorado, our aerospace industry has grown 32% in the last 5 years, which is phenomenal. That's 14% over the national average. And I think it's because of a lot of reasons. We have all these assets here, industry that none is better represented than Redwire leading our industry. We have government. We have U.S.-based force, 3 of our 6 base force spaces of our country are here in this state. Space comps here. We have world-class universities and federal labs. CU Boulder, of course, is one of the universities that's real close to here, more aerospace students than any other university on the planet. 1 out of every 4 Astronautical Engineering PhDs comes out of Boulder, which is incredible. So anyway, I just want to say on behalf of the State, we're really happy Redwire is here. We hope you continue to grow and find success here. It's my job to make you succeed. So let me know how I can help you. And thanks for allowing the State to say a few words.

Thank you, Bob, for all the work you do, supporting the State. Next, I'd love to introduce Les Johnson from Marshall Space Flight Center.