Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jim McElroy – Atlantic Trust.
Jim McElroy – Atlantic Trust
Can you give some indication about what the balance sheet looked like at year-end?
William Bambarger
Sure. Our balance sheet at year-end remains extremely solid. We had approximately $18 million in cash, receivables are in line, our unbilled and deferred revenue accounts are fairly consistent with what you would expect given our fantastic year, no debt of course and no other significant changes over the third quarter with regards to the balance sheet. We finalized our tax calculations, all of our deferred tax liabilities and things like that, so we updated those and I think that there’s no significant increases or decreases that were unexpected.
Jim McElroy – Atlantic Trust
Okay and relative to the ?09 outlook, is there any sort of back end or front end load to the year that you’re contemplating? Do you need a strong second half in order to make those numbers or could you just characterize how the year might look on a quarterly basis?
William Bambarger
I think our internal projections, although we don’t give quarterly guidance, our internal projections are fairly consistent throughout the year. Accountants and CFOs always fear the dreaded hockey stick budget and the one that we put together is certainly not that.
I think with that said, the whole reason why we don’t give quarterly guidance is because our business is very lumpy. In any given quarter, we could have significant contract costs on our cost plus contracts; we could experience some up and down demand for our products primarily in our space communications systems segment that could spike or drop revenue on a quarter-to-quarter basis.
Our expectations and forecasts going forward is fairly consistent cyclical activity over what we’ve experienced in the past couple of years, without the need for dramatic turnaround in the third or fourth quarters of 2009.
John Higginbotham
I would add to that Bill. Again, going back to the point, more than half of the forward-looking numbers are coming from contracts and customers that we already have. The nature of the kinds of services and products we supply to them, have a fairly lengthy project planning cycle. So we’ve got a fairly high degree of insight as to what the next handful of quarters looks like.
Clearly we’re forecasting adding some new business, but as I’ve shared with you, we’ve been very conservative in forecasting when and how and under what terms that business is added, given the generally uncertain economic environment that we all see, that we’re currently in. So I think, again there’s much higher probability of upside than down side in my opinion.
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