Rick Dillon
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead
Thanks, Randy, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to slide 4; we can do a quick recap of our performance for the quarter. Fiscal 2017’s second quarter sales were at the higher end of our guidance range, but down 2% year over year. Core sales were down 3% excluding a 2% net benefit from acquisition and divestiture activity and 1% negative impact from FX. Adjusted operating profit declined from $18 million to $15 million, primarily as a result of the lower sales volume and an unfavorable sales mix. This along with the higher income tax rate resulted in second quarter 2017 adjusted EPS of $0.11 compared to $0.21 per share last year with income taxes accounting for $0.05 of the decline. Turning to Slide 5, our core sales rate of change improved considerably on a sequential basis from down 14% in Q1 to down only 3% in the current quarter. This was modestly better than the decline of 4% to 6% we had anticipated. The call out here, as Randy discussed, is better than anticipated industrial activity across multiple product lines. I will walk through core sales by segment shortly, but the overall trend certainly bodes well for the expected sequential improvements we continue to forecast for the back half of the year. Slide 6, summarizes the quarterly adjusted operating profit margin where you can see margins were down about 90 basis points year over year. This is largely due to an overall unfavorable mix at the gross margin level with industrial segment growth weighted towards Heavy Lifting Technologies coupled with Energy segment volume declines. So, let’s walk through our performance by segment in a little more detail starting with the Industrial segment on Slide 7, Core sales reflected positive for the first time in seven quarters. We saw growth across the Tools, Heavy Lifting and Concrete Tensioning product line. Importantly, we saw sequential 5% and year-over-year growth across all geographic regions as well as – we believe this was due to a combination of factors including improving confidence in the general industrial landscape, commercial effectiveness actions around our marketing and distributor programs, strong activity within the Heavy Lifting gantry product line and easier prior year comparisons. While we continue to expect core sales growth in the back half of the year, the year-over-year rate is expected to moderate from the robust 11% this quarter given the lumpy nature of our Heavy Lifting Technologies product sales and the comparisons aren’t quite as easy in the back half. From a profitability standpoint, Industrials’ margins were flat year-over-year due primarily to strong Heavy Lifting and Concrete Tensioning product sales and new investments in growth. As you have heard us discuss countless times, absolute margins in Heavy Lifting and Concrete Tensioning are below segment average and these two product lines grew at a significantly higher rate than the Tools product line during the quarter. This accounts for about 150 basis point of margin drag. Further, we have been actively assessing our distributor coverage and channel partners adding sales and marketing and training resources along with new product investments. While these weigh in on our margins in the short-term, they are an integral part of our strategy of driving growth. We want to make it clear that the incremental margins on the standard Tools products, whether Enerpac or otherwise branded, were right in line with normalized rates. Moving on to the Energy segment on Slide 8 where we expected sequential year-over-year of sales decline due to challenging oil and gas market conditions, continued sluggish offshore activity and difficult year-over-year comparisons. Our Hydratight business encountered renewed maintenance push outs and scope reduction actions by customers most notably in the Americas. We believe this is the result of backtracking in oil prices resulting from increased stockpiles. Essentially the price has gone up enough to increase feedstock costs for downstream customers and thus reduce the profitability spreads. In addition, there is about $10 million of nonrecurring project revenues impacting the year-over-year comparison. Viking continued its trend of sequentially stable revenue yet sizable year-over-year declines. Cortland had a flat sales quarter with mid-single-digit growth in the non-energy markets offset by a similar decline in its energy products. Profit margins were down considerably on an unfavorable mix attributable to lower Hydratight sales and sharply lower Viking rental revenue which comes at a much higher variable margin. Turning to Engineered Solutions on Slide 9 where we saw our first year-over-year core sales growth in nine quarters. Heavy-duty trucks in China remained really robust due to regulatory changes and combined with moderating destocking from off-highway OEMs led to increased revenues across those end markets. While we didn’t see much change in the rather tepid demand conditions in agriculture and other off-highway, it is good to see some of the severe destocking behind us. Profit margins in ES, Engineered Solutions, improved nicely on the higher volumes and benefit of ongoing cost reduction actions. Turning now to the liquidity. As you can see on Slide 10, our seasonal cash flow usage was about as expected. Capital expenditures were $9 million during the quarter reflecting equipment purchases associated with our restructuring efforts and timing of certain projects in process that will ultimately be converted to operating leases. From a net debt standpoint we ended the quarter pretty much even where we started at approximately $400 million. Our leverage at 2.9 times net debt to EBITDA should be the higher high end given the trailing 12-month EBITDA Trent, keeping in mind that we have projected a ramp up after the seasonally low quarter. We are holding our free cash flow projection for the year at $85 million to $95 million, this combined with our $1732 million cash on hand and $600 million of revolver availability provides us plenty of liquidity for funding capital deployment and other operating needs. That is it for my prepared remarks and I will now turn the line back over to Randy.