Tony Thene
Analyst · Cowen & Company. Please go ahead
Thank you, Brad, and good morning to everyone on the call today. Let's begin on Slide 4, and a review of our safety performance. Our total case incident rate or TCIR was 1.4 in the first quarter of fiscal year 2020, which is slightly above the performance of fiscal year 2019. Over the last four years, we have made significant strides to improve the safety performance across our facilities. However, we've hit a point where our recordable rate has remained flat without improvement and we are disappointed with the results. Our focus remains on accelerating proactive engagement with our employees and continued investment in the development of our leadership team. We are encouraged that as a result of our effort to redefine the safety culture over the last several years, our employees feel empowered to stop any process or equipment or action that is unsafe. Our employees are the face of our safety program. They are the most knowledgeable about the workplace and how to make it better. In addition, we are putting all of our supervisors through a refresher course, focusing on the principles of human performance. We are investing heavily in our safety programs, hand safe, ergonomics, human performance and the stop program to name a few. That will lead to sustainable and lasting improvement across our business. Through employee engagement, system improvement and leadership commitment, we will continue toward our goal of a zero injury workplace. Now, let's turn to Slide 5, and a review of our first quarter performance. In our first quarter, once again, we delivered impressive operating performance. Let me highlight a couple of noteworthy points. First, we delivered our 11th consecutive quarter of year-over-year sales growth and earnings growth. Second, we generated record first quarter operating income at SAO. And third, SAO adjusted operating margin was 20.6% during the first quarter, this marked our second consecutive quarter of 20 plus percent adjusted operating margin at SAO. In addition, commercial execution remain strong as we continue to drive a richer product mix and delivered our 11th consecutive quarter of year-over-year backlog growth up 26%. This backlog growth includes strong gains in our key end use markets. Aerospace and defense backlog was up 40% compared to last year and medical backlog was up 15% over last year. In the aerospace and defense end use market, sales were up 19% compared to last year with gains across almost all of our submarkets as we continue to benefit from a broad industry participation and submarket diversity. We are also uniquely positioned with our Athens facility to provide incremental capacity during this aerospace peak cycle. Overall, customer engagement levels at Athens remain high and we received an additional VAP qualification during the quarter. Customers continue to work aggressively to secure capacity with us via long-term agreements. In fact, we recently finalized two long-term agreements with major OEMs where we are able to gain incremental market share with favorable pricing. Another important and rapidly growing end use market for us is medical where sales increased 11% compared to last year and forward demand for our solutions remain strong. Sales into the medical market have consistently outpaced the broader industry which is a clear indication of the value of our solution and our ability to consistently gain market share. Given our elevated supply chain position in the medical market, we are expanding our production capabilities and capacity at our Dynamet facility to capitalize on the attractive high margin growth opportunities we see in the years ahead. Finally, we continue to support our consistent quarter-over-quarter earnings growth and strong sales execution with strategic investments in the long-term future of our industry. A company of the future must explore next generation sales and earnings growth drivers to remain successful. In recent years an area where we have focused is additive manufacturing where we have built a leading end-to-end active manufacturing platform. We are currently generating operating losses in our Carpenter additive business, which is part of the PEP segment. It is important to note that those losses are the equivalent of research and development cost as we drive to create a business that will generate accelerated long-term growth for Carpenter Technology and enhanced value for our shareholders. I will talk more about our capabilities and key emerging technology including additive manufacturing and soft magnetics later in my comments. Now, let's move to Slide 6, and the end use market update. Looking first to the aerospace and defense, sales were up 19% over last year, on a sequential basis sales were down, but the overall strength in the market muted the typical seasonal decline compared to prior years. Demand patterns across our submarkets remain strong and our leadership in multiple attractive application area is driving growth. Demand in the engine submarket remains at high levels, and we saw a strong demand in the fastener submarket during the quarter. Certainly, the 737 MAX situation is a significant issue for the industry. We continue to monitor the situation and are in regular contact with our customers, current reports suggest it will be resolved in the near future. While we are seeing some adjustments in order patterns in inventory planning primarily in distribution, we are also still seeing request for expedited delivery and increased orders from materials used for spares. Accordingly, we have not reduced production rate and have no current plan to reduce production rate as these are longer lead time products, we have a significant backlog and our solutions are utilized across multiple aircraft applications and platforms. Overall, we continue to see strong demand for aerospace grade materials and the medium to long-term industry demand is expected to remain robust. Current backlog is close to 13,000 aircraft which represents seven to eight years of production. Moving onto the medical end use market where sales were up 11% compared to last year reflecting continued market share growth. The sequential decline in sales was largely driven by normal seasonality. Looking ahead, the outlook for the medical market points to solid demand patterns, our key submarkets, orthopedics, cardiology and dental all expect consistent growth in the coming years. We continued to generate year-over-year sales growth well above market growth rate which demonstrates our ability to gain share and develop strategic inroads with major industry OEMs. In addition, collaboration on [agile] [ph] manufacturing with customers is accelerating and AEM products continue to penetrate the medical market given their potential to improve patient outcomes. In just a few years, we have transitioned from being primarily a supplier to distributors to now being a strategic OEM partner whose portfolio of material solutions is increasingly recognized in the development of new medical devices and applications. In the transportation end use market sales were up 5% compared to last year and up 2% sequentially. The increases were driven primarily by richer product mix as we look to emphasize solutions that have been specifically engineered for high temp and high wear applications. While international markets continue to struggle with macro related headwinds and new emission regulations, the demand in North America remains relatively stable. Tariffs have impacted our mode of supply chain, but we are working hard to offset those challenges by expanding market growth in countries not impacted by the tariffs. Now moving to the energy end use market and our oil and gas and power generation sub-markets. Total energy sales were down 12% compared to last year. Overall, the oil and gas sub-market is facing notable headwinds in North America as operators have steadily moved from growing production to managing for cash flow. North America rig count declined 3% on a sequential basis following a 10% sequential decline last quarter. On a year-over-year basis, the rig count is down 16%. The market slowdown has been accelerated due to operators reaching budget exhaustion earlier than normal in North America. The decline in drilling activity and contraction in the number of running rigs has created increasing pricing pressure as operators move to capture market share. The declining market activity and growing pricing pressures continue to negatively impact the overall tour, rental and service market, which in turn has affected Amega West operating performance. In the industrial and consumer end use market revenues were down 19% both year-over-year and sequentially. Sales in industrial market where negatively impacted by reduced global manufacturing and a related decline in demand for select applications. Our performance was also impacted by our ongoing portfolio prioritization as we continue shifting our overall production towards higher value applications. Lastly, sales into the consumer market increased year-over-year as we experienced solid demand in consumer electronics. In fact, we enjoyed one of the strongest quarters in terms of bookings in the last four years. We expect to see continued healthy demand for our high-end electronic products given the increasing need for critical applications. Now I'll turn it over to Tim for the financial review.