Mr. Gundermann: Astronics has been a public company since the 1970s and over the years has been involved in a series of different kinds of businesses. Around 2000 we decided to focus strategically on aerospace. So we did group divestitures and one spinoff, and since then have been largely an aerospace company involved in aircraft lighting and electrical systems. And that's across the aerospace industry - everything from big airplanes, like A380 and the 787, to military airplanes, like the Joint Strike Fighter, and business jets, like the Cessna Mustang or Lear 85. Early in 2009, we made an acquisition of a test systems company, which is involved in providing solutions for the defense industry to test various communication equipment and other technology. As a result, we now operate two business segments: the aerospace segment, which is about 80% of our business, and the test systems segment, which is about 20% of our business.
TWST: When you examine your areas of operations, what does the competitive arena look like? Is competition defined by geographic affinity, relationships - what are the keys on which you compete?
Mr. Gundermann: The aerospace industry is certainly one that's very dependent on relationship. There's not an infinite universe of customers out there, so maintaining our reputation and working effectively to bring our customers new solutions is something that we consider extremely important, and that's where I think we excel as a company. We've been successful developing and bringing the industry new technologies. And those new technologies have allowed us to be designed into new aircraft platforms. For a small company, we're pretty proud of the range of platforms that we operate on. An example of our innovation includes advanced electrical systems for aircraft that do not depend on conventional thermal circuit breakers but rather software-driven electronic circuit breakers. We're developing such a system now for the Lear 85. Another technological innovation was the application of advanced lighting technologies for aircraft that are not filament based. Most lights on airplanes historically have been traditional incandescent or halogen technologies, which are prone to catastrophic failure. But the new technologies, primarily LEDs and metal halide high-intensity-type light sources, don't have those failures. On the Joint Strike Fighter, for example, we're providing a lighting system which is expected to have mean time between failures in excess of 1,000 hours, which is a significant leap in technology. We compete against both small privately owned companies in some parts of our business as well as against very large household names in the aerospace industry. We feel that we're better capitalized and more capable than the small competitors typically, and we can move a little bit quicker and take a longer-term perspective relative to our larger competitors. We see this position as a competitive advantage. We are big enough to beat the small guys but small enough to outmaneuver the big guys.
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