Harold Bevis
Analyst · Colliers
Thank you, Kirk, and thank you to everyone for joining the call today. Ed and I are going to refer to the earnings deck that's available on our website as we speak this morning and bring our result to life a little bit. And I'm referring right now some of my comments to Page 3 in that deck. I'm proud that our global team responded appropriately during this downturn and delivered positive EBITDA of a little over $1 million and generated cash of a little over $9 million despite a 48% decline in revenue. We were able to offset some of that margin hit with a very aggressive and comprehensive set of cost-outs, which I'm going to elaborate on in a couple of pages, of which $8 million showed up in the quarter and a larger amount on a full year annualized basis. It was a combination of permanent and short-term actions and included corporate overhead reductions, plant overhead reductions, footprint consolidation as well as additional actions on discretionary spending. We also offset some multimillion-dollar impacts that are in that $1 million of EBITDA and $9 million of cash. As you would expect in an abrupt downturn like this, we did have overhead absorption issues in the plants. We had excess inventory calculations that we needed to absorb. We had COVID-related absences. We had temporary closures of our facilities. We reconfigured our offices in our 25 plants to add barriers and create social distancing for our approximately 7,000 employees. It's a lot of work. We're happy to say that our core markets are now in recovery mode. At the bottom of Page 3 is the ACT research report and the outlook for our core market, about 35% of our revenue is North America truck. That's always been the heartbeat of our company. And when that market took a dive in the second quarter, it affected us. And we're happy that, that was -- that abnormal and unnatural level of truck building is behind us, and we have quite significant increases underway as we speak. We're feeling them. Our internal results are consistent with these outlooks. And the heavy-duty truck build market is expected to increase 50% in the quarter that we're in and medium duty, 30%. So turning to Page 4. I'd like to elaborate a little bit on the comprehensive actions that we took. We have several actions in process, and we completed some actions in the quarter. We did use the opportunity of light demand to initiate an aggressive consolidation and repurposing of 13 of our facilities. We have 25 facilities, so it was roughly half of the facilities that we went after here to optimize and reposition. We were able to achieve a $14 million inventory reduction in the quarter as well, primarily by attacking procurement activities as our consumption and production rates were much lighter than we expected. We rightsized our staff and SG&A as well as the plants, and we rightsized our material order quantities be consistent with the amount of production that we had. And we reset our discretionary spending decisions in travel, marketing and other discretionary areas. We have improvements that are still underway that are not in our reported numbers here. We have consolidations that are underway, and we have some additional headcount actions that are forthcoming. So we have a full complement of actions that are very aggressive. Third point I want to make is that we did not rate our future. We kept going with the growth initiatives that we have underway. And we had some strong wins in the quarter. They're private. We can't say who the customers are, we're covered by NDA, but they're significant. And we had over $100 million of new business that's in its final stages now, one with an electric vehicle customer, one with a warehouse automation customer, and I'm going to touch on both of them in a couple of slides. We are aggressively adding people and capacity to support these growth initiatives and add to our heritage of commercial vehicle part making. And on Page 4, just to take you quick on the actions that are in process, we're consolidating and repurposing 12 facilities, rightsizing our salaried staff and discretionary spending. We're hiring new leaders with knowledge of new markets. We're redesigning our supply chains to be more lean, and we have a strict management of working capital underway that's continuing. Turning to Page 5. Another positive point is that there's a multiyear recovery expected in commercial vehicle production. This is, again, as an ACT Research report that we're referring to. And our customer dialogues are consistent with these outlooks. There is an expectation to recover back to pre-COVID levels. And we will be recovering back to those levels with a lower cost structure. We've permanently lowered the breakeven point of this company and our cost structure, and we do expect to have better margins as this unfolds. Additionally, we do expect to have additional revenue from the new business wins beginning in the fourth quarter of this year. Turning to Page 6. We are aggressively trying to change in certain areas. We're very proud of our part of making heritage for commercial vehicles, and we continue to remain a leader in those areas and they're core to what we do, but we are trying to add significantly to the revenue profile and our profit rates going forward. Three main areas are really leadership, innovation and new markets. We are supplementing the strong team that we have here with new people that have knowledge of alternate markets, and we're kickstarting an innovation program to be much more aggressive in new product introduction across all our divisions and we are explicitly entering new markets, again, by repurposing a portion of our manufacturing capacity and adding leaders who understand these markets and have them be the tip of the spear for us as we enter in and choose correctly and target correctly. Page 7, we are pivoting the company towards these new markets, tilting towards these new markets. And there's 3 parts to it: there's optimizing the financial performance of the business that we have; number two 2 is adding new people and growing outside of our traditional markets; and number three is building on the strong momentum that we already have. The FSE acquisition was a really good one. We got a great team there, and we got a lot of new customers that add to our customer roster and completely new product set. Assembly of high-speed automation equipment for warehouses as well as military equipment. And there's a little graphic on the bottom of Page 7 of what we're trying to do. We want to maintain our business and our shares that we have in our traditional markets and grow disproportionately in the new targeted markets that we have. Page 8. We do have a multi-period reposition of our footprint underway, and this is just a graphic to show you what we're doing. We're implementing a set of actions that's involving many, many people. I won't take you through the different plant agendas, but we are repositioning factories in 3 countries: China, Mexico and the United States. We are adding dedicated floor space to make new products. We are consolidating production to lower our cost points and mature product areas, and we're consolidating where we've made a determination that we have excess cost and excess space. We expect to generate an ability to support another $100 million to $150 million of new business in our targeted markets, mix dependent. That's a big range because the mix and the size of these products is quite different and unique. Additionally, we do -- we are targeting to lower our cost by $4 million to $6 million as we go through this repositioning. On Page 9, I want to talk a minute about the fast-growing e-commerce and last-mile delivery market. We had our first big win in this market with our Unity seat. You see a little picture here where you have a global platform we're rolling out across our seat factories, and we're absolutely trying to penetrate the medium-duty commercial vehicle market. As you know, trucks are delineated by the tonnage they can carry. And the medium-duty product lines and medium-duty trucking is growing nicely around the world and it's driven in many cases by e-commerce and last-mile delivery. They're also coupled with the trends away from combustion engines to electric vehicle propulsion. And in this quarter, we had a big seating win with a company that's focused on using electric vehicles for last-mile delivery. Once again, we're not at liberty to say who that company is through the privacy agreements that we've agreed to, but it's someone that you would be happy that has entered into our customer roster. This is a growing market. The e-commerce market, as we all know, is growing rapidly, especially boosted a little bit during the coronavirus as people have stayed at home and huddled at home and ordered more online than it was expected even. Page 10, just a little bit more about our growing warehouse automation business. This was a key reason why we went out looking for FSE, First Source Electronics. And we are leveraging their know-how and relationships. We've brought into play 3 other factories within Commercial Vehicle Group to make their products, so in the quarter just ended, we expanded from 1 facility to 4, and it gave us a bigger footprint to accommodate a growth with the customers they had as well as new customers. And this market is absolutely central to what we are trying to be and add to our Commercial Vehicle heritage. This business is growing nicely. It's expected to grow to $27 billion, and we are a central player in this business right now. Page 11. We are absolutely navigating near-term market disruption. This has been very disruptive. What's happened in our traditional markets, our customers abruptly closed down their factories. Given that we are a JIT supplier to them, we abruptly shut down as well. Then they restarted, then we had to rehire. We previously put out an 8-K that we had to lay off 5,250 people when this happened. We've now rehired over 4,000 of them. So it was an abrupt layoff, furloughs, closures, restart, rehire that we've been through. It's behind us now. It happened during the quarter. It happened in April mainly. But right now, we are experience -- the ACT forecast that we've seen, we're experiencing that kind of growth back as well. We continue to invest right through here with long-term investments in hiring people. You can see a graphic medical housings to add to our plastic parts business warehousing equipment and designing of new products. These are the pictures here. Page 12. Just to recap it a little bit on the 4 focus areas that we have underway to pivot and change the company's profile. Number one is to optimize the core business. That's cost, that's working capital, that's on-time delivery, that's quality. We also have a really special aftermarket business that we're differentially focused on now to grow. And then there's -- we have a new look that we're taking at certain business that's never made much money for us and making new decisions. I've spoken about the electric vehicle market a little bit. Each of our businesses is trying to win in this market, electrical vehicle market. The warehouse automation business, led by the FSE team and now supplemented by other Commercial Vehicle Group team is leading to a major charge into that market and where we have excellent customer references, and the e-commerce business is absolutely exploding in -- the delivery business through Internet ordering is unbelievably growing. So we're very happy to have a footprint in there. And then new markets altogether. So we have great equipment, great people that know what they're doing, and we're repurposing a big portion of our capabilities to be able to grow in these new markets with new customers and new products. So Page 13. We're embracing new, we're embracing who we are. And really, today, our heartbeat is all about commercial vehicles. We're proud of that. We're adding new approaches, new direction and new decisions to add to it and warehousing, electric vehicles and new markets on top of it. So all in all, the quarter was a tough one, really, tough one, really hard on a lot of our employees. The temporary actions we had to take, the layoffs we had to do, the shutdowns we had to go through, the people that got sick with coronavirus themselves, it was a tough quarter but we're through it. Coronavirus is still here. We're set up to deal with it in our factories and in our offices, and we're working through it and attacking these new areas. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Ed Carney. Ed joined during the quarter. I was thankful that Ed joined. He's our Interim Chief Financial Officer. We've put out an announcement on that, been working hand-in-hand going through this quarter. And Ed, if you could take it from here, please.