Hello everyone, and welcome to the Hyster-Yale Fourth Quarter 2022 and Full Year Earnings Conference Call. My name is Bruno and I'll be operating your call today. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to your host, Christina Kmetko. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Welcome to our 2022 fourth quarter and full year earnings call. I’m Christina Kmetko, and I'm responsible for Investor Relations at Hyster-Yale. Joining me on today's call are Al Rankin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Rajiv Prasad, President; and Scott Minder, our Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. Yesterday evening, we published our 2022 fourth quarter and full year results and filed our 10-K, both of which are available on our website. Today's call is being recorded and webcast. The webcast will be on our website later this afternoon and available for approximately 12 months. Our remarks that follow, including answers to your questions, contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to several risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements made here today. These risks include, among others, matters that we have described in our earnings release issued last night and in our 10-Q and other filings with the SEC. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which may not be updated until our next quarterly earnings conference call, if at all. With the formalities out of the way, I'll turn the call over to Rajiv.

Thank you, Christie, and good morning, everyone. I'll start by giving you the operational perspective and I'll also provide some color commentary on our markets. As you'll hear, we've made significant progress in the past quarter and we expect this positive trend to continue in 2023. Scott will provide you with the detailed financial results and Al will close the call with his strategic perspective and take us into the Q&A. While Scott will give you the financial pluses and minuses, I'd like to point out that for the first time since 2021 second quarter reported both quarterly operating profit and quarterly net income at the consolidated level. Our fourth quarter profits exceeded the expectations we laid out at our call are largely due to higher volume, ongoing cost discipline, and improved product margins driven by higher pricing. Those efforts more than offset the negative impact from supply chain shortages and the effect of unfavorable currency movement. Our ability to obtain necessary components and their related production impact has been the significant topic this year, so I'll start there. Our unit shipments increased nearly 11% sequentially and we're modestly higher than the fourth quarter 2021. These increased shipping rates are due to fewer component shortages and less overall supply chain disruption than in previous quarters, with the America seeing the largest improvements. While the America's challenges have moderated significant production constraints, continuing Europe. Sourcing difficulties for certain critical components as well as large labor shortages in some skilled production jobs remain a concern. As a result, while fourth quarter 2022 shipments grew capacity utilization levels in Europe and the U.S. fell short of plan, we continue to expect to increase our production rate as these labor issues abate. However, despite the production disruptions in 2022, we've produced about 6,000 more…

Thanks, Rajiv. As Rajiv mentioned, we add a solid quarter, returning to profitability and ahead of our expectations. I’ll start with some high level comments on our consolidated financial results and then add perspective on the three individual businesses. In the fourth quarter, our consolidated revenues of $985 million were a quarterly record. They increased almost 19% or more than $155 million year-over-year. This growth was due to a roughly 20% increase in the lift truck business, which significantly outpaced its 1.5% shipment growth over the same period. I’ll give some additional lift truck details in a moment. Versus the third quarter, shipments increased nearly 11% while bookings remained flat around 21,000 units. Overall, our backlog dropped by nearly 6% and ended the year at 102,100 units down almost 9% from its peak level in the second quarter 2022. Looking at profitability, the company reported a consolidated operating profit of roughly $20 million for the fourth quarter. This compared to an operating loss of $107 million in the fourth quarter 2021. The 2021 operating loss included non-cash goodwill impairment charge of about $56 million related to the lift truck business in Asia. We reported net income of $7.6 million for the fourth quarter 2022 compared with a net loss of $103 million in the prior year. In addition to the prior year’s goodwill impairment, the 2021 net loss included a $19 million charge to establish valuation allowances on deferred tax assets. Now let’s look at the results in more detail. Our lift truck business generated an operating profit of $27 million in the fourth quarter, which was ahead of our expectations. This compared to an operating loss of $93 million in the prior year. Excluding the impairment charge I mentioned earlier, the substantial improvement was largely due to increased prices…

As you just heard from Rajiv and Scott, we’re making progress operationally and financially. Our fourth quarter earnings reflected the improving profit quality of the robust backlog for which we are now producing trucks and we continue to have solid bookings despite softening market conditions. Looking forward, we expect continued gains from building more, higher margin backlog units. We believe this will lead to substantial consolidated operating profit and net income in 2023 with the quarter’s building on the fourth quarter of last year as Scott indicated. The steps we’ve taken to improve profitability to date are producing tangible results. They’re evident in our fourth quarter results and even more so in our 2023 outlook. Our efforts to reduce inventory and generate cash are progressing, albeit at a slower pace. We’re laser focused on increasing our cash flows and maintaining adequate liquidity with ongoing action plans to improve future results. We’ve already made progress in the first quarter of 2023 to date. We expect these improved results to accelerate, particularly in the second half of the year. To achieve our objectives, we’re working intensely to reduce inventory levels as our supply chain becomes more consistent and our production rates gradually increase. We’ve got very capable people from around the company focused on how to make the most units in the shortest amount of time, while maximizing the use of on-hand materials and reducing manufacturing inefficiencies. We’re collaborating with our suppliers to minimize disruptions and ensure and efficient and consistent flow of materials. We’re working closely with our dealer partners to balance order timing with their customer’s delivery needs. It’s a complex global Hyster-Yale Lift Truck challenge, but our teams are focused on it and we’re making progress as we are operationally at Bolzoni and Nuvera as well. While we pursue…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Chip Moore from EF Hutton. Chip, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thanks for taking the question and congrats on all the progress this quarter. Wanted to ask about your commentary around operating profits improving from Q4 each quarter in 2023. Can you maybe speak to the cadence of that improvement as you worked through the last of the lower margin backlog that you’ve got? I think you talked about maybe finishing that up on the first half. And there’s a follow-up. What are you factoring in for Europe as well?

Well, let me just comment on the quarterly cadence. As you point out, we had a good fourth quarter. I think we see every indication at the fourth quarter can – level can continue. The first quarter we’re very encouraged with and we see after the first quarter continuing improvements over the course of the quarters. During the year some of the quarters of considerable significance but recognizing also that our third quarter is always seasonally lower quarter than other quarters in the year or at least the surrounding second and fourth quarter. So we’re very encouraged with the progression. We see it moving in the right direction. To get a second of Europe. Maybe you’d comment on Europe, Rajiv.

Yes, so Europe continues. As I said in my remarks, the Europe continues to have some constraint supply chain issues. We’re working through those. We expect through the year for Europe volume to increase. We’ve got plants have a – in a gradual increase of that volume as we’ve discussed with our supply chain. That’s where – that’s the way we feel the markets can evolve. So gradual increase I think in both markets in terms of volume. I think as Al said, the margins, I think will again, said in our remarks where in the first half of the year will be mostly through the bookings from prior years and at a good margin. So we expect that to flow through both in Europe and in North America.

Yes, I think, we had pretty good margins. They adjusted standard margin level in the fourth quarter. And I think we see them getting better as we look through the year. But as Rajiv said, there still are some laggard low margin trucks in the first half. On the other hand, there were quite a few of those trucks in the fourth quarter. So just to put that in perspective. I think another dynamic to really focus on is that on the one hand we will be increasing our production levels in a moderate way over the course of the year. We think that is in line with a pace that our suppliers can work constructively with. And in that context as the year progresses, we’re certainly hoping and expecting that our suppliers will resolve their supply problems and be able to supply components on a much more timely basis. That should allow us to become significantly more efficient in our manufacturing operations than we have been in the fourth quarter and that we expect to be in the first part of the year. So there are a lot of things that are moving in the right direction where we’re continuing to work closely with our supply base to make sure that their capabilities are what we need, and the environment for doing that is improving. It’s improving because suppliers are solving their own shortage problems. And I think to some degree it’s improving because excess demand in the system is moving – is moderating. And so that gives the suppliers more capability to serve our needs and to work us through this period of our extended backlogs perhaps in the context of a more moderate economic prospects and growth or even potential for decline in some areas of the world as we look through 2023.

Thanks. That’s very helpful. And I guess to follow on that, Al. If we think about, a potential deeper recession, you talked again about this sort of shock absorber of the backlog position. And you also mentioned, I think, very low cancellation rates. Maybe just speak to historical replacement cycles and it feels like maybe this is a unique cycle in terms of what you could see in a recession scenario for the company?

Well, it’s unique for us in the sense that we have never had a backlog anywhere near these levels. So, that’s the silver lining for some of the troubles that we’ve been working our way through here. We think that as Rajiv indicated in his remarks that the global markets will be turning down, we don't see a deep or long recession because there's an awful lot of pent-up demand as Rajiv suggested for forklift trucks and for enhanced productivity on the part of our customers. So I think we don't see a deep global recession and a big drop off. We see just a downturn that brings us back to much more sustainable long-term levels. But in the meantime, whatever downturn there is, we've got a good chance of riding through it because of our backlog. But understand also that as we produce and from our backlog, we're adding to our backlog each month and at least at the current time, we're continuing to book more good margin trucks than we anticipated in our plan. So that's been continuing in January and February and we hope that trend may continue, but at the moment, while the backlog is reducing, its more moderate than what we were expecting, and it means that we're extending further out into 2024 are most product lines. It's not 100% of them, but on most product lines, they're certainly the high value. And I think most markets are performing better than we expected that we expected more declines, and generally the markets are firmer than we thought they were going to be.

That's great. If I could sneak one more in on Nuvera, great to see those successful pilots underway. Can you comment maybe around getting activity more broadly? And then I think you mentioned that new much larger engines come into market. Maybe you can expand on that and what that would target?

Yes, sure. I mean, the way Nuvera is going to market is to have some – or we have some focus segments that we think will really need to transition to fuel cells in their electrification journey. These are typically the heaviest duty type of larger trucks. And a good example of that is our port equipment. That's why we're focused on transitioning those first. But there are other industries that do that, you think about electrified buses. We're also looking at, you've seen power generation both static, which is the new offering from Nuvera but they're also working with partners who've got mobile generators, incredibly enough to charge lithium-ion battery cars and another vehicle. So just a mobile charger that has a fuel cell on board with lithium-ion batteries and acts as the charger for vehicles. So, some new segments are appearing that they're connected to. We think putting the demos out is the best way that they have found to really get customers engaged and to pursue their target market. So the best way to monitor how Nuvera is doing is to look at announcements that Nuvera will be making around demonstrations and partnerships as we move forward. In terms of the size of the engines, we are seeing demand for library engines more for truck applications and also starting to see some marine applications that they're involved in along with locomotive. And each of those need larger platforms to support the power needs. So that's why we are developing the 125 kilowatt engine and combination of those will be used in those applications.

Got it. Appreciate it. I'll hop back in queue. Thanks.

Our next question is from Steve Ferazani from Sidoti. Steve, your line now open. Please go ahead.

Good morning everyone. Thanks for all the detail on the call. I did want to revisit a little bit of the previous caller's initial questions in terms of backlog and go a little bit further in terms of looking at your orders and dollars per unit. The last three quarters remained pretty, pretty steady. Trying to think of not only the stickiness of backlog but how you're thinking about pricing given your backlog remains so significant, and how much business you might be just turning away right now versus starting to pick up again and maybe being a little bit more flexible on pricing?

Yes, so I think if certainly as the share of the market is down because of the approach we are taking because of the approach. We've been very strict on our pricing and margin requirements given our backlog condition and our ability to deliver trucks. And we've seen the market accept that again, Al said this is an unusual market that we haven’t seen before, and we’ve got customers now talking to us about their 2024 needs. And as we move towards taking this industry based solution approach to solving our customers’ problem, we are kind of working with them to really put the right truck in the application. And because of the modular scalable solutions that we have, we can – at the right price, you can get the right cost for the application and that will support our margins. So I think it’s not just the firmness on the pricing, but also some of the initiatives we’ve put in place. Over the last three years, it’s really supporting our approach. Now, there are customers who are not yet adapting that approach and we – and still trying to bid and buy on pricing terms, and those are the ones that we’re not staying away from, but we’re trying to work with them to find the right solution for the value proposition they’re looking for. And this is where our investment in China could be and in Fuyang is the production facility will become more and more important. As we put the right trucks in the right solution at our target margin again, our focus is to – we have an economic model and we want to place these trucks at customers at target margins, not the most margins we can get, but at target margin.

This is going to be a very, very much reinforcement indeed, almost duplicative comment. But it’s really important from our vantage point that as our backlogs and our current – begin to contract, and we need to be more competitive, more broadly in the marketplace, we expect to have new products, particularly including the Fuyang products coming on in a time cycle, which very much fits the need pattern that we anticipate as the backlog comes down. So that’s a very fortunate condition from our point of view, but it’s also the result of the – some of the strategic programs that I outlined, particularly the modular and scalable product program and the way it comes online first with the two to three ton pneumatic trucks, and then it cascade into other trucks including the more standard types of trucks that are below the base levels of our most recently introduced modular and scalable trucks. So it’s a good fit. We’re encouraged.

Yes. We’re very passionate about putting the right truck in the application and getting our target margin. That’s the way we want to develop the market and our commercial strategy.

So the way I think to think about it is that we expect to maintain good margins, but we’ll do it in a little different way than we’re doing it right at the moment.

Yes.

Makes sense. Makes sense. Thanks for the detail on that. When I think about and I know this isn’t a one quarter or two quarter story, but when I think about the expectations that working capital trends down for multiple factors, but as supply chain constraints ease and you catch up on sales to orders, certainly that trend should grow in 2023, which would indicate much healthier cash flow as we think about that priority – immediate priority reducing debt. Is that reasonable to think that way?

Reducing what?

Reducing debt.

Reducing debt.

All right. Just to make it crystal clear here, our focus is on producing trucks for which we already have the parts are a significant proportion of the parts. And so if we can find those one or two parts that are missing on individual trucks, we can work through without bringing in a lot of new additional inventory. And it isn’t so much a focus on bringing down debt, but as working capital comes down, the debt automatically reduces because we just – we don’t have the need for the debt in order to finance the working capital that we’ve already paid for. So there are a number of things that going to be at work here. On the one hand, receivables are going to trend up. On the other hand, inventory’s going to move down for the reasons that we described. And one of the things that’s also going to be happening is that payables are going to be moving up because at the moment, so much of the inventory that we have – we’ve already paid for, and we’ll come back to more normalized levels of payables as we move through the course of the year. So that’s kind of the dynamic that’s at play. And we would expect that the cash flows in the business would more than sustain any other uses in cash – any other uses of cash and allow us to bring the debt down at the same time.

I mean maybe Scott can say a little bit more about this, but our debt, we have two types of debt, right? We have that term loan, which is really there for the long-term. Then we have our revolver, which we use for operationally, and our revolver has been higher than normal over the last couple of years that we’ve gone through this challenge. We want to bring that back to our normal state that we draw during the trough period in the month, and by the end of the month, it’s in good state – good shape pretty much not drawn. So that’s what we are working towards. We think we’ll get there in the second half of the year sometime, so that, that’s the primary mission. And then any excess cash we have beyond that will be used for some of the strategic initiatives that we had planned, which we’ve held off on due to this dynamic that we’ve gone through over the last couple of years.

Rajiv, this is Scott. I think you’ve covered it well. By the end of 2023, we expect to have lower debt balances as the working capital comes down and uses of cash as Rajiv outlined, beyond debt pay down are to fund our growth initiatives and to maintain our factories to ensure we can efficiently produce the increasing loans throughout the year.

Perfect. Thanks everyone for that. Last one for me, just on Bolzoni, I think you’d agree probably that Europe has held up a lot better than we were probably thinking six months ago. I would say that, I’m guessing that you’ve seen the same thing noting that Bolzoni, a lot of that business is in Europe. How much does that improve as Lift Truck, not just from you, but from your competitors picks up a supply chains eased? Or is that really more with the replacement – with replacement parts? How do we need to think about Bolzoni?

No. We’ve got to think about Bolzoni as a sum ratio of Lift Trucks. And because it’s an attachment that goes on Lift Truck and typically they’re involved in new truck sales, because it’s a new attachment that goes with a new truck. And as our shipments rise and our competitor’s shipment rise, that will be good for Bolzoni, because typically, their lead times are shorter than Lift Truck lead times. So customers and dealers typically order those later than they order Lift Trucks. Once they have a solid delivery date for the Lift Truck, they’ll go back eight or 10 weeks from that and order the attachment. So we do expect their attachment to very much correlate with Lift Truck sales, especially Class 5 and in North America Class 4 and 5 trucks, and increasingly now Class 1. But counterbalance trucks in the – I would say, in the two to five ton range. So that’d be a good in a correlation. The other thing I would say, the America – Bolzoni Americas team is doing very, very well beyond our expectation. They’re starting to gain traction and we are booking very well.

I just add that you should note the numbers that Scott went through in some detail on the fourth quarter, because Bolzoni performed on an underlying basis really very quite well in the fourth quarter. And there was just a one-time sale that resulted in write-off of goodwill that was allocated to that particular small distribution entity at the time of the acquisition. So it’s a very non-operating and rather artificial write-off that just happens to come from the way a goodwill was allocated at the time of the acquisition. So there’s momentum behind Bolzoni, not just in the future, but also in the fourth quarter.

Thanks for the responses everyone. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Steve.

Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Brett Kearney from Gabelli & Company. Brett, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question and congratulations on the demonstrate progress after all the hard work last couple of years.

Thanks, Brett.

We’ve seen the opportunity to kind of accelerate momentum on investing behind the strategic initiatives this year. Curious if you could help us think about kind of the major buckets of capital – CapEx investments the company will be making this year. And Al you talked about increasingly solving for productivity challenges that customers are facing, obviously, the modular scalable program is an important piece of that. Can you also touch on out some of Hyster’s advanced operator assist systems and telematics offerings kind of tie into the challenges you’re solving for your customer base?

Yes. Let me ask Rajiv to address that, but with a preface from me. It’s still early in the year, we want to be darn sure that everything we think is sustainable – is sustainable. But there are some things that we would very much like to do in which we certainly hope to do as we move through the year, assuming it continues to move in the direction that we expect. And indeed, in our own thinking, we’ve baked those in and see the kinds of progressions that we described to you even with those things taken into account. But I think you’ll see the initiatives start to play out in the second half more than in the first half, because we’re going to watch to make sure that all the pieces of the equation continue to hold together. But against that backdrop let me ask Rajiv to expand on some of the momentum, I think is the best word to describe it that we feel we have going on our technology projects.

Sure. Maybe just in terms of buckets for capital investment, we’ve got some cut catch up things to do, which would – which we need to do into – in a number of our plants and also some of our development centers, which we’ll do in the second half of the year. As we launch the modular scalable trucks, we’re optimizing the footprint of our production capability. We want to have supply resiliency both for incoming material, but also for trucks. So we will produce very similar or the same trucks in multiple plants, so that needs to be done. And then we – it’s our product and technology plants as well as our commercial strategies that we are going to invest in. So those are the loose buckets. In terms of our technology, what we see – the difficulties that we see for our customers, productivity is definitely one. And really there’s a huge amount of desire to understand their application to figure out what the trucks are doing, and therefore data is required to do that in terms of what the trucks are doing, who’s operating the trucks, are there any issues on the truck? And so our solution to that is to put telemetry on our trucks. So, you have real time information on what the truck is doing and who’s driving it and how it’s performing. The next area is really around safety. What’s happening at our customers is they get seeing a high turnover of operators and difficult to recruit operators. And so they’re moving towards less experienced operators and that’s creating issues in their application – in their operations. And that’s where our operator assist systems have come in. They’re really backup, kind of become a bit of a support system for an inexperienced…

Just to elaborate a small bit about the automation side. The backdrop of course is the point that Rajiv made many times, which is the most expensive aspect of the operating cost of a lift truck driver. And so that’s the sort of the core backdrop. And then if you put it in the context of the computing power that can be deployed in today’s world on a vehicle and in the context of the management of the vehicle, and then put that together with the increased sophistication of sensors that has developed over the last, I don’t know, Rajiv, five years, seven years, particularly pushed along by the automotive industry, which drives for low cost. And so we’re in a position of being able to bring automation forward in what I would call a highly controlled warehousing or manufacturing environment, where the sophistication of the software systems can really manage that environment very effectively. We can use the sensors that are being used on automobiles, but without the huge number of variables that automated automobiles have to face in a real world environment that is not inside a warehouse or a factory. So, we see a very great opportunity as we look forward, and we think that these are going to be very much sort of project approaches and not just the sale of a product, but they’ll also be packaged in a way that allows them to be deployed by our dealers efficiently and relatively easily into installation. So it’s a pretty exciting arm of the business as we look forward. And we do think that, I think Rajiv you would agree that we think our approach to – in our internally developed technology is distinctive and has competitive advantage of consequence. So that’s the backdrop for what we’re up to in that area, a little bit of elaboration.

Excellent. No, that’s very helpful. Thanks so much Al and Rajiv.

You’re welcome.

Thank you. Okay. And with that we’ll conclude our Q&A session. We’ll close with a few final reminders. A replay of our call will be available online later this morning. We’ll also post a transcript on the investor relations website when it becomes available. If you have any questions, please reach out to me. You can reach me at the phone number on the press release. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. And now I’ll turn the call back to Bruno to conclude the call. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s call. Please remember, a telephone replay will be available during seven days. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.