Joe Puishys
Analyst · CJS Securities. Your line is open
All right. Thanks, Jeff. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. By now, most of you have had a chance to read our press release. This morning, I'd like to review our fiscal 2019 and the progress we're making on our key strategies. We'll discuss the charge we recorded in the quarter of course, and highlight our outlook and long-term direction as well as comment on our favorable end markets. I'll turn it over to Jim for more details on the quarter and our guidance. For 2019, we made progress on many fronts despite a few challenges during the year. We delivered on another year of growth with revenue increasing to a record $1.4 billion. We continue to see solid demand for Apogee's products and services reflecting healthy end markets and the strength of Apogee's portfolio in the markets we serve. Full year orders for the entire company were up 12% compared to fiscal year 2018. We ended the year with higher backlogs driven by the long lead time parts of our business. In particular, our Architectural Services segment, which is our large curtainwall installation business, known as Harmon, continued to show great strength. Full year revenue grew 33%. Strong operating leverage, disciplined project selection, and impressive execution at the site led to record profitability. And we finished the year with a record backlog and a large slate of jobs about to enter backlog. In Architectural Glass, we made significant progress toward overcoming the challenges we faced earlier in the fiscal year. We saw order growth and began to recover some share in large projects. We hired and trained nearly 400 net new production employees during the year, an increase of over 20% in very tight labor markets. And we made strong progress to restore productivity, which is reflected in the fourth quarter operating margin, which is a 500 basis point improvement over the first half of the year. Fourth quarter operating margins would have been even stronger except for some severe winter storms, which interrupted production during the fourth quarter, primarily in the month of February. We expect to realize further benefits from our productivity initiatives and we anticipate continued margin expansion in fiscal year 2020. So, even though we had some challenges, we had a lot of positives during the year. Let me turn to the EFCO related charges. When I joined Apogee, one of the strategic priorities I laid out was to diversify our revenue base and make Apogee less dependent on more cyclical large project segment of the construction market, where we were very heavily dependent. To that end, over this time, we have expanded Architectural Framing Systems into our largest segment through both organic growth and acquisitions. Given its strong market position and recent acquisitions, it is also our largest opportunity for long-term revenue growth and margin expansion. The EFCO acquisition has advanced our diversification strategy in Framing Systems. It provides increased scale, adding to our product offerings and expanding the markets we serve. I remain very confident that EFCO is an important part of our future at Apogee and our future improvements. However, as we previously discussed, we also inherited a few legacy projects with the EFCO acquisition that have presented substantial issues. We started the installation on the last and significantly largest of these projects late in calendar year 2018 and made substantial progress towards completion in the fourth quarter. The charges we announced this morning are expected to cover the remaining costs related to these legacy projects, and we expect to be substantially complete on these projects by the third quarter this year. We are aggressively working to minimize these costs and we are actively pursuing all options available to us to recover these added costs through insurance and other legal actions. These charges announced today and – do not include any future recoveries and they are not in our guidance that we're providing for F’20 as well, meaning there is any potential recoveries. As we move into fiscal 2020, we're focused on putting these issues behind us and positioning EFCO and Framing Systems segment overall for long-term success. We see tremendous opportunity for EFCO to grow revenue and significantly improve profitability. We've been laying the foundation for these improvements since the acquisition. I put a new leader in place last summer, my top operations executive from Apogee. We put a more disciplined pricing and project approval process in place. The sales force is reengaged under new leadership and they established good order momentum in the fourth quarter, which has continued very nicely into the first few weeks of fiscal 2020. We have investments underway to improve the facility layout and process flow through the factory and we're in our second year of implementing our lean and continuous improvement systems into that business. And we're also seeing progress on realizing synergies across the Framing Systems segment driven by Apogee leadership. There is still a lot to do, but I'm confident we have the right team in place to begin delivering very positive results from EFCO. Turning to our outlook and long-term direction. Looking at the rest of Apogee, I'm optimistic about the future. Conditions in our end markets remain favorable, particularly the U.S. architectural markets. The external indicators we track all remain favorable. The Architectural Billing Index has been positive for 17 straight months and 24 of the last 25 months, new construction starts remain at healthy levels, office vacancy rates are at decade-low level, falling below 10% for the first time since 2001, and we're seeing continued employment growth particularly in the office-occupying sectors, health care, and education, the three most important end markets for us. And our internal indicators also remain positive, significant activity with architects and building developers, a strong sales pipeline and bidding activity, and we're entering the new fiscal year with a strong backlog in our long lead time businesses which provide us very good visibility well into fiscal 2021. Many people comment on the age of the economic recovery and all try to predict a future downturn. I'd like to go off script for a minute and comment on this. In March, Wells Fargo and the Department of Commerce issued a report and I'd like to quote that while construction has steadily tended higher -- or trended higher for much of this expansion, the pace of activity falls short of prior cycles. For example, at the peak of the 2001 cycle, non-residential structures investment had expanded a cumulative 81% over the course of six years. The 1990s expansion saw a 75% rise in investment over 10 years. Nearly 10 years after the end of the last recession, structures in the non-resi investment have risen only 48%. We continue to feel confident that the end markets bode well for everyone in our industry as we continue to bump along the top and see modest growth. We continue to see numerous growth and margin improvement opportunities across our segments. In Architectural Glass, we're launching a new growth initiative to further expand our presence in the market for fabricated glass for nonresidential construction. We've carefully evaluated this organic growth opportunity and have been thoughtful in determining how to best expand our presence with the new operating facility. This is a significant long-term opportunity for Apogee, which will begin to contribute meaningfully to Glass segment revenues and operating income in fiscal '21. We're very excited about this initiative, but at this point, we are intentionally limiting our comments for competitive reasons. We will provide more details on this investment in the coming quarters. Overall, we believe our Glass segment is well positioned for growth and margin expansion in fiscal year 2020 and beyond. Turning to Framing Systems segment, I previously mentioned the opportunities we have to improve operations at EFCO. Aside from EFCO, we're also targeting numerous other opportunities for long-term growth and margin expansion. These include new product introductions, continued geographic expansion, core business unit synergies for both product and sales efforts and a continued ramp-up of our building renovation initiative which passed the $50 million revenue mark in the last fiscal year. Architectural Services segment has never been stronger. We are coming off an outstanding year in fiscal 2019. As a reminder, our Services business is focused on a small number of large projects. This makes the business inherently lumpy due to the timing of projects in the pipeline. Not every year will look like the one just completed regardless of our momentum. Despite this lumpiness, we have good long-term visibility in this segment as we regularly engage with our customers well in advance of projects actually getting started. We are experienced and comfortable with this dynamic as we manage this business for long-term success rather than short-term earnings. In fiscal '20, we expect to see a step back from fiscal 2019's record level of performance as the timing of project schedules will drive lower revenues and operating income. Despite this short-term decline, our Architectural Services segment has never been stronger. Our backlog is substantially higher than just one year ago. Looking further out fiscal '21 is shaping up to be another terrific year for Services and we see multiple strong years ahead for this segment. We already have well over $200 million in backlog and customer commitments for fiscal year '21. We also have numerous attractive opportunity in our sales pipeline and are continuing our disciplined approach to project selection to focus on those projects that have a best fit for Apogee. We believe our confidence is well-founded and is supported by this segment's performance over the past several years. For example, looking back at fiscal year 2018 results, they were negatively impacted by a similar project schedule-related flow. But our backlogs gave us confidence that that segment would turn around quickly and we projected that. And as we projected, fiscal '19 we delivered tremendous results across the board. We believe this segment's historical performance and existing backlog justifies our enthusiasm for the future prospects of this business in this segment. Lastly our financial condition remains quite solid and we're deploying capital to drive shareholder value. We increased both the dividends and share buybacks in fiscal '19, returning over $60 million of capital to shareholders. And as I've mentioned, we're investing internally to drive organic growth and margin expansion. We will continue this balanced capital deployment approach in fiscal 2020. With that, I'll pass the call over to Jim who'll provide details on the quarter and the outlook and the guidance. Before we take your questions, I'll return for a few additional comments. Thank you. Jim?