Emrise Reports on Annual Stockholders' Meeting

Jul 02, 2009 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- ERI | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Emrise, a multi-national manufacturer of defense and aerospace electronic devices and communications equipment, announced that it held its annual meeting of stockholders at 11:30 am EDT on June 25, at the Staybridge Suites in Eatontown, NJ.

Approximately 83 percent of the company's stockholders were present in person or by proxy at the meeting.

Emrise stockholders approved the proposal to elect Otis W. Baskin, as a Class I director to serve a three-year term, and also approved the proposal to ratify the selection of BDO Seidman as the company's independent registered public accounting firm to audit the company's consolidated financial statements for 2009.

In prepared remarks, Emrise Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Carmine T. Oliva discussed key strategic initiatives designed to enhance stockholder value that have been launched by the company and he reviewed a number of opportunities and challenges faced by the company.

Oliva said, "As many of you know, Emrise Corp. completed a major strategic initiative in the 18-month period beginning in November 2007 and ending in March 2009. This initiative was undertaken in order to focus our Electronic Devices business segment on new higher growth, higher revenue core businesses while shedding lower growth, smaller non-core businesses. The core business this strategic effort was focused on was the acquisition of Advanced Control Components (ACC), which has an RF devices business in the US that would allow Emrise to address the large U.S. military market from which it was precluded from doing previously since all of our RF device manufacturing was located in Europe. The non-core businesses we divested included our Digitran digital and rotary switch business, our Japanese switch and outside sourced resale business and our printed circuit board manufacturing business. In order to implement this strategy, we arranged a $26 million debt financing in November 2007 followed by the acquisition of ACC in August 2008. We then sold the last of the three divested, non-core electronic devices businesses by March 2009 and paid down our debt from $26 million to $16 million, primarily with the $11.5 million gained from the sale of non-core assets.

"We believe that the bullish global military market represents a significant opportunity for us in 2009. In particular, some of our products are targeted at the U.S. priority spending categories of 'force protection' and terrorist interdiction. We are delivering products for numerous military programs such as 'IED' jamming devices and unmanned air vehicles just to name two. Our expectation for revenue from ACC, which is a driver of this opportunity, is running at or above the top of the range of the previous guidance we provided for ACC, which was in the range of $17 million to $18 million, up from $12 million for the trailing 12 months before we acquired ACC. In our communications products segment, sales of test instruments for the FAA and U.S. military have been robust and we believe that these sales will be a major contributor to our overall revenues in the second half of 2009. Despite the impact of current economy on our communication business, our timing and synchronization communication equipment products remain one of our best opportunities for significant growth in the future."

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