William M. Cook
Analyst · BB&T Capital Markets
Thanks, Jim. We recently completed our most recent sales forecast this week, incorporating the latest data from the market and input from our key customers. It appears that the weak end market conditions that we have seen with many of our OEM customers may now just beginning to stabilize. Unfortunately, we're still not yet seeing the signs of these conditions will materially improve in any of our capital equipment-related end markets. This is disappointing that we had -- as we've previously anticipated that by now, we will be seeing signs of improvement in many of these end markets. But the general global recovery that we've all been waiting for has just been pushed out further into the future. And for us, this means at least another quarter based on what we can see today. In total, we now expect our full year fiscal '13 sales to be between $2.4 billion and $2.45 billion, down slightly from the record $2.5 billion we delivered last year. For us to be down even slightly from our prior year is unusual as we posted 21 sales records out of the past 24 years, but we have dealt with this before and we know what to do. And now I'd like to review each of our segments. Within our Engine Products segment, the recent forecasts and announcement from our key global ag equipment OEM customers suggest that their production rates in both the U.S. and Brazil will increase over last year's strong levels. However, in our other OEM equipment categories, we have not yet seen signs that our customer production rates for new construction and mining equipment or heavy trucks will improve materially before the end of our fiscal year in July. Particularly for new mining equipment, we're now expecting ongoing weak conditions through the end of this calendar year. In our engine aftermarket business, we are expecting a gradual improvement as utilization rates of existing off-road, ag and construction equipment and on-road heavy truck fleets continues to improve. And as I'll talk about more in a minute, we continue to see higher growth rates for our proprietary replacement filters. So in summary, we expect our full year sales in Engine Products to be down between 4% and 6% year-over-year versus last year's record. Now switching to our Industrial Products segment. Our Gas Turbine sales for the full year are now expected to be up between 27% to 30% over last year. We have longer lead times in this business than we have in any of our other businesses. And we can see that the strong sales we recorded, especially over the last 2 quarters, to now be over. A significant reason for this is that as we mentioned last quarter, we shipped several unusually large projects in the last 6 months. One of these, the Qurayyah project in Saudi Arabia totaled $25 million, and we do not see a repeat of these types of unusually large projects in fiscal '14. So our fourth quarter Gas Turbine sales should be similar to what we shipped in the first quarter this year, approximately $50 million. While the Gas Turbine market remains a great long-term growth opportunity for us due to the absence of any large projects during the next 12 months and the ongoing weak global economic impact on the demand for new electricity power generation, we expect our Gas Turbine shipments over the next 12 months to be more similar to fiscal '12's $180 million. Now looking at the next part of our Industrial segment, our global Industrial Filtration Solutions sales are expecting a mid-single-digit percentage decline year-over-year. Manufacturing indicators in the U.S. have flattened out in the recent quarter. However, Europe remains stuck in its longest recession since World War II. Similarly, manufacturing indicators in China are not as strong as they were a quarter ago. The better news here is that overall, we're seeing good demand for our industrial replacement filters, which indicates that while the demand for new equipment remains weak, there is still a solid level of manufacturing activity that's taking place. And finally in our Special Applications Products, we're forecasting full year fiscal '13 sales to decrease 8% to 11% due to ongoing weakness in both our disk drive filter and membrane products businesses. In total, we now forecast our full year Industrial Products segment sales to be consistent with last year. If, or should I say when, these ongoing levels of global economic uncertainty are reduced, businesses will be more confident making new investment decisions, which will drive the demand for our customers' equipment and obviously then for our filtration systems. But bottom line, given the high levels of uncertainty in all 3 major regions of the world, we will continue to focus on those things we can control within our company and strive for further improvements in our key operating metrics until we see concrete signs of a general business rebound. Now as we've discussed in previous calls, we continue to have significant growth opportunities in the faster-growing emerging economies. So even in the weak global environment, we're continuing to add sales resources, distribution capabilities and distributors and actually, even OEM customers in these regions. For example, in our engine aftermarket, we added 110 new distributors and 830 new part numbers to our product offering in the last quarter. Another key initiative benefiting us is the ever-increasing numbers of filtration systems in the field installed with our innovative filters. For those of you who have followed Donaldson for a while, you know that we have a unique -- a very unique position in our markets since we are the leader in providing the first-fit air filtration systems to our OEM customers. We focus on continuing -- continually developing breakthrough filtration technologies for these customers. We then use the combination of these innovations and our engineering capabilities to design first-fit systems that provide both better value and performance, as well as helping our OEM customers and us retain a higher percentage of the ongoing replacement filter sales. We have a number of different breakthrough designs and technologies that we're using to accomplish these objectives. We now estimate that approximately 30% of the first-fit air filtration systems we're currently manufacturing for our OEM customers are already in this proprietary category. And in the last quarter alone, we won another $100 million of new OEM programs, which we'll launch in the future. Most of these programs were won with our latest proprietary filtration systems, which bodes well for continued growth of our aftermarket business. So we feel very optimistic about our future prospects despite the current uncertain economic environment, and since most of our -- these new programs are currently -- we're currently working on will be with new technologies. And one of these technologies that we have specifically highlighted is PowerCore. It's also a great example of how we invest centrally into R&D and then leverage a new technology into as many applications and as many of our businesses as possible. We are now very successful in using PowerCore in both our engine and industrial segments. Our engine PowerCore sales in the third quarter were $30 million, up 9% over last year. Within that, sales of PowerCore replacement filters are up 25%. On the industrial side of our business, we sold another 350 Torit PowerCore dust collection systems, while our Torit PowerCore replacement filter sales increased 77%. In total, for the company, PowerCore sales totaled $35 million in the quarter, up 6% over last year. Now to quickly summarize. The current challenging global industrial environment is both weaker and has persisted longer than we had originally expected or hoped. But enough about the global economy, which we obviously can't control. What I want to highlight is the great job the entire Donaldson team has done by proactively running our company. As I noted earlier, despite our lower sales, our operating margin percentage was a record, and our cash flow generation was outstanding. These performances are the compilation of numerous Continuous Improvement initiatives across our businesses and regions, and I want to thank all of my fellow employees for their efforts and persistence, which have really paid off. Our good operating performance is allowing us to continue to invest in our company for the future, both to support our growth opportunities, as well as to add the necessary infrastructure for the long term. So 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. Greg, this concludes our prepared comments. We'd now like to open the call up to questions.