William M. Cook
Analyst · Charley Brady with BMO Capital Markets
Thanks, Jim. Fortunately, our outlook hasn't materially changed from what we provided in October. As Jim mentioned, we had a slight change to the top line due to a tweak in the foreign currency rates we use when updating our forecast, as the U.S. dollar has strengthened again recently. However, in local currency or constant exchange rates, our full year sales forecast has remained the same. As we look to each region of the world, we -- first, we expect most of Europe to remain in the recession for the balance of our fiscal year. Moving to Asia, it's recently been reported that the Chinese economy bottomed out in the July-August period, and we believe that conditions there could begin to slowly improve during the second half of our fiscal year. We see the current U.S. conditions as a short-term correction or pause. Now obviously, should conditions in any of these regions show signs of being worse than we forecasted, we will, of course, quickly respond and expand our cost-saving actions to address our cost structure to actual business levels. However, our current forecast is that we are expecting our total company sales to grow approximately 4% over the next 9 months for the balance of our fiscal '13, with some businesses, such as Gas Turbine, going much faster and obviously helping our overall results. In total, we expect our full year fiscal '13 sales to be between $2.5 billion and $2.6 billion or up between 0% and 4% compared to the record sales we delivered last year. Within our Industrial Products reporting segment, we're forecasting sales to increase 4% to 10%. This will be led by our Gas Turbine Systems business, where sales are expected to be up 21% to 27% for the full year, including strong large project shipments in the next 2 quarters. We are forecasting our Industrial Filtration Solutions sales to increase between 0% and 5% for the full year with continued growth in the Americas, slowly improving conditions in Asia and particularly China, both offsetting the recessionary conditions in Europe. And finally, we're forecasting sales of our Special Applications Products to increase between 1% and 7% for the full year, as we're anticipating improved demand for our membrane products, better disk drive filter sales and growing demand for our new venting products. In our Engine Products reporting segment, we're expecting sales to be even with last year. Our on-road global OEM customers are planning to build fewer trucks during fiscal '13. As I mentioned earlier, ACT Research forecast Class 8 build rates to be down 15% in our fiscal '13. However, medium duty build rates are expected to be up 4%. Within our Off-Road Products sales, we expect ag equipment demand to remain strong in the Americas. We expect demand for equipment use in residential construction to continue improving in North America, while demand for larger equipment used in non-residential construction is expected to be weaker. In Europe, demand for construction equipment, generally, is also expected to be weak. In Asia, we anticipate demand for construction equipment to begin improving in the second half of our fiscal year. However, we still expect production rates to remain below end market demand for the next few quarters, as our OEM equipment customers continue to work off their current excess inventory levels. We foresee current softer demand for mining-related equipment continuing and the excess inventory of some categories of mining equipment to keep production of new mining equipment below last year's levels. Finally, we do expect low-single digit growth for our aftermarket or replacement filter sales business. While utilization rates of on-road trucks and off-road equipment in North America are lower, they still remain positive and are expected to continue to be positive. We expect utilization rates of equipment in Asia to begin improving over the balance of our fiscal year, while we expect our aftermarket dealers in Europe to remain cautious given the recessionary conditions. So overall, looking forward into a pretty hazy future, we are now facing a mixed bag of economic conditions. We do have some strong end markets, such as GTS. We have some good regional stories, including Latin America. However, we're also seeing weaker conditions in many of our engine OEM equipment end markets, especially on-road heavy truck and several of the off-road equipment segments. So while we can't control the economic environment we live in, we are focused on those things we can control. By doing this, we can offset much of the general economic weakness in the environment, and in effect, to help create our own recovery. We are doing this in many ways. As we've discussed in previous calls, we have many significant market share growth opportunities in many of the faster growing emerging economies, where we remain underrepresented. We are continuing to add resources, distribution and OEM customers in these currently underserved regions. For example, in the engine aftermarket in our last quarter, we added roughly 100 new distributors around the world. We're also continuing to add new part numbers to our product offering, nearly 600 for our aftermarket business in the last quarter. Another key item benefit benefiting us is the ever-increasing number of systems in the field, which are installed with our proprietary filters. Using proprietary technology for first-fit applications will help us and our OEM customers retain a much higher percentage of the replacement filter sales for many years into the future. The essence of our growth model is continually developing innovative new filtration technologies for OEM customers and using the combination of our proprietary technologies and application engineering capabilities to design first-fit systems that provide better value for our customers and help retain their replacement filter business for the future. In other words, using the old razor and blade analogy, designing the best-performing razors over and over again and using our unique designs to retain the blade business for our customers and ourselves. We have a number of different unique designs and proprietary technologies in our arsenal that we're using across our company to accomplish these dual objectives. One that we've specifically highlighted over the last few years is our PowerCore technology. This is a great example of how we invest centrally in technology and then leverage a new technology into as many applications and businesses as possible to realize fast sales growth and the best ROI, which allows us then to reinvest in development of the next generations of new technologies. Our goal is to repeat the cycle over and over again. We are now very successfully using PowerCore in both our Engine and Industrial segments. Our engine PowerCore sales in our first quarter were $29 million, up 22% over last year. And within that, sales of the replacement filters are up 32%. On the industrial side of our business, we sold another 300 Torit PowerCore dust collection systems and doubled our Torit PowerCore replacement filter sales. So in total, Torit PowerCore sales were up 43% from last year's first quarter. Putting the 2 pieces together, our total company PowerCore sales totaled $34 million in the quarter, up 25% over last year. This is just one good example of how we're using our unique technologies to develop products to help us to grow faster than the underlying market growth rates. Now to quickly summarize, we're certainly facing a more challenging global economic environment than we anticipated 3 or 6 months ago. But this isn't the first time we've had to deal with this type of challenge, nor will it be the last. We have a detailed game plan as to how to manage our business both to successfully navigate through the short-term challenges in some of our markets and regions while also taking advantage of the growth opportunities we still see. We will also continue to selectively invest in our company for the future. As we have over the past 25 years, we will continue to utilize, grow and expand our diversified portfolio of filtration businesses, as this has been proven repeatedly over time to be the right business model for our company and our shareholders. We do expect this diversified portfolio of filtration businesses to deliver full year sales growth over last year's record of $2.49 billion and EPS this year of between $1.68 and $1.88 with the midpoint of this range being a new EPS record. This concludes our prepared remarks. Alicia, now we'd like to turn -- open up the call to questions.