Hello and welcome to the Astec Industries Third Quarter Earnings Call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. It is my pleasure to introduce your host, Steve Anderson, Senior Vice President of Administration and Investor Relations. Mr. Anderson, you may begin.

Thank you, and welcome to the Astec third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Joining me on today's call are Jaco van der Merwe, Chief Executive Officer; and Becky Weyenberg, Chief Financial Officer. In just a moment, I'll turn the call over to Jaco to provide comments and then Becky will summarize our financial results. Before we begin, I'll remind you that our discussion this morning may contain forward-looking statements that relate to the future performance of the company and these statements are intended to qualify for the Safe Harbor liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Factors that could influence our results are highlighted in today's financial news release and others are contained in our filings with the SEC. As usual, we ask that you familiarize yourself with those factors. In an effort to provide investors with additional information regarding the company's results, the company refers to various US GAAP, which are generally accepted accounting principles, and non-GAAP financial measures, which management believes provides useful information to investors. These non-GAAP financial measures have no standardized meaning prescribed by US GAAP and are therefore unlikely to be comparable to the calculation of similar measures of other companies. Management of the company does not intend these items to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the related GAAP measures. Management to company is both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures to establish internal budgets and targets and to evaluate the company’s financial performance against such budgets and targets. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results are included in our news release and appendix of our slide deck. All related earnings materials are posted on our website at www.astecindustries.com, including our presentation which is under the investor relations and presentation tabs. And now I will turn the call over to Jaco.

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Turning to slide 4, the third quarter turned out to be disappointing from a short-term results perspective, yet positive from creating a stronger business for the long term. As mentioned in earnings release, our results for the quarter were negatively impacted by litigation loss contingency of $6.4 million, related to equipment sold during 2017. Becky will make more comments about this in her remarks. Sales also ended lower than expected due to various infrastructure solutions related orders being delayed to Q4 due to customer readiness and payments. From a long-term performance point of view, I'm excited about the 220 basis point improvement in margins we realized during the quarter. The investments we are making in our factories and systems are progressing well, and I fully expect to see further benefits in future quarters. The large transformation at one of our infrastructure solutions sites is developing well with most of the capital equipment and new shop floor layouts completed. Margin development at this facility improved from last year but ended below our Q3 expectations. Gross margins are up 320 basis point year-to-date and we have exceeded 20% gross margins for five consecutive quarters. We continue to see funds flowing from the federal highway bill, further supporting our long-term conference. Year-to-date sales were up 8.3% with growth in both segments. Our teams are working diligently to reduce inventory levels and we expect the results of these efforts to flow through over the next few quarters. We expect operating cash flow to improve in Q4 as we convert inventory to cash and improve profitability. During the quarter, I visited various customers, attended the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association meeting and met with most of our mobile construction equipment dealers. The sentiment…

Thank you, Jaco and good morning, everyone. I'll begin my review of third quarter results on slide 15. Sales were $303.1 million, down 3.8%, slight declines in both segments. By region, strong international sales growth of 11.7% was enhanced by positive margin development and was offset by softer domestic sales down 7.9%. Part sales grew 2.4%, which was offset by a decline of 4.5% in equipment sales. Backlog continues to normalize, down 36.6% from the peak in the third quarter of 2022 and 10.8% sequentially, and still within our historical range of one and a half to two quarters. Domestic backlog was down 37.2% and international down 33.4%. Order rates have remained steady over the last three quarters, a trend we expect to continue as demand remains strong. Supply change disruptions are becoming less of an issue, further incentivizing customers to resume normal order patterns. We are also improving our ability to convert backlog into sales, suggesting backlog will stay within that historical range. Adjusted EBITDA decreased 39.8% to $10 million, decreasing adjusted EBITDA margin 200 basis points to 3.3%. The biggest driver here is a litigation loss reserve of $6.4 million associated with an initial adverse verdict related to equipment sold in 2017. Looking at ongoing operations, we expanded gross margins by 220 basis points to 23% as we achieved further price realization and benefited from our financial operational excellence. This is the fifth consecutive quarter gross margins have exceeded 20% and year-to-day gross margins are 24.1%. SG&A increased due to the litigation loss contingency and higher personnel costs as we invested in our business. We are also experiencing increased consulting and project costs. While profitability was masked this quarter due to the litigation contingency, the team is doing a good job of managing expenses and we are pleased…

Thank you, Becky. Turning to slide 22, I would like to summarize our key messages. Although Q3 was disappointing, the Astec team continues to work together, serving customers and driving operational excellence. Our customers continue to convey a positive sentiment to us, supported by positive long-term end market drivers, including funds from the Federal Highway Bill. The OneASTEC operating model is guiding us to create a culture of consistent performance and execution. We delivered higher gross margins in the third quarter and lower sales, with EBITDA margin performance masked by the litigation loss contingency. We are transforming and improving our operations. And finally, our simplified focus and growth strategy establishes a framework to drive long-term shareholder value. I like where we are heading, and I'm optimistic about our future as we drive towards our long-term goals shown on slide 23. I also like to share that we are putting the finishing touches on our Astec 2030 Business Plan and look forward to sharing those details in 2024. I'm grateful to our employees for their dedication and hard work, and to our customers for their loyalty and support. With that operator, we are now ready to open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question is from the line of Stanley Elliott with Stifel.

Hey, good morning, everyone. Thank you for the question. Can we start off by talking about kind of what's happening on the margin front and mainly kind of the move sequentially down. I mean, even if you back out the litigation charge, you're still looking at maybe flattish sort of margins. And I think we had hoped that there had been enough pricing in the backlog and an improved kind of within the order book that we would actually continue to see the margin trajectory, kind of like what you saw in the first half of the year.

Yes, I can take that, Stanley. So as reported, you can see that overall margins continue to improve for the quarter and then obviously nicely year-over-year. And I think it's important to note that the third quarter, as we mentioned previously, has a different profile mix with regards to parts and capital. So obviously that contributes. And then also, if you look at last year in the third quarter, the mix between plants and a mobile construction equipment was different in this year. And that contributed to what you see. So overall, I will say with the mix of products that we have with the chains in the mix on parts for the quarter that's what you can expect during a typical third quarter, which we didn't have last year.

Okay. And I guess as a quick follow on, did the mix of international versus domestic revenues kind of contribute to that in any way?

No, not really. In fact, we are very pleased with the performance that we've seen on our international business. And remember that on the international side transfer pricing to comply to local jurisdiction, obviously dictates a little bit the margins that you make on the international side. But as I said, we are actually very pleased with the development on our international business.

And I guess as a follow up a fair amount of positive commentary from some of the dealer events. Are we saying that order rates are going to start turning positive in the fourth quarter and into early next year, because of these trade shows, or should we think of you all continue to work down get the backlog to get more to that historical norm?

Yes, no, good question. And once again, as a reminder, in the prior two years, especially on the material solution side, the dealer order writing took place in earlier quarters, last year and the year before. This year we will have it in Q4 and as mentioned, we believe that it's going to be a strong order writing period, at least in line with what we've seen the last few years, we still have relatively low dealer inventory, especially on the mobile construction equipment side. And so we feel confident and we have pretty good visibility that order writing will be strong. And we've also seen a good order over writing for asphalt and concrete plants here in October. And we've actually seen a pretty nice development on parts orders for October as well. So we are expecting that the backlog will moderate a little bit more, especially as we focusing on reducing our lead times and reducing parts backlog. So but we have very good view on what we think is going to happen here in Q4.

Your next question is from the line of Mig Dobre with Baird.

Yes, good morning. The term normalization has been used repeatedly on the call and it's been used in prior quarters as well. So I'm trying to understand exactly what it means that normal, orders have normalized. If we look at three months from now, after you report Q4, if we look at your combined order intake for 2023, would you say that that is the normal run rate for orders in both your businesses?

Yes, so, Mig, I think once again, if we look at what we have on slide 8, we gave there the historical range. So we always talked about that 1.5 to 2. If you look at the order patterns for the first three quarters, I don't think you should take that and just multiply it by four, especially if we look at the peak of the backlog in the third quarter last year. As we improve availability and as we improve our own lead times, our dealers will not have the need to place orders as far in advance as what they did in the past. So, from my perspective, if we stay in that $400 million to $500 million range, that is a range that we are really comfortable with and that we've dealt with in the past. Any time I think that we go below that, that's for myself, that's where the red lights will come up a little bit. But at this point in time, indication is that Q4 will be a strong bookings quarter. And customer sentiment is still very positive. And the dealer interaction that we've had is really good. And I'm very excited about the new products that we're bringing to the market. The new Milling Machine that we have in the presentation has been performing really well in trials. And when a customer tells you that he wants to buy the prototype machine, then you know you're up to something. I think there's a lot of positive momentum that we are seeing in terms of just the order writing we're seeing, the seasonality and then the new products that we bring to the market.

So, again, when you're evaluating your order intake for full year 2023, would you consider that to be a normalized level of demand or are there distortions still that we need to be aware of?

Yes, I think it's distorted. I mean, if you look at the orders that we got during 2013 and how the backlog increased, I mean, if you just look at Q3 of ‘21 to Q3 of ‘22, there was a build-up of 50%, $300 million of additional backlog. And we're still working through that. So, Mig, I have no concerns right now that we're going to see a significant drop in the output for 2024.

And I think that's interesting, right? Because right now, your production, your shipments are obviously exceeding order intake, hence backlog coming down. At what point in time does this backlog normalization, as you call it, actually has to result in lower production?

Yes, I mean, we obviously reviewing production levels on a consistent basis. We have multiple levers that we can pull if we get to that point. But right now we are not making any of those plans. Our S&OP processes at various of our product lines is really strong and robust, and we have pretty good visibility of what's coming. And we have good visibility on our coating pipeline, which is really strong right now. So I'm not concerned at the moment. I think the teams have really good handle on that. But of course, the moment we see those indications, we'll pull some of the levers that we have. And at some of our facilities, we are already working significant overtime levels because we have the visibility of what needs to be delivered in the next couple of quarters. And our international business is continuously growing as we expand our footprint here in the US over the last year, we've expanded our footprint for our mobile construction equipment and on the material solution side. So there's a lot of other positive factors that can mitigate any external pressures from interest rates or the macro environment.

Yes, Meg, I would just add to that, unlike some of our peers, we're not planning any layoffs. There's no reason for us to go to that level yet with what we have in front of us. So to Jaco’s point, we're not concerned about that. The capacity is right size, and we're still running pretty significant overtime in certain locations.

Okay, then I guess my final question. In your prepared remarks, you mentioned some delays maybe in infrastructure orders. Can you comment on that a little bit more and when do you expect infrastructure order to slowdown, reverse?

Yes, no, I can make, Mig, so, as you know, when we sell a big asphalt plant, it can be $5 million to $10 million on the deal. So if two of those deals do not ship, it can have a noticeable impact and that is exactly what we saw during the quarter. The majority of those, the funds have already flowed from our customers and the teams are in the process of shipping. So it's not something that will linger for quarters. It was literally just a couple of weeks that we didn't get into the quarter.

Your next question is from the line of Steve Ferazani with Sidoti.

Good morning, Jaco, Becky. Appreciates the detail on the call. I did want to ask a little bit about SG&A. Even if I back out the litigation contingency, it still looks like SG&A was up pretty substantially sequentially and year-over-year, and what's a seasonally slower quarter. Can you help out a little bit on the higher costs and whether that stays in?

Yes, so our range of $57 million to $60 million is still what we are seeing. During the quarter, obviously, we booked the litigation loss there. And we had some threw up on our bonus structure. We have a specific project that we're working on that we talk about in a modularization, where we have quite a bit of our engineering team working to change various of our models from an ETO type model to more of a configure to order model. That is to prepare us for our transitions at some of the sites to Oracle. That's about another $1 million that is onetime items in the quarter. So going forward, we still feel comfortable that we will be in that range that we communicated before, Steve.

Okay, thanks for the help on that. With the new products becoming available, I know one of the three became available this quarter, but the other two are next quarter. When you roll out new products like this for order, how much can that provide a bump?

Yes, no, good question. So the first machine was a significant upgrade of one of our best sellers that we've had in the portfolio. We've had really good customer feedback on that and in this case it's more of a cost improvement opportunity. On the Milling Machine that will go next, if you go and look at the market, that is the single biggest product model that is sold in the milling market. So it's a significant opportunity for us. If you look at our dealers today, if every dealer sells two of those machines next year, we talk about 50 machines plus. So it actually can have a nice bump for us and then on the paver, same comment there. It's the single biggest market segment where we didn't really play in the past. We still have some testing to do. The prototypes are still being worked on. But the same comment, if every dealer just sells two of those machines, you talk about another 50 machines.

Okay. The last couple of quarters or maybe even more, you've been talking about the investments to improve plant efficiency. Can you tell what's your take on when we'll start seeing that in your numbers?

Yes. Now so we have, obviously we're investing in all our facilities and that is what you're starting to see flowing through in the margins over the last four, five quarters. The two significant ones that we are making is in our factory in Northern Ireland. And then one of our big infrastructure solutions factories here in Chattanooga. And in the last factory, as I mentioned in the script, all the capital equipment is in place. The layouts are now in place. So now it's a matter of putting the final touches on line balancing and getting everybody trained in the new processes. So we already expect that Q4 will start to see some of those improvements and then quite a bit in next year.

Yes, Steve, I would also add that what we're expecting and what we're seeing is that about six months after a site goes live with Oracle, we're seeing those operational improvements from the system. So we are already seeing them now in that first site and certainly in our corporate teams and their work balance. So it really confirms our investments will have solid returns. We're seeing it a little bit ahead of what we anticipated, but definitely six months after goal life per each site.

The investments we're making in the factory in Northern Island, there's significant new product development that is included in that project. So that will take a little bit longer. We will most probably start to see the benefits of that later next year and even into 2025. However, we will actually produce some of the models that we currently sell at that facility. And that will give us additional capacity for both the U.S. but for the rest of the world as well.

Your next question is from a line of Larry De Maria with William Blair.

Thanks. Good morning. I wanted to go back to a couple things here. We expected orders to moderate, given the timing of the dealer event. I think you'd call that out. We discussed it last quarter. Then you also commented that you expected to write a lot of tickets and get back to your sort of prior levels. Is that implied we should be looking for orders that are in the range from 3Q of ‘22, which was really high at $450 million. So [inaudible] now what's the reason for expectation to think about for a pickup in orders based on the comment you made?

Yes, I must probably need to come back to you on that one. I don't have a clear answer.

Yes, Larry, this is Steve. It's okay if I jump in. But that $450 million range that you mentioned when you're doing the implied orders, obviously backlogs. The key factor there, Q3 of last year, was our peak backlog at $969 million. But if you looked at the implied orders overall, I mean, we've been in that 235, 240, plus or minus implied order rate for the past three quarters. So, we have seen the normalization where it's been in that range and then have some chance for some upside going forward.

Okay. That's a good range. Thank you. Secondly, can you go into some further detail in inventory? I think we're at a point where deals were short in inventory or still there to some degree. It couldn't get it fast enough and now we have too much. So, can you talk about what happened there? Maybe where yearend inventory might land? And if there is a level of cancellation just leading to that higher inventory?

I'll take that one, Larry. Good morning. Inventory, the makeup of really the increase this quarter was largely in finished goods, which is up $25 million, and WIP which is up $21 million. So it's really that conversion. And we have the one site that carries the lion's share of the inventory, and that's the one that's going through all the transformation work. So their ability to bleed that down will come next year for sure. And we might see some of that in Q4, but that's going to be the meaningful one. And when it drops, it should drop fairly significantly. And they've got high backlog, and they've been working through a lot of change. So that's really, I would say, the lion's share, pipes have turns improvement, because we've got to keep in mind that inventory also has that incremental pricing from our supplier so the normal value will remain higher which we're pricing for and certainly our confident in our ability to price for inflation so.

Yes, Larry also Jaco mentioned about a couple of deals that just didn't get through on the reporting line and that those were certainly an inventory at quarter end but that'll get relieved as those shipments are delivered on a couple of the bigger plants.

Now this is just to make a comment on the finished goods that Becky mentioned. We've had some cancellations but very little to mention actually, Larry, so that's not the risk most of that inventory is carryover is part of the carryover so we'll see that change. If you look at the year-over-year, the cost of that inventory you can work on about 6% or so that is just pure inflation year-over-year and so when you calculate that and the change is not that significant. And we mentioned last quarter that supplier lead times is still elevated so that's still the case even though we have less supplier issues lead times are still high. And I got confirmation just yesterday from our teams that we are continuously updating our supplier lead times and so as lead times come down inventory will be a reflection of that. So, yes, we have some work to do there for sure obviously it's costing us in terms of interest so we are really focused on driving that over the next couple of quarters.

Okay. If I could just sneak more in here. Thank you for that color. Look, we had a quarter with lower expect margin, even solving for the litigation, higher inventory and you have one factory going through a transformation. I believe this would be a little concerned on the ERP implementation. So can you maybe discuss that a little bit more, maybe the impact of ERP outside of expectations in the quarter and how that ultimately is going? Because obviously there'd be some concern that's having some impact. Thank you.

Yes, Larry, great question. I think it's important to separate two things going on at this one site. So there's two different transformation efforts going on. They have the Oracle implementation, which happened in May. But for the last two years, all of last year and all of this year, there's been $25 million of capital improvements that are going on. And when you have a tight floor footprint, it's like a quilt, right? You pick out a patch and you move it and then you move it to equipment and you keep playing musical chairs until everything comes in. So it's that same facility, so it's not just one effort that's going on, if you will. So they will be turning the corner here and as Jaco mentioned, they're just about through the last investment is happening right now and we'll turn on a state-of-the-art ERP system in Q1. And then the capital investment there is really complete and their Oracle system is in and they're perfecting that. We're seeing some operational improvements from both those already, but it's going to be meaningful more so next year.

Okay, thanks. So aside from that facility then there's nothing outside the ordinary and what's specific to the ERP system broadly at Astec this quarter?

I mean, right now we're in the middle of designing the ETO module for the future sites and the teams are getting ready for the 2024 launches. We have a significant number of our infrastructure solution sites that will go live next year. And we are continuously monitoring the cost. And right now we're still in the ranges of what we reported before. And if we see anything change on that, we'll obviously inform the market about that.

Yes, but to be very specific, no impacts in Q3 or Q4 to performance expected from ERP.

There are no further questions in the queue. I'd like to hand the call back to Steve Anderson for closing remarks.

All right, thank you Dennis. We appreciate your participation on the conference call this morning and thank you for your interest in Astec. As today's news release indicates, today's conference call has been recorded. A replay of this conference call will be available through November 15, 2023. And an archive webcast will be available for 90 days. The transcript will be available under the Investors to Relations section of the Astec Industries website within the next seven days. All of that information is contained in the news release distributed earlier this morning. This concludes our call, but I'm happy to connect with you if you have any additional questions. So thank you all and have a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time. And have a wonderful day.