Park Aerospace - Earnings Call - Q1 2026

Executive Summary

• Q1 FY2026 net sales were $15.4M, gross margin 30.6%, net earnings $2.08M, and EPS $0.10; revenue rose versus prior-year Q1 ($13.97M) but fell sequentially from Q4 ($16.94M). Adjusted EBITDA was $2.963M; management highlighted EBITDA margin at 19.2% and the quarter coming in near the top of the estimated range.
• Mix and execution improved: fabric-sales mix normalized, production aligned with sales, and tariff impacts were minimal—supporting >30% gross margin despite underutilization costs from the new factory.
• Management “estimates” Q2 FY2026 sales at $15–$16M and EBITDA at $3.0–$3.4M; GE Aerospace jet-engine program Q2 sales estimated at $6.7–$7.2M, with FY2026 GE program forecast maintained at $28–$32M.
• Strategic catalysts: accelerating missile-defense demand (Patriot/Arrow) with a proposed blanket PO for up to $40M of C2B fabric and a major new plant expansion (preliminary budget $35M ±$5M) to capture long-term opportunities.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

• What Went Well

  • Gross margin exceeded 30% (30.6%) supported by normalized fabric/material mix and matched production/sales; EBITDA margin cited at 19.2%.
  • Quarter landed in the middle of the prior sales estimate ($15–$16M) and near the top of the EBITDA estimate ($2.5–$3.0M).
  • Tariff impact was “very minimal,” with costs largely passed through; missed shipments improved in prior quarter and remain manageable.
  • Quote: “We’re happy about [gross margin]…nice to be over 30%…three different factors…helped us get our margins up above 30%”.

• What Went Wrong

  • Sequential revenue decline (Q4→Q1) with ongoing underutilization drag from the new factory as significant costs run through P&L.
  • Continued delays in customer approval of C2B fabric requalification (“imminent,” but not yet done), constraining conversion to higher-margin materials.
  • Cash declined to $65.6M from $68.8M driven by €1.376M (~$1.5M) advance to ArianeGroup and $2.165M buyback; a $4.9M transition tax installment payment hits Q2 cash.

Transcript

Speaker 2

Good afternoon. My name is Paul, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Park Aerospace Corp. first quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings release conference call and investor presentation. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star two. Thank you. At this time, I will turn the call over to Mr. Brian Shore, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Shore, you may begin your conference.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator. This is Brian. Welcome all to the Park Aerospace Corp. fiscal 2026 Q1 investor conference call. I have with me Mark Esquivel, President and COO. We announced our first quarter earnings right after the close. If you look at the news release, you'll see there's link information as to how to access the presentation that we're about to go through. The presentation also can be found on our website. You want to take a look at that in order to make this call more meaningful. Just a little quick comment before we get started. It's only been two months since our Q4 presentation, and as a result, some items are just carried over from the Q4 presentation for context and cohesiveness.

We may just skip over some of those items or at least skim over some of the items that we just covered two months ago, just for purposes of keeping the presentation moving in brevity. If we do skip over something that you want to discuss in more detail, though, please just ask us questions about it at the end. We'll try to highlight also what's new, even if there's a slide that had a lot of old stuff, maybe we'll just pick out one item that might be new. When we get there, you'll probably realize what are important new items toward the end of the presentation. When we're done, Mark and I will be happy to answer any questions you might have. When we proceed, when we go into slide two, that's our forward-looking disclaimer language.

We're not going to go through it or read it for you, but if you have any questions about it, please let us know. Slide three, our table of contents. Slide one starts our Q1 investor presentation, and then there also is an appendix one at the back of the presentation, supplementary financial information. We're not going to review that during the call, but if you have any questions about it, please let us know. As has become our kind of pattern of late, we feature something about the James Webb Space Telescope in our table of contents slide. As you probably know, the James Webb Space Telescope was produced with 18 of our Park proprietary SigmaStruts. We're very pleased and delighted about that. What do we have here? We have a bullet cluster with dark matter. The part dark matter is in blue.

Now, this is enhanced because the dark matter, you can't see it. It's invisible. Just on the right-hand side, let's explain that dark matter is an invisible and hypothetical, kind of strange hypothetical form of matter. This is way beyond my, you know, pay scale to understand what that even means, which does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation. You can't really see it. That's why there, you know, this picture is enhanced with the blue. Dark matter is a mystery of the universe, which cannot be explained by Einstein's general relativity or anything else known to mankind. It's just incredible what the James Webb has discovered so far. It's just amazing, you know, thinking about all the things that we thought we knew, we thought we understood about the universe, but maybe we don't, you know, some people say the universe is unfathomable, and maybe they're right.

Anyway, it's such a privilege and honor for us to be associated with the James Webb. Okay, let's change gears and go to more mundane things. Slide four is our quarterly results. If you go to the right-hand column, Q1, which we just reported, sales $15.4 million and gross profit, $4,718,000, gross margin, 30.6%. We're happy about that, not where we want to be. We'd like to be higher, but it's just nice to be over 30%. We'll explain how we got there. There's maybe three different factors that kind of affected our ability to get our gross margins up above 30%. Just a little tiny less than $3 million, and our EBITDA margin 19.2%. What did we say about Q1? Our Q1 during our Q4 investor call, we had a sales estimate.

Estimate is $15 to $16 million, so we came in kind of in the middle of that range. Adjusted EBITDA estimate $2.5 to $3 million. We came in, I guess, pretty much the top of that range. Last quarter, we talked about what these estimates mean, what they don't mean, and I don't want to go into it again unless you want me to. Basically, these are not guidance where we give you a number or where we plan, you know, kind of set ourselves up to beat the number. When we give you these estimates, we're saying to you, this is what we think is going to happen. Okay, let's go on to slide five, so don't belabor that too much. What I'd like to do, if you don't mind, is let's go to slide six. We'll jump around here a little bit.

The second bullet item on slide six, there's significant ongoing expenses related to operating our new manufacturing factory, manufacturing facility, sorry, and that's why we're pleased to have our margins over 30% because this is a drag. This factory is underutilized, and there's significant costs that's going through our P&L that drags down our margins, including our gross margins. That's one factor. I said there were three. Let's go back to slide five. ArianeGroup, we discussed this many times, our business partner agreement under which we are the exclusive distributor for Raycarb C2B fabric that's used for ablative composite materials for advanced missile systems. Remember, the other two factors aren't positive. They're just lack of negatives. A couple of quarters ago, actually, last quarter, we had $4.4 million sales of fabric during that quarter.

That really brings our margin down a lot because we sell the fabric at a small markup. Ultimately, when we turn the fabric into composite material, that's where the margins really are powerful. Last quarter in Q1, we had $1.1 million sales of the fabric and $480,000 in the materials made with the fabric. That's kind of more of a normal ratio. It isn't really a big drag on our, that wasn't really much of a drag on our Q1 earnings. We'll get back to the group call in a second. Why don't we skip over to slide six again? Production versus sales. This is another factor that had negatively affected our margins a couple of quarters ago where our production was much lower than our sales. We call it SVP. In Q1, they were relatively nicely matched, which is what we want.

We want our production and sales to be relatively nicely matched. It's not really a factor. It's not that these two things were positive. It's just a lack of negatives in terms of the impact on Q1. That's how we're able to, I guess, get our margins above the 30% number. Let's go back to slide five. Sorry about that. I'm probably making you a little dizzy here. Recall of Mark, maybe you could help us with that. One of Park's key customers is C2B fabric. We've talked about this quite a bit in the last couple of quarters. What's the status of the recall, Mark?

Speaker 3

The recall, I think last time I said that it would be soon on the last call two months ago, but it's still not done. Last week, I did reach out to my contacts at the customer, and they said it's imminent, which is better than it'll be a few weeks out, I think. If I look at it, there's no guarantees, but I would say the approval will happen in the next couple of weeks. The reality is it must happen. We're a single-source position on the program. I think as Brian will talk later in the presentation, this program is going to grow significantly. All indications are it's going to grow significantly just based on all the information from the customer and the information held in the public. Like I said, Brian will cover that in the later slides.

Speaker 1

Yeah, there must be enormous pressure to get this done now. I mean, it's no joke anymore. Enormous pressure. Mark and I were just talking about, should we tell you about how many thousands of pounds of this C2B fabric that we're storing for customers? We thought maybe we shouldn't. It's too sensitive. We're storing a lot of this product that we sold to customers already, so there's a lot of pent-up need for the prepreg material. The customers can't do anything with the fabric. That's for us to produce the material with. Let's go back to slide six. Total missed shipments, we can tell you every quarter, $275,000. That's up a little bit from Q4, unfortunately, caused by, surprise, surprise, international shipments, other miscellaneous issues. Impact of tariffs and tariffs-related costs on Q1, very minimal, less than a few thousand bucks, let's say.

Later on in the presentation, we'll talk a little bit more about what we might expect from tariffs in the future. Let's go on to slide seven. This is a slide we do every quarter, our top five customers in alphabetical order. These are just rounding up the usual suspects. All these customers often show up in our top five. Just to make it simple, the Patriot missile, we'll be talking about that one. That's AAE this time. Kratos, obviously, is the Kratos Valkyries, obviously Kratos. I think that's a photo of a loyal wingman operation, actually. 787 would be GKN. That's all we really want to talk about. The Middle River Aerostructure, I think Donna decided that we feature so many GE programs photos that we didn't need to provide you with a photo this time. Let's go into slide eight, our pie charts.

I always like these things, but you can see the 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and the 2026, it's fairly consistent. 2021 was quite different. That was the pandemic year where commercial aircraft was very severely impacted by the pandemic. Let's go on to slide nine. Elena does this Park Law's niche military airspace programs for us every quarter. It's getting to be more and more difficult for us to provide much detailed information about these defense programs. It's so sensitive. The pie chart's interesting, though. Radomes, rocket nozzles, drones, those are really niche kind of area markets for us. Even for us, aircraft structures are niche. We don't really like commoditized stuff too much. I guess the only thing maybe we can comment on, which is interesting, is this AAMN for Oriole air-to-air. That goes back to the 1940s.

You know, it's one of the original air-to-air missile systems, but it's been repurposed for other purposes. That's why it's on our list here of programs. These are all programs we're working on. We don't just put pictures of them and stuff that we think we're not working on. Funny little anecdote, at least for me, this was produced by the Glenn Martin Company. What's very interesting about that is that we talked so much about MRAS, Middle River, which used to be GE Aerospace. The factory that MRAS is located in, the Baltimore area, is the old Glenn Martin factory. I've been to that factory, I don't even know, maybe 50 times. A lot of history there. I think Mark, you've been there as well. I think that's all we'll probably say about slide nine right now.

When we go into slide 10, this is the first slide where we're just not really going to say very much because it was covered. We have it in every quarter. It was covered in Q4. Just for anybody new, just really quickly, the little secret here is that you say, what is, why do we, why are we on all these GE Aerospace programs? All these engines are GE Aerospace engines. The secret there is that Middle River Aerostructure Systems was a sub of GE Aerospace for many, many years. When we got on these programs, MRAS, we call it, was a sub of GE Aerospace. About five years ago, GE Aerospace sold MRAS to ST Engineering, which is a Singapore company, but these programs continue. These GE Aerospace programs continue if you're trying to figure out the mystery there. Slide 11, I think nothing is new here.

If you want us to go back and ask, you want to revisit any of these items, just ask questions or in calls later if you want. Just for purposes of not kind of being totally repetitive, we're going to skip over things that we covered in Q4. Last item, LIFRA program. We did cover this in Q4, but the update is still under negotiation. The ball's in their court. They have everything we need. As I think I mentioned, it's okay with us either way, whether we stay with our current LTA or go to the LIFRA program. This LIFRA program was requested by MRAS and STE, something they want. I don't know how to say this, but I think they very much want it, but MRAS is very consumed with other issues right now, and that's maybe preventing them from getting to this.

Not all their suppliers get 100, 100, 100, you know, if you get what I'm getting at. Some of the suppliers cause a lot of difficulty, and it's not funny. It's very challenging. That's a little bit distracting for those folks right now. Let's go on to slide 12. Update on GE Aerospace generator programs. Pretty much everything here was in Q4. I just want to mention that we often refer to Aero Engineers as our bible. It used to be a monthly, but now it's a quarterly. There isn't even an Aero Engineers update since we announced Q4 on May 15. The only new item here is the first six months of 2025, 39 per month. I wouldn't read too much into that because normally the first half of the year, they're a little slow.

My guess is probably no better than anybody else's, but I'm going to guess they'll be in the low 50s this year, somewhere between 50 and 55. That's just a guess. I don't have any inside information at all. I think I mentioned this to you last time, but the first six months, there were a lot of engines that were going aftermarket, but the second six months of the year are for new airplanes. They also have an Airbus, unfortunately, a lot of kites they built. The last item is the key one. Their Airbus is targeting 75 airplanes per month. Let's go on to slide 13. Approved engines. This is all exactly from Q4 with no changes. Like I said, there's been no update to the Aero Engine News.

We talked about the market share of the LEAP as compared to the Pratt and how many LEAP 1A engine orders there are. Quite considerable, quite considerable, I would say. Slide 14, update on the XLR, sorry, the A321XLR. That's a variant of the A320 family, a Neo family, which is what we've just been talking about. The new item, July 5, 2025, AirAsia Inc. is a $12.3 billion agreement for up to 70 A321XLR aircraft. That's a lot of money, a lot of airplanes, I would say. This is an important program because it has a really unique capability in terms of fuel economy, range, and payload. Let's go on to slide 15. The 919, the Comac airplanes. Let's see what's new here. The second item, they plan to achieve, Comac, a production rate of 200 919 aircraft per year. That's pretty good.

It's not 900, which is the A320 Neo. You know, 75 times 12 isn't at 900. This is not nearly 900, but it's still pretty good. We'll take it. Trade issues. U.S. has reportedly lifted the ban on GE Aerospace export license for the LEAP 1C engines, which are used on this airplane. Let's go on to slide 16, I think it is. Comac, still with the Comac family. The Comac 909 is their regional jet using a different kind of GE engine. Again, the new item is U.S. has reportedly lifted the ban on GE Aerospace export license for that CF3410A engine, which is used on this regional jet. 777X. What's new here? First item, we updated the numbers: over 1,400 flights and 4,000 flight hours in the test program. This item, second item is new. According to Boeing, the 777X program is on track for certification this year.

Wow. Entry into service in 2026. I think they're hedging their bets. I just saw this recently. Maybe the end of this year, maybe next year for certification. Now they're saying this year. That's impressive, you know, how much they've gotten their act together. I mean, if they deliver on that. 541 orders. That's nice too. Let's go on to slide 17. Some of the numbers here. $6.2 million. Q1. These are GE Aerospace jet engine program sales history and forecast. Q1, $6.2 million. We had forecasted in our Q4 presentation $5.2 to $5.6 million. This came in a little bit higher than that. Interesting thing to think about, $24.7 million for all 2025. If we read ahead, you're probably familiar with the juggernaut at $61 million. That's quite a bit of incremental sales for GE engine programs.

The forecast down in the bottom right here, our Q2 forecast $6.7 to $7.2 million. We're sticking with the $28 to $32 million number for fiscal 2026, even though, you know, if you look at Q1 and Q2, we're kind of getting off to a slow start. As I mentioned, I'll remind you that the fiscal 2026 forecast is based upon input we've received from the customer. Let's go on to slide 18. Park's financial performance history and forecast estimates. The top half we already covered. The bottom half, let's go right to the forecast. Q2, we're estimating $15 to $16 million in sales, $3 to $3.4 million of EBITDA. I think that pretty much covers that slide. Let's go on to slide 19. This slide is exactly a slide that was in the Q4 presentation, historical fiscal year results. We're not going to discuss it.

Again, in any of these things we're skipping over, we're skimming over. If you want us to go back and discuss these again, let us know when we get to the question portion of the call or call us afterwards when we happen to go over these things with you. We already covered this slide in our prior presentation slide. I just want to explain we're including these slides for context and cohesiveness so that the presentation holds together. When we've covered things before, we're just not going to go over it again. Before meeting in Q4, very recently, just two months ago. Slide 20. General Park updates. Most of the stuff was already covered. We covered the ArianeGroup, the new agreement under which we're going to advance ArianeGroup €4,587,000 against future purchases. The last item is important because, in our Q1, we advanced ArianeGroup €1,376,000.

That's approximately $1.5 million based upon the exchange rate at the time. Let's keep that $1.5 million number in our head and get back to that. Slide 21. The purchase agreement, we'll revisit this toward the end of the presentation. Very important. Timing is very important. The purchase agreement for the $5 million investment to help ArianeGroup increase their capacity for C2B fabric manufacturing. Next item, lightning strike. We already covered that, so we don't want to cover that again. The next item, the LTA with GE Aerospace, we covered that, so we don't go over that again. Last item, these discussions continue with two Asian industrial conglomerates relating to an Asian manufacturing joint venture with Park. I think our guys were supposed to be in Asia now, actually, but things came up. I think that trip is now going to be in September.

These people have been to visit us. We've been to visit them already. These discussions are somewhat advanced at this point. Slide 22. More updates. Current EmRES scorecard, 100, 100, 100. What is that EmRES love worth to Park? I don't know how to quantify it, but it's just worth a whole lot, you know. That's really our objective is for customers to love us. EmRES is not the only customer who loves us, that's for sure. Making customers love us is central to our Park X strategy. I think we talked a little bit about this. We never went into the details about it, but we mentioned our strategy, this X strategy. Making customers love us is actually central to that strategy. Tariffs, international trade issues, what's the impact going forward? Okay, Mark, back to you.

Can you help us, you know, get some understanding of where we're going with tariffs going forward?

Speaker 3

Thanks. I get the easy ones. Tariffs. I think I mentioned last time, yeah, I mentioned last time there's been little or no impact to our business as far as tariffs. We did get ahead of it. Several months before they started coming in, we notified customers we would pass these costs along. Fortunately for us, there's been little impact as far as even getting tariffs from suppliers. I'm not saying we're not seeing them, but the ones we have seen have either been not significant or they've been passed on to the customer. From our perspective to our business, there's just really no impact. If you watch the news, like we all do, things are still dynamic. They're still talking about, you know, 30% tariff in some countries. We're watching that.

For now, and we think in the very short term, near term, we don't see any issue with our business from a tariff perspective. Could something change? I don't know. I think we're pretty well covered at this point. Maybe by the next quarter, there'll be another update. Hopefully, the update is the same. We're not seeing any impact to the business going forward.

Speaker 1

Okay. Thanks, Mark. Yeah, tariffs are a hot topic these days. Any questions about it, just let us know. Let's go on to slide 23. Our share buyback, this is not really an update except for confirming that in Q1, we purchased $2,165,000 worth of stock. Let's put that number in our little memory. We'll go back to that a little later on as well. We haven't purchased anything in Q2, and my guess is we probably won't be doing that. Let's go on to slide 24. Oh, here we go. Okay. We can recall these numbers. Park's balance sheet cash and incredible cash dividend history. We have zero long-term debt. We reported $65.6 million in cash and marketable securities at the end of Q1. Now, at the end of Q4, it was $68.8 million. That's a difference of $3.2 million, right?

There are two things we just talked about, which are unusual expenditures in Q1. One was about $1.5 million to ArianeGroup. The other one was $2.2 million buyback. That's $3.7 million. If you just those two things combine and explain the difference, the drop in cash between Q4 and Q1. One more thing I got to remind you about. Remember, we used to talk for many quarters about those transition tax installment payments. The last installment, which is $4.9 million, is Q2. It actually was already paid in June, but you'll see that show up in our Q2 cash. It's like $5 million out the window. That was our last installment tax payment. That relates to repatriation. We talked about that many times, so I'm not going to go over that again. Forty years of dividends and over $600 million of dividends paid so far.

Let's go on to slide 25. Okay. This is a no-change financial outlook for GE Aerospace Gen Engine Programs. The juggernaut. These three slides, no change. I don't think we're going to go through the details again. The timing, we don't know, but it's coming. It can't be stopped. We better be ready. Slide 26. There's that $61 million number we were talking about. We've gone through the math many times. The math is straightforward as far as we're concerned. It's pretty transparent also because we were telling you what the revenue per unit is. We're giving you the unit assumptions and doing the math. We don't give the number for the 9X program. You hear a little bit. That program hasn't been certified quite yet. It's a little bit, you know, more confidential. We don't give that information away. Slide 27.

Just the footnotes, which kind of explain all the math. On slide 26, we're certainly not going to go over those. Slide 28. Okay. This is where we're going to have to slow down. This is the new and big thing. War and peace, question mark in parentheses. Park's new juggernaut. This is the first juggernaut as the GE Aerospace programs, I guess the GE Aerospace programs. This is our new juggernaut. Supplies of key missile defense systems are reportedly seriously depleted as a result of the recent wars in the Mideast and Europe. There's an urgent need to replenish those systems. I have to stop here and explain something. We're going to be talking about three different defense programs. There are many programs and the others we're not able to talk about. One thing I want you to understand is very important.

We're not providing any inside information about these programs. Nothing at all. Everything we're telling you about is just based upon stuff publicly reported in news and other reports. I just want you to understand that. We're not giving away any inside information on these programs. The PAC-3 Patriot Missile Defense System. We've been talking about this for a while, but boy, it's become headline news. The largest deployment of PAC-3 Patriot Missile Defense Systems in history occurred in response to Iran's ballistic missile strikes on that, I can't pronounce it. Let's just say that our airbase in Qatar. The Patriot Missile Battalion was reportedly moved to Qatar from South Korea and Japan, in anticipation of Iran's ballistic missile strike in response to U.S. strategic bombing of Iran's nuclear weapon site. We had our act together, obviously. We knew what the response was going to be.

How do you think South Korea and Japan feel about that? Do you think they're happy about it? This is a shell game here. You know, what's going on? We don't have enough systems. That's the reason why we're doing this. We're, you know, grabbing Peter to pay Paul. It's not funny. Israel's supply of Patriot missile systems has reportedly not, this is no inside information, it's publicly reported to have been seriously depleted as a result of the war with Iran. Ukraine's supply of Patriot missile systems, you know that. They're begging for it. They're begging for it. Ukraine has reportedly been seriously depleted as a result of the war with Russia. Other countries have been promised Patriot missile systems for years. They don't have them. We, you know, can't get them. War and peace continued on slide 29 in the news conference.

Did you see this news conference at the recent NATO summit? President Trump stated in response to a Ukrainian reporter's question about providing additional Patriot missiles to Ukraine. It was kind of sad. I mean, I almost thought she was about to cry. "We're going to," he said, President Trump, "we're going to see if we can make some available, but the U.S. is supplying to Israel, and they are very hard to get." This is what he said. "And we mean the U.S. needs them too." There is the problem. You know, there is an urgent, desperate need for these things, and we just don't have them. The U.S. reportedly has 25% of Patriot missiles needed for the Pentagon's military plans. 25%. It was recently reported that the U.S.

has temporarily paused Patriot missile systems to Ukraine over concerns about an alarming, that's not my term, that's a term that was reported, depletion of the U.S. stockpiles of the weapon systems. The pause was intended to allow the U.S. to do an assessment of the current stockpiles and urgent needs for the weapon systems. We're trying to figure out what we're doing. You know, it's almost like we got steamrolled. Slide 30. Continuing with Patriot, War and Peace, new juggernaut. In a news conference in the White House yesterday with President Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, I think. I don't know how you pronounce it. I think that's how you pronounce it. Did you see this one? President Trump announced that in response to Russia's continued military aggression, West weapon systems to Ukraine, including especially Patriot missile system shipments, will be significantly increased.

So much for the pause, you know. Here is the other thing. It was announced that 17 additional Patriot missile systems, it was not clear if that was reference to batteries, launchers, or missiles, will be immediately transferred from another unnamed country, I don't know which country, which does not need them as much. They don't need them as badly. Okay. Question mark to Ukraine. You wonder how that country feels about this. You know, are they pretty delighted they're losing their Patriot systems? Again, you know, it's, what do you call it? The shell game or Pat Roberts being their pay Paul. This is not funny. It's not funny. Patriot missile systems are planned to be incorporated into President Trump's Golden Dome missile defense system. It's not just replenishing all these missile systems. We need a lot more of them. They're going to be in the Golden Dome.

According to Sputnik News, that's the Russian news agency, I think, or a news agency in Russia. The U.S. Army plans to boost its procurement of PAC-3 Patriot missile systems by four times. Four times. We could be, you know, kind of smart alecs about, you know, Russian and misinformation. They're not the ones that came up with the story that Donald Trump was a Russian spy, Russian asset. They're not the ones that came up with the story that that laptop was Russian misinformation. What's the expression? If you're in glass houses, you don't throw stones. Slide 31. It is apparent from the reporting that the U.S. plans to do much more than just replenish the depleted stockpile of Patriot missile systems. A lot more. Let's talk about our involvement with the PAC-3 Patriot missile system.

Park supports the PAC-3 Patriot missile system with specialty ablative materials produced with that C2B fabric from ArianeGroup. We're sole-source qualified. We're specialty ablative materials on that program. We were recently asked to increase our expected output of specialty ablative materials for the program by significant orders of magnitude. We won't say how much because it's too confidential. We can't give it away. Of course, Park will support this request. At Park, we are patriots. Park recently entered into that new agreement we talked about with ArianeGroup, referred to above, for the purpose of increasing C2B manufacturing capacity. Under the circumstances, timing is very fortuitous, but will that additional manufacturing capacity be enough? Probably not. Park recently received a proposed blanket purchase order from a key OEM for up to $40 million of C2B fabric. You get what's going on here? Next slide, 32.

Ts and Cs of this agreement are being negotiated. When we process that $40 million into material, it'd be a significant amount. We're not going to say how much because, again, it's too confidential. Let's go into another program, which is in the news. Maybe not quite as much as Patriot, but definitely in the news. Israel's Arrow 3 and Arrow 4 missile defense systems. The Arrow 3 system has reportedly been seen in extensive use in Israel's recent war with Iran. Israel stockpiled these Arrow 3 weapon systems and reportedly seriously depleted. Again, just reading reports, no inside information from us. The Arrow 4 system, which is reportedly in the final stages of development, is designed to intercept hypersonic missiles in a space transition zone. That's pretty elegant, right? Germany is buying the Arrow 3 and Arrow 4 systems from Israel. Again, it's not just replacing what's depleted.

There's a significant additional need for these systems. Israel may need to do much more than just replenish a depleted stockpile. I guess I just said that on these Arrow systems. What's our involvement? We're qualifying the Arrow 3. We're sole-source qualifying the Arrow 4. That's all we want to say about it. On slide 33, we're still in Arrow. What are the signals Park is receiving on the market about these Western weapon systems? Let's just say acceleration. Let's change gears here a little bit. Is the U.S. planning to rely exclusively on missile defense systems in the future? You know, the Golden Dome? Are we done with MAD? If you're old enough, you might remember MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction from the Cold War days, way, way back. Maybe not. What about the LGM-35A Sentinel missile system? That's certainly not an ICBM, that's certainly not a defensive system.

That's ICBMs. ICBMs, you know what they are, right? Replacing the 450 Minuteman III ICBMs. Park's Minuteman history. It's interesting if you, I don't know, interesting to me anyway. In 1972, when they first introduced the Minuteman, Lockheed Sunnyvale asked Park to take weight out of the missile system. We did that by developing multi-level circuit boards. Are you aware of that? Park developed, invented multi-level circuit boards. That's what we did. We may be coming full circle. That was the very beginning of the Minuteman program. This is now to replace the Minuteman III. 450 new missile silos. Missile silos, maybe you've seen them in videos and things like that. 659 missiles. This is all stuff that's public. You look it up yourself. Nothing we're giving away here. What's our involvement? We're not able to say. Slide 34. We kind of touched on this already.

As a general matter, it's more difficult to discuss the defense programs we support as compared to commercial programs we support. Many of the defense programs are highly sensitive and confidential. Please understand something. There are several additional critical defense programs which we are supporting or are planning to support, and we're not able to discuss those things. In some cases, those programs represent significant revenue potential for Park. Now, I'll change gears here. Some people ask, what will happen to defense spending if real lasting peace breaks out? We sure hope it does. What if the Israelis and Persians end their wars? What if the Arab states sign up for those Abraham Accords? What happens if the Ukrainians and Russians, they settle their difference and put their arms down? It'd be all very nice and wonderful. Will defense spending drop off precipitously as it did after World War II?

You know what happened after World War II? Over 90%, I think like 93%, I mean, basically fell off a cliff. Will we beat our swords into plowshares? You probably know that's from the Bible. We're betting against that at Park. We hope that peace breaks out and it's lasting peace, but we're betting against that, our swords will be beaten into plowshares. Let's go on to slide 35. Another, you know, we talked about this last time, so we're just going to update you a little bit. Our manufacturing, major new expansion of Park's manufacturing facilities, an update. As you know, we're planning a new major new expansion of our manufacturing facilities. It will require a new plant. That could be in Newton, Kansas, or somewhere else. The plant expansion will include the following lines. This is all something we covered before.

Solution hot melt film, hot melt tape, hypersonic materials manufacturing. Preliminary estimate capital budget. A new manufacturing plant equipment, $35 million plus or minus $5 million. I hate to tell you this, but that number may be a little low. We may need additional solution treating. That might be based upon things we just talked about, things we just covered. We'll keep you updated on that. I just want you to be aware. Let's go on to slide 36. Why are we doing this? Our juggernauts require it. Our new long-term business forecast requires it. Significant requirements and new business opportunities for both hot melt and solution composite materials. Defense and missile programs are drivers. Our long-term forecast has moved higher just since May 15, since we last talked to you about it. Why are we doing it?

To have the manufacturing capacity and the flexibility needed to take advantage of new opportunities as they arise. Last item, it's interesting, a little nuancy, to have the manufacturing capacity needed for Park to be Park. What does that mean? Our calling cards are Park, flexibility, responsiveness, and energy. That's how we build the business we got. That's not normally how things are done in aerospace, but we're different. We need a cushion manufacturing capacity. Very important, very important for Park. We never want to abandon what has worked for us and what, you know, these are core principles for Park. Flexibility, responsiveness, and urgency. Let's go on to slide 37. We were thinking of planning for long-term, and back to why we're doing this expansion. Conceptually, five years out. We'll get back to you on that.

It probably will take to the end of the year before we have our plans finalized. Then we have to design our factory. We have to design the equipment. It's not stuff you order off the shelf like at Walmart. All this equipment is very specially designed and a lot of engineering work. To build a factory and equipment takes a long time. The factory has to be completed. The equipment has to be delivered. The suppliers have to sign off on the equipment. We have to do trials. We have to do qualification runs. We're talking years before we'd actually be able to ship qualified product from this new factory, years. It's very important we keep that in mind. That's what we need to look ahead. We're thinking of planning for our future. Conceptually, five years out, that's probably not a bad concept number.

Maybe it's a little less than that, but it's not two years, and it's probably not three years either, between now and when we're able to ship product from this new factory. We're not sharing a new long-term forecast at this time, but suffice to say for now that this is an exciting, challenging time for Park. The opportunities for Park are significant. Timing is now. We must take advantage of the opportunities now. We must not squander these very special opportunities. You could say once in a lifetime. I was going to say that. I thought, is that overly dramatic? I just said very special opportunities. We must not hesitate. In this case, he or she hesitates. You know what happens.

Our objective is to have our expansion plan in place by the end of the calendar year and to be moving into the implementation phase of our plan by then. After our last call, one of our investors, a good investor, asked, you know, should we wait? Should we hold off? It's not how it works in aerospace. We'll wait until we get the, you know, the business booked or it's in our backlog. It's a kind of a circular, this thing. If we waited, it would be too late. We're way too late. We're not going to get in our backlog to begin with because nobody's going to give us the business if we can't explain to them that we have the ability to handle the business, to support the business with our manufacturing capacity. Timing is now. I would just comment, maybe this sounds a little defensive.

I don't know, but I want you to think about something. Park has been around for 72 years. Why is that? Is it because we grab at the first shiny thing? I don't think so. We haven't taken shortcuts. No easy way outs. We're very good discipline. No debt, cash, over $600 million of dividends paid. Are we, you know, given into doing wild, irresponsible things? Think about our history. Think about that a little bit. I'd appreciate it if you do that. Maybe for somebody else who would make you nervous, oh, what are these people doing? Do you have any example of when we've chased something we shouldn't have chased? Can you think about that a little bit? Like I said, maybe it sounds a little defensive, but I thought it's better to talk about it if somebody said, maybe you're being too aggressive. I don't think so.

I don't think so. This is, like I said, maybe a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. What would be really irresponsible of Park would be to squander the opportunity. We're not going to do that. That's it. Let's go on to slide 38. Nothing here. This is exactly the same slide that we had in our Q4 presentation. All I'll say is that estimated non-G program incremental sales, that number is just so blown out the window. It's not even funny that we're not giving the number, but the number is quite significant. The number is built up pretty conservatively also because the line items include only things we know about and can quantify. There are a lot of things we know about that we can't quantify quite yet, and they're not even in our number, you know. Actually, even the number is quite a high number.

It's also, I think, a pretty conservative number. We spent a lot of time on this already. We're taking this project very seriously. A lot of due diligence being done by lots of different people at different levels. We want to make sure we get it right. That's it for us. Operator, we're done with the presentation. Mark and I'd be happy to take any questions to the extent there are any at this time.

Speaker 2

Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from Nick Ripostella with NR Management.

Speaker 0

Hey, good afternoon. A lot of exciting things going on there. I just have a simple question. Slide 21. The recently entered into new LTA. You know, is there anything different about this LTA than previous ones with GE Aerospace that you could discuss?

Speaker 1

I didn't hear you exactly. What are you asking about the?

Speaker 0

On slide 21, you referenced.

Speaker 1

Slide 21. Okay.

Speaker 0

Yeah. A new LTA with GE Aerospace for 2025 through 2030. I'm just wondering, is there anything different in that LTA than, you know, previous ones?

Speaker 1

That's a good question. That evidences that we're probably confusing everybody. The LTA we've been talking about for years is an LTA with MRAS, and they're not GE Aerospace. By and large, those programs that we talk about are MRAS programs. That's a separate LTA that goes through 2029, 2019 through 2029. This LTA, Mark, this is something Mark negotiated with GE Aerospace. They're still engine programs, but they're different engine programs and different materials. They feed into GE Aerospace programs, and maybe we're confusing the matter too much, but it's a different LTA. Just so you know, all of the GE Aerospace revenues are included in the history, in our sales history, as well as the juggernaut.

We include the GE Aerospace revenues from the MRAS LTA and from the GE LTA in both the history, in the historical sales to GE Aerospace programs, as well as the juggernaut slide.

Speaker 0

Okay. Okay. One other question.

Speaker 1

Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 0

Hello? Yeah.

Speaker 1

Yes, please go ahead.

Speaker 0

This may be a difficult one. At what point do you think you would feel comfortable filling in some of the question marks on your long-term forecast? When you use terms like, you know, blow it out of the water, it's very exciting. If someone were to attempt to build a model out a few years, at what point would you feel comfortable giving us some information to build such a model for the longer-term picture?

Speaker 1

We have the models internally, and we've spent a lot of time reviewing them internally. We're in the board, of course. I think we feel it's a little premature to share this information with the public. It might also be a little bit shocking too, so we're holding back a little bit. I think we want to get a little more confidence. You know, Nick, like I said, we're doing a lot of due diligence, a lot of internal discussions. I think we'd like to get a little more comfort, confidence in what we're doing in terms of the budget and everything else because that'll be part of the equation, I guess. I don't have an answer, but like I said, we hope to have the plan complete by the end of the calendar year and go into the implementation phase at that point.

By that time, we should feel in a position to provide that information. I don't know about during our Q3 call, which would be, what, October? No, that's our Q2 call, in October. I hope that if not then, by the time of our Q3 call, which would be the beginning of January. I'm sorry about that, but I appreciate it if we could just hang in there.

Speaker 0

That's okay. Just to, you know, pat you all on the back, I think with respect to your plans for investments, the team there has pretty much earned the trust of shareholders, I think. You've been wise and not buying stupid things. Certainly with share buybacks, you've been judicious, and I've seen a lot of bad examples. I just want to reflect that sentiment. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Oh, thank you very much, Nick. You know, this Charlie Munger guy, he passed away recently, but he, I'm probably going to get this wrong. He said something about they're successful not because they're always brilliant, but they're never stupid, you know. Being not being stupid, it means a lot. Like, don't do something stupid. Don't let go for the gold, shiny stuff when it's just BS, and just because everybody's doing it, don't be sheep. Everybody else is doing it. We try to be really disciplined over the years and not just because everybody else is doing it, not do those things and do what we think is right for the company.

Speaker 0

Okay. Next week, we won't see a press release with an investment in Bitcoin mining.

Speaker 1

Maybe not. I don't know. Yeah.

Speaker 0

Okay, thank you so much.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Nick Ripostella.

Speaker 2

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the floor back over to Brian Shore for any closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much, everybody, for listening in. It was nice to update you. Please feel free to call us if you have any follow-up questions, and have a good day. Thank you. Goodbye.

Speaker 2

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.