Ivo Jurek
Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead
Thank you, Bill. Good afternoon and thanks for joining us today. I hope you and your families are staying safe and healthy. As we continue to confront the pandemic globally, we recognize the enormous effort our Gates associates put forward during the difficult second quarter. I want to thank each one of our team members for their unwavering dedication and effort during this time of great uncertainty. Throughout the quarter, we maintained our focus on complying with the recommended safety protocols and mandates around the world to operate our facilities. While adopting enhanced safety practices to protect the safety of our employees, the families as well as the communities in which we operate, doing so remains our top priority. Within this challenging business environment, we delivered performance that exceeded our expectations. In the face of the volume declines driven by the pandemic, we have been focused on what is under our control to mitigate the decline in margins, while acting with the long-term interest of our business in mind. We have maintained operational and supply chain continuity throughout the crisis and have been a reliable partner to our customers, many of whom participate in essential industries around the world. We also continued to fund our key initiatives and did not compromise our ability to respond to improvements in our mostly short-cycle end markets, which we are now seeing across all of our regions. While we do not minimize the tragic effects of the pandemic that in many ways continues to impact the daily lives of our employees, their loved ones and the general public, we believe the second quarter marked a turning point for our business. Based on the incremental improvements in our end mark markets as well as positively trending macro data. We believe the most significant impact to our business from COVID-19 is likely behind us as shelter in place requirements in different geographies were lifted. Customers who had suspended operations began to recharge their supply chains and progressively resume production. The overall increase in industrial activity combined with an increase in personal mobility and driving levels contributed to improving demand trends for our mission-critical components throughout the quarter. Absent any broad reimplementation of movement restrictions, we believe April represented the pandemic’s most significant impact on our business. Exiting the quarter, we had returned to year-over-year growth in China, and the recovery also began to take hold in North America and Europe. We continued to make progress on our restructuring plan we announced last year, taking two further actions. In June, we announced the closure of our power transmission plant in Korea, a market, which we plan to serve from other facilities in the region. Additionally, in July, we announced our intent to establish a shared service center in Europe, which would consolidate certain functions that are currently distributed throughout the region. We anticipate completing the closure of our Korea facility this quarter and intend to complete the European project in the second half of next year. These actions represent continued optimization of our operational footprint, resulting in increased flexibility, without compromising our ability to provide our customers with highest level of service. Although COVID-19 is certainly not yet under control, key macro indicators and improving levels of customer activity give us an early indication that, absent significant additional waves of the virus, our business has turned the corner and is on a measured trajectory to recovery. Now moving to Slide 4 and an overview of our second quarter results, this was a challenging quarter. Total Q2 revenue of $577 million declined 28.8% year-over-year, including a negative currency impact of 2.4%. Core revenue in the quarter declined by 26.4% year-over-year, better than the midpoint of the range we provided on our last call. This is a result of our ability to maintain operational continuity throughout the quarter in the vast majority of our global production facilities. Importantly, after bottoming in April, we saw significant improvement across the business. Our revenues progressively strengthened throughout the quarter, exiting with June core revenue down mid-teens year-over-year. The strength of improving business activity continued in July. For the second quarter, sales into replacement channels substantially outperformed those into the first-fit channels. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA was $83 million, representing a margin of 14.4% and a decremental margin of 35%. The improved decremental margin from Q1 is primarily the result of cost-reduction actions we have taken, enhance productivity and favorable product mix. Our adjusted earnings per share of $0.03 per share was primarily the result of lower revenues and associated earnings, partially offset by lower income tax and interest expense compared to the prior year. Moving on to Slide 5, as a side note, we will continue to provide geographic breakdown of our revenue for the remainder of 2020. Our business is a very global one, with over half of our revenue coming from outside North America. And the regional trends we saw were largely in line with the general expectation we laid out last quarter. Across our regions, extended customer shutdowns, particularly in the automotive first-fit channel, negatively affected demand for our products in a broad sense, with the most significant impact in Europe and Asia regions. Now let me move to Greater China. The stronger order trends we began to see in the end of March continued. With our business there returning to core growth in May, followed by further acceleration in June. We saw growth in the quarter broadly across the region, with the exception of automotive first-fit, which improved significantly as the quarter progressed, but remain core growth negative compared to the prior year. The construction and heavy-duty truck end markets notably outperformed other parts of the business in China. After hitting and throughout in April, our business in Europe improved throughout the quarter, most notably in June when movement restrictions had largely been lifted or significantly ease. Although sales into first-fit channels improved sequentially within the quarter, they were down significantly on a year-over-year basis, primarily due to the decline in automotive first-fit. Our replacement channels were less impacted. With the automotive replacement channel, in particular, seeing nearly flat core growth performance on a year-over-year basis in June. Our business in North America performed in a similar fashion to what we experienced in Europe overall, and improved sequentially after bottoming in April. Sales into replacement channels outperformed first-fit with automotive replacement, showing the most significant improvement within the quarter, exiting with mid- single-digit decline. All industrial markets were down significantly, but improved during the quarter, with the most notable improvement also coming in the month of June. As to our East Asia and South America regions, those regions demonstrated slower rates of recovery in the quarter with the largest impact coming from extended shutdown in India. Moving now to our segments on Slide 6, starting with Power Transmission business, Power Transmission business in Q2 saw core revenue decline 23.7% on a year-over-year basis. Within this revenue decline, our China business generated a modest level of growth, while our automotive business in China improved throughout the quarter. It was a solid performance in the industrial end market, particularly general industrial and heavy-duty truck that drove the growth. As to the other regions, North America was impacted the least and improved solidly throughout the quarter, driven by the larger percentage of sales directed into replacement channels, particularly automotive, agriculture and general industrial applications. Our business in Europe showed the most significant improvement throughout the quarter, also led by the replacement channels. With our automotive replacement business rebounding in the quarter and exiting nearly flat on a year-over-year core basis in June. One of the notable effects in the quarter that we anticipate will remain, for an extended period of time, is an increase in demand for our belts and related components in the personal mobility applications. Although it is a relatively small piece of our overall revenue, this business has been growing significantly, a trend we expect to continue, particularly as many commuters search for alternative forms of transportation and localized recreation during this crisis and beyond. During the second quarter, we launched a number of new personal mobility products that cover a wide range of applications from e-Bike, and traditional bicycles to power sport vehicles, capitalizing on what we believe are the inherent advantages of our belts versus traditional change in applications that offer positive longer-term secular trends. Our industrial chain development initiative had another strong quarter of design wins in applications, including automotive assembly plants, aggregate facilities medical product manufacturing and industrial dispensing equipment. We are pleased with our ability to drive a solid level of design wins as we deployed virtual sales and marketing tools to continue to engage our global customers. Let me move now to Slide 7. Our Fluid Power core revenue represented a decline of 30.6% year-over-year, the result of very challenging market environment. After bottoming in April, all of our regions showed sequential improvement throughout the quarter. Similar to Power Transmission, our Fluid Power business in China returned to growth, aided by construction and market. Outside of China, North America was least impacted, the result of its exposure to the agriculture end market and automotive replacement channel. Our Fluid Power business in Europe saw a large decline across first-fit customers in particular, with sales into replacement channels outperforming on a relative basis. The lighter, more flexible new products we have been introducing to our customers continue to gain acceptance in the marketplace. Our pipeline of opportunities continued to grow. And we had a number of wins in the quarter with our new MXT and PRO Series hoses. Notably, we expect to see the sales of our new Fluid Power products grow this year despite the negative market dynamics. Although we are exiting a very difficult quarter, we are encouraged by the more positive business outlook and momentum behind our new products. I will now turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Brooks Mallard, for some additional detail on the financials. Brooks?