Harold Bevis
Analyst · Dougherty & Company. Your line is open
Thank you, Kirk. And thanks to everyone for joining the call today to discuss our first quarter results.Given this is my first earnings call with you I’d like to briefly introduce myself. I’ve been working with the CVG management team for the last six years as an Independent Director and for the last eight weeks as CEO. My background experience and knowledge of the Company, its customers and our strategy was well suited as we progress towards our long term goals.That said, the magnitude of the COVID pandemic and its impact on our business was very swift and unexpected. However, our team immediately sprung into action. As you saw in early May, we provided an interim update that included our actions in response to the COVID pandemic as well as our preliminary first quarter results.Furthermore, we announced last week that we’ve amended our long-term -- excuse me, our term loan, and our asset-based revolving credit facility. This new agreement provides the Company with additional flexibility to right size certain parts of the Company to a post-COVID environment, and expands our ability to improve the Company.As Tim will discuss later, we continue to believe that our ample liquidity is sufficient to meet our operating growth and restructuring needs. Prior to the onset of COVID, we had already been preparing for a cyclical slowdown in end market demand, which started late in 2019 and continued into the beginning of 2020.The pandemic first impacted our operations in Shanghai, China in January. And then, as we all know, the COVID virus spread through Europe and North America, and significantly affected our operations in those regions, including OEM production suspensions, and our own temporary shutdowns to dramatically scale back our supply to those plants.On a positive note, our China business is now operating at pre-COVID rates as are our material handling and military businesses. Additionally, the impact to our sizable aftermarket business has been less than it has been on new commercial vehicle production. While it has only been a short time since I transitioned from Independent Director to CEO, I’ve been very impressed by how rapidly the team came together and took action to adjust to our new operational realities that this global crisis has brought us.I’m proud to be working alongside such dedicated and driven individuals. The health and safety of our employees remains our top priority. And where our work is underway, we have implemented heightened cleaning and sanitizing processes, social distancing requirements and provided for personal protective equipment. In fact, at our plant in Saltillo, Mexico, we are producing masks for all of our employees and their families to help keep them safe during this uncertain time.In the face of these significant headwinds, the immediate focus of the CVG leadership team is the alignment of the business to the current marketplace realities and preserving our capabilities so that we can restart our operations efficiently. We are progressively implementing a series of cost reduction measures to further align our cost structure and business practices to the current environment, preserve liquidity and protect our workforce.These measures include permanent reduction of the salaried workforce, temporary compensation reductions, furloughs, as well as big reductions in most discretionary expenses. We are implementing lean staffing org charts where we can and are managing our working capital investments tightly while remaining prepared to take further actions as developments occur. Additionally, we’ve been working closely with our customers to prioritize key projects and short-term production decisions.Turning to our end markets. As I mentioned, the North American medium and heavy-duty truck markets were already in a cyclical decline coming into 2020. As noted in our year-end commentary, our initial outlook for 2020 was based on industry data, which signaled declines in 2020 Class 8 production of approximately 40% and Class 5-7 production decline of approximately 15% to 20%. We also anticipated a decline of 15% to 20% in the global construction markets we serve. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the North American truck markets have subsequently come to a halt. And more specifically, our customers temporarily closed their facilities and curtailed production, resulting in significant production efficiencies that began in the second half of March, and have continued through April and early May.Substantially all of our major customers are in the process of restarting production. And as a result, we are restarting our operations in sync. Given the nature and timing of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on global business operations, we expect to see production inefficiencies throughout the second quarter as we restart the majority of our plants. However, the time span and pace of the recovery is unknown.At this point, our expectations for build rates in the short term remain low, and we are staffing accordingly. However, there is a consensus among commercial vehicle builders that lower production levels will persist in the near term.As I mentioned earlier, portions of our business have been operating at pre-COVID levels. Encouragingly, we have seen an uptick [Technical Difficulty] for military applications and a surge in demand for material handling, as e-commerce grows in importance following the outbreak of the pandemic. As a result, we expanded the FSE operations from one plant to three plants, utilizing two existing CVG facilities. We are aligning with key players in this industry and are well-positioned to take advantage of the demand surge of material handling equipment.As we work through the short term issues presented by COVID-19, we remain focused on our long-term sales diversification strategy. We are aggressively pursuing opportunities to expand and diversify into the electric vehicle market, last mile market delivery, and non-commercial vehicle markets altogether. We have had encouraging conversations with customers to grow and expand in material handling, military and other non-cyclical end markets. We remain confident in our market position, as well as immediate and decisive actions we have taken to aggressively align the organization to the new market environment.While we expect to see the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in future quarters, we will remain prudent in the execution of our long-term strategy to position the Company to emerge from this crisis in a stronger position than when we entered in.With that, I will turn the call over to Tim who will discuss the financials in more detail.