Andy Lampereur
Analyst · Justin Bergner with Gabelli & Company. Please proceed
Thanks, Bob and good morning everyone. I am going to start today's financial review on Slide 4, with the reconciliation of second quarter GAAP to non-GAAP results to remove the current year restructuring costs and impairment charges. As reported in last week's press release, we recognized a $169 million net impairment charge to reduce the carrying value of our Cortland, Viking and Maximatecc businesses. The triggering event for the impairment charge for our energy businesses with the additional round of oil and gas, customer capital expenditure reductions that’s impacting our Cortland and Viking business units, which are tied to the exploration, drilling, and commissioning value streams in the oil and gas industry. We also wrote down the carrying value of our Maximatecc business, the result of reduced forecast. Excluding the $169 million impairment charge and about $4 million of restructuring expense neither of which were included in our guidance, we generated earnings per share of $0.21 a share compared to our second quarter guidance of $0.17 to $0.22 a share. These adjusted results include the benefit of lower effective income tax rate that will provide both cash and earnings benefit for the balance of the fiscal year. Relative to our second quarter guidance, the lower tax rate benefited EPS by about a nickel a share. Turning now to Page 5, we prepared a comparison of our second quarter results excluding the impairment charges in both years as well as restructuring costs this year. Our current year second quarter sales declined 13% while adjusted operating profit declined at a higher rate on account of lower gross profit margins. Our year-over-year EPS declined 25% as a result of lower operating profit which is partially offset by the lower income tax rate and lower share count due to buybacks. I’ll dissect these numbers in greater detail starting with slides with sales on Slide 6. Consolidated sales for the quarter were down 13% with 5% of that due to currency rate changes and 8% being core sales declined. Our second quarter core sales declined in all three segments, but the declines in the Industrial and the Engineered Solution segments were a little worse than we had expected. We attribute that to the weaker demand across a variety of industrial end markets as well as destocking by off-highway OEMs. The weakness continued as our quarter progressed and was evidence in all geographic regions with the Americas and emerging markets being particularly soft. Turning now to operating profit margins on Slide 7, we saw the normal downward seasonal trend in the second quarter on account of holiday shutdowns and the slow season for energy maintenance. Compounding that this quarter were two particular items unfavorable sales mix and under absorbed fixed overhead costs due to OEM destocking. Our consolidated second quarter operating profit margin excluding the restructuring costs and impairment charges in both years declined 250 basis points from 13.9% to 11.4% this year. Sales mix in the quarter was unfavorable reflecting the largest core sales decline in our highest incremental margin businesses. Additionally, we had unfavorable mix within energy, as our Hydratight maintenance business grew over 10% during the quarter, but that primarily took place in its lower margin service product line. Overall, mix cost us 50 basis points of margin at the consolidated level – at the gross profit level as well, which flowed through the operating profit line. Now, I’ll spend a few minutes on each of our three segments, starting first with the Industrial segment on Slide 8. Industrial segment results reflected the weaker year-over-year demand with distributors reporting challenging conditions in most verticals including mining, energy and general industrial. All geographic regions reported weak demand with softness throughout the quarter. We don't feel that much of the lower demand was due to destocking in this channel as inventory levels at most of our distributors have not meaningfully changed. Industrial segment core sales declined 14% year-over-year in the second quarter and as the green line on this graph indicates the trend has been declining over the past year reflecting recessionary conditions in most major end markets served by the Industrial segment. The combination of lower volume coupled with a 50 basis points of unfavorable headwind from a mix standpoint, hurt Industrial segment operating profit margins by 350 basis points on a year-over-year basis. Now, I am going to move on to the Energy segment on Slide 9. Core Energy segment sales declined 8% year-over-year in the second quarter compared to a 13% growth in the first quarter. Hydratight which is our maintenance oriented business unit in this segment had another good quarter, but not as robust as the first quarter due to the conclusion of the large Middle East service job we talked about last quarter. Despite sequentially lower revenue on that job Hydratight continues to generate solid growth with year-over-year core growth of over 10% in the second quarter. It was a different story however for our other two energy businesses that are more directly correlated to oil and gas capital spending. They collectively posted the year-over-year core sales decline of over 30% in the quarter. We don't see the trend improving for exploration, drilling, and commissioning in the balance of calendar 2016. We do however feel pretty good about the continued growth prospects for Hydratight, which is being driven by required maintenance on production assets. This reinforces our message from last quarter's call that our maintenance revenue which are about two-thirds of the Energy segment sales are not very correlated with oil and gas prices. Second quarter Energy segment profit margins are traditionally the weakest of the year due to lower maintenance levels from a seasonality standpoint. This was exacerbated in the second quarter with high service mix in Hydratight, high decremental margins coming through in the Viking rental revenue decline in pricing pressures in both Viking and Cortland given steep competition for the available business. Mix alone was over 400 basis points of headwind in the Industrial segment from a margin standpoint in the second quarter. While margins will improve sequentially as we move into the back half of the fiscal year they will remain the low historical levels given the volume and pricing headwinds in our CapEx driven businesses. Now, we will turn to Engineered Solutions on Slide 10. Core sales were down 4% in this segment on a year-over-year basis while the stronger U.S. dollar was a 4% headwind. We continue to see pockets of strength in the Engineered Solutions segment in on-highway vehicle markets including heavy duty truck and convertible top both primarily in Europe. Off-highway end markets including construction equipment, material handling, forestry, and agriculture continue to pose bigger headwinds for the segment. On our last quarterly earnings call, we noted that several off-highway OEMs were taking extended holiday shutdowns to reduce inventory levels. We saw this continue well past the traditional holiday season with several of them reducing ongoing production levels and a few delaying or scaling back new platform introductions in the back half of the year. As a result, our margins in the Engineered Solutions segment were pressured due to lower production levels and the resulting weak overhead absorption. However, the segment did generate 80 basis points of margin expansion year-over-year as a result of cost reductions last year and in the first half of this year. Now, that’s it for the segment deep dives this morning and I’ll shift to the balance sheet and cash flow. We had a positive cash flow quarter despite the typical second quarter seasonal headwinds. Our year-to-date free cash flow of $23 million includes $6 million for the second quarter. During the quarter, we returned about $5 million of cash to shareholders via buybacks and we deployed about $15 million in the Larzep acquisition in the Industrial segment. We feel good about our year-to-date cash flow at the midpoint of the year knowing that the lion share of our annual free cash flow is always back end loaded. Our quarter end leverage was in line with expectations at 2.5 times trailing net debt to EBITDA. Now, I will cover guidance for the balance of the year. As we communicated in the last 10 days, the general industrial economy remains challenged and has weakened since our December earnings call. Despite a nice increase in oil and gas prices in the last month, commodity prices in general are at low levels including energy, mining, agriculture and other off-highway equipment markets are seeing sluggish demand as a result and are reducing their inventories. As you can see on Slide 12, we’ve reduced our consolidated core sales forecast, our Industrial segment core sales forecast as well as Engineered Solutions segment core sales outlooks for the year. We are now expecting consolidated full-year core sales to be down 46% compared to our prior guidance of a 1% to 4% decline. Despite the cost reduction actions that will benefit us for the long-term, our margin expectations for the balance of the year have been reduced due to the unfavorable mix that I discussed as well as these lower production volumes. With our largest core sales declines coming from our most profitable segments, we are expecting mix to work against us in the next two quarters as it did in the second quarter. You can see our updated guidance here on Slide 13. Our full-year guidance reflects lower sales in EBITDA, but a claw-back in income taxes for the year. The lower tax expense reflects the reduced effective income tax rate that results from fixed dollar income tax credits having an outsized impact on the effective tax rate because of lowered pre-tax earnings. Additionally, we've seen a favorable shift in earnings being generated in those countries with tax rates that are much lower than the U.S. We are now projecting a 5% effective income tax rate for the entire fiscal year down from our prior 15% estimate as a result of these factors. The lower taxes will also help our current year free cash flow. In terms of calendarization, the deeper we get into this fiscal year, the better the comparisons become as a result of anniversarying some of last year’s toughest quarters, as well as more stable currency rates that we've been seeing in the last six months. We expect the fourth quarter comparisons to look better than the third, but unfortunately still expect to be feeling the headwinds from the industrial recession. So summing it all up, we are now projecting full-year sales in the $1.135 billion to $1.15 billion range and EPS of a $1.25 to $1.35 a share. Our third quarter sales are expected to be in the $290 million to $300 million range with corresponding earnings per share of $0.34 to $0.39 a share. As a result of lower cash taxes, we anticipate little change to our full-year free cash flow estimate now in the $100 million to $105 million range. Consistent with past practice, our guidance does not include the impairment of restructuring charges nor any future stock buybacks for acquisitions. That’s it for my prepared remarks today. I’ll now turn the line over to Randy.