William M. Cook
Analyst · Longbow Securities
Thanks, Jim. We completed our most recent sales forecast last week, incorporating the latest market data and input from key customers. Unfortunately, high levels of uncertainty remain in many of our markets. In addition, we're getting significantly less order visibility from our customers than we did a year ago. The result of all of this is that we've adjusted our total sale -- full year sales to be slightly lower than our previous outlook. This update includes our just-completed second quarter, which was weaker than we had originally anticipated. In addition, we have tempered our growth outlook for the balance of this fiscal year. So in total, we now expect our fiscal '13 sales to be approximately equal to the $2.5 billion sales record we achieved last year. Within our Engine Products segment, recent forecasts and announcement from our key global equipment OEM customers suggest that their production rates in both the U.S. and Brazil should increase even further over last year's run levels. However, in other equipment categories, we have not yet seen signs that our OEM customers' production rates for construction and mining equipment or heavy trucks will improve materially before the end of our fiscal year in July. In our engine aftermarket business, we are expecting a gradual improvement as the utilization rates of existing Off-Road equipment and On-Road heavy truck fleets continues to improve. In summary, we now expect full year sales in our Engine Products segment to be slightly lower year-over-year. Now switching to Industrial Products. Our Gas Turbine sales for the full year are now expected to be up 27% to 32% over last year. We have much longer lead times in this business than we have in any of our other businesses, so most of what we're forecasting is already in our open order backlog. Within Gas Turbine, we're expecting very strong third quarter shipments and are forecasting that our fourth quarter sales should be similar to what we reported in our first quarter. Our global Industrial Filtration Solutions sales are now expected to be slightly lower year-over-year. While we are continuing to see positive manufacturing indicators in the U.S., we have yet to see signs of a pickup in Europe. But based on what we are now seeing in the market, we do expect some further improvement in China. And finally, in our Special Applications Products, we are forecasting sales to decrease 1% to 6% as the now weaker end market for disk drive filters is expected to only partially be offset by the growth in venting filters and membrane products. So in total, based on the strength of Gas Turbines, our full year industrial products sales are forecast to increase 2% to 7% for the full year. As we look around the world to the regions, we expect most of Europe to remain in a recession for the balance of our fiscal year. As I just noted, recent economic reports from China have been encouraging with reports of slowly improving end market conditions. An improvement in China will also help our businesses in Japan and South Korea, which support many equipment OEMs who export to China. In the U.S., the continuing uncertainty post the fiscal cliff issue, now with the looming sequestration issue on Friday, has dampened the investment in many end markets. We hope for a speedy resolution of this issue along with the debt ceiling issue behind it. If these levels of uncertainty are reduced, businesses will be better able to make investment decisions, which will drive the demand for our customers' equipment and obviously, then, for our filtration systems. Bottom line, given the high levels of uncertainty in all 3 major regions of the world, we will continue to closely monitor conditions so that we can quickly respond if conditions begin to recover faster than we are currently forecasting. Or conversely, if conditions remain weak, we will expand our cost-saving actions to further adjust our structure to our actual business levels. Now I'd like to switch gears. As Jim mentioned, fortunately, we have many new programs that we have won with our OEM customers that will be going into production over the next 2 years. In order to support their platform launches, we have to do the design and engineering work now to meet our commitments. We are also continuing work on our Strategic Business Systems project. We received approval from our board last July for this 4-year project, and work is well underway. This investment will enable us to utilize standard systems and processes globally to provide an effective foundation for the achievement of both our short and long-term strategic client objectives. Since both of these investments around the engineering work for our customers' platforms and our Strategic Business Systems are directly related to supporting our long-term growth objectives, we are continuing work on both despite the current economic conditions. Now as I have discussed in previous calls, we still have significant market share opportunities in the faster-growing emerging economies, so we are continuing to add sales resources, distribution capabilities and distributors and OEM customers in these regions. For example, in our engine aftermarket, we added 130 new distributors and nearly 650 new part numbers to our product offering in the last quarter. We also continue to add to our own distribution capabilities. In December, we completed the expansion of our existing distribution center in Aguascalientes, Mexico. This most recent expansion doubles the distribution capacity for our Latin American customers. Another key item benefiting us is the ever-increasing number of systems in the field installed with our innovative filter systems. Those of you who have followed Donaldson know that we have a very unique position in most of the markets we serve, since we are the leader in providing the first-fit air filtration systems to our OEM customers. So we have a great opportunity to use our new technologies for these first-fit applications, which will help our OEM customers and us retain a much higher percentage of the replacement filter sales in the future. Within our company, we focus on continually developing breakthrough filtration technologies for our customers. We then use the combination of these innovative filtration technologies and our internal engineering capabilities to design first-fit systems that provide both better value and performance, as well as help retain our customers' replacement filter business. We have a number of different unique designs and breakthrough technologies that we are now using to accomplish these objectives. We estimate that about 30% of the first-fit air filtration systems we are currently manufacturing for our customers are already in this category, and most of the new programs we're currently working on will be with new technology. One of these technologies that we specifically highlighted is PowerCore. It is a great example of how we invest centrally into our R&D and then leverage a new technology into as many applications and businesses as possible. We are now very successfully using PowerCore in both our Engine and Industrial segments. Our engine PowerCore sales in our second quarter were $29 million, up 13% over last year, and within that, sales of PowerCore replacement filters were up 28%. On the Industrial side of our business, we sold another 400 Torit PowerCore dust collection systems and doubled our Torit PowerCore replacement filter sales. In total, Torit PowerCore sales increased 22% from last year's second quarter. So in total, our company's PowerCore sales totaled $34 million in the quarter, up approximately 14% over last year. Now to quickly summarize before we turn it over to Q&A. We do continue to face a more challenging global environment than we had anticipated last summer. We do have a detailed game plan which will allow us to successfully lead our company through these challenges while also taking advantage of the growth opportunities we still see. We will continue to invest in our company for the future, both to support our growth opportunities as well as add the necessary infrastructure for the long term. We will continue to utilize, grow and expand our global diversified portfolio of filtration businesses. This has been proven over time to be the right business model for our company and our shareholders. We are expecting this diversified portfolio to deliver full year sales consistent with last year's record of $2.5 billion and EPS of between $1.61 and $1.81. Ron, this concludes our prepared comments, and now we'd like to open it up to Q&A.