Lockheed Martin CFO says ‘seeing a little bit of a slower start’ to Q1

Lockheed Martin CFO Jesus Malave said while speaking at the JPMorgan Industrials Conference, according to a transcript of the event: "Yes, when you look at Q4, we overdrove our sales from our guide by 750. About half of that was related to supply chain performance better than expected at the time. And we had poured through the information of data to determine whether or not ‘did we turn the corner? Do we see a step change in performance?’ The on-time delivery didn’t really improve. We also looked at earned value metrics did we make progress and schedule performance. We really didn’t see any improvement there as well. And so as I mentioned on the call, what we did see though was the ability to deliver at a higher level of requirement. And so at least we were encouraged by that. But some of the upside that we saw, I think may have been just some timing. Run for the role at the end of the year, kind of, unfortunately, Aerospace and Defense suffers from that. And so we saw probably some first quarter sales that did point into the fourth quarter, but it came out of the first quarter. So I think we’re probably dealing with a little bit of kind of WIP replenishment here in first quarter, which is causing a little bit of a slower start than we otherwise would have expected, and we’re seeing that… So it’s always going to be a lower, the lowest quarter of the year for sales. And when you do the math, it would tell you you should be around 15, 15 1. And we’re just — we’re slightly below that because of what we’ve seen here. So I wouldn’t say that we’ve taken a significant step back but we just haven’t seen market improvement either."