Luca Savi
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital
Thank you, Emmanuel. And thank you all for being with us this morning despite the many challenges and the unique circumstances that you are dealing with at this time. I truly wish you and your families all the strength necessary to get through this crisis. This morning we will do our absolute best to describe the market forces that we are facing, and more importantly, the focused actions that we have taken and will continue to take to combat those forces and create an even more resilient ITT for the future. But first, I want to take a moment to thank all the ITTers around the world who worked tirelessly during this pandemic to take care of our customers and to take care of each other during these very challenging times. Every day during our leadership team briefing we will discuss our people’s safety and all of the local grassroots efforts that our teams championed to support their local community. As you can see in these pictures, ITT is united to provide face shield, protective masks and other critical supplies to first responders and hospital workers in our valued communities. This morning, we played Alicia Keys’ new song Good Job during the whole time prior to our call. We did this to further honor the first responders and essential employees around the world that provide our IITers with the opportunity to deliver to our customers in the essential industry that we serve. Without them, this call doesn’t happen. So thank you. Let’s now turn to our 2020 priorities on slide four. This morning we will use words and phrases that we don’t often use in this investor calls like unprecedented, pandemic and essential businesses. These are truly historic times, where resilience in the face of adversity is paramount, and to me, nobody personified leadership at a time of crisis better than Winston Churchill, who reminded us all that success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue the count. So as ITTers all around the word mastered the courage to continue to battle these unprecedented market forces and as we go through this earnings presentation this morning, there is one word that I want you to remember that best describes today’s ITT, resilience. To amend our resilience in the face of the unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, ITTers all around the world are united in their focus and our top three 2020 priorities and they are the health of our people, the health of our business and the health of our financials. Our first quarter results are a testimony to this focused priority to the resilience of our diversified businesses and to the resilience of our dedicated people. While the vast majority of our businesses are being essential, COVID-19 disrupted our operations as we experienced decreased customer demand, temporary plant closures and stricter health protocols to keep our employees safe. But we stayed nimble, flexible and humble, and we went to work. And we worked harder than ever in more unusual circumstances than ever before to create value for our customers each and every day. For example, we had employees that stood in line for hours to cross European borders to get to work. We have many employees were separated for weeks from their families due to various travel restrictions and all employees adapted to new PPE and social distancing requirements. But as ITTers have always done throughout our 100 year history we got the job done and produced results for our customers and our shareholders. And as it relates to the health of our business and the health of our financials in the quarter we expanded our war chest of self-help opportunities through significant incremental new actions totaling $135 million and we executed measures to boost our liquidity to approximately $1.2 billion. I am confident that these actions will power ITT through this challenging period and position us well to aggressively capture opportunities in the future. As you see our priority is to start with the health of our people and I am so proud of how hard ITTers is around the world worked together to share best practices and leverage our collective ingenuity to keep each other safe. But at the highest level, I am so thankful that the detail playbook that was implemented are indomitable seen in China and then leverage around the globe has helped to contend confirmed ITT COVID-19 cases to just single digits, and to-date, no manufacturing facilities shut down due to the spread of the virus amongst our employees. This is a tremendous accomplishment considering at a numerous operating locations in hotspots like China, South Korea, Nodier Italy, New York and California. And I can assure you that we will never let our gut down when it comes to the health of our people. Now, I’d like to share with you our Q1 2020 highlights related to the health of our business and the health of our financials on slide five. Starting with the health of our business. From a customer centricity standpoint, we can see that our strong share gain momentum continued at MT Friction, as we outperform global OEM production by more than 2,000 basis points. And on the strength of our Mexico operations we posted almost 1% growth in North America, as we run production of our recent share gains with GM. However, I want to caution everyone not to expect this kind of outperformance in the future quarters, as the cost of phasing in 2020 will be erratic and when we cycle through various customer and end market dynamics. But by the end of the year we do expect to post a 700 basis points to 1000 basis points of outperformance versus global auto production. This will be our ninth consecutive year of outperformance. Supporting our continued outperformance, MT Friction generated yet another quarter of strong global platform wins. Q1 awards include the conquering two platforms with the leading ED manufacturer that we are pursuing for years. Our persistence to build intimacy with this customer coupled with our technological and quality leadership paid off and these wins add nicely to our already strong win rate on new global EV platforms. Finally, while we face challenges on the aerospace front our rail and IP businesses delivered a solid topline improvement from both a revenue and order standpoint. Next, from an operational excellence perspective, we continue to drive the productivity actions that have been powering our business over the last several years. We continue to focus intensely on driving efficiency actions, eliminating waste and bolstering our war chest of self-opportunity across all our sites. In the quarter, the team at industrial process produced an 11.3% of segment operating margin representing an improvement of 60 basis points. This margin expansion was supplemented by 180 basis points improvement in working capital. Well, done George and team. Considering the sudden drop in demand across industries due to COVID-19, we are executing approximately $50 million of new entity-wide restructuring actions to recalibrate our global workforce and deliver $70 million in the annualized savings. As we execute these reductions, we will also optimize the way we work as an organization. This approach was exemplified by our planting budget Italy that reduced the workforce more and faster than the declining production devising new ways to do more with less. And across IIT, we are also drastically cut in discretionary spending by $20 million and CapEx by $35 million. Next, I provide an overview of the Q1 results and perspectives on the health of our financials. Revenue declined 5% to $663 million, segment operating income margin was 14.5% and operating income margin was 13.4%. EPS of $0.80 per share was in line with our expectations and declined 9% excluding unfavorable FX of $4 million. And lastly, we generated $31 million of free cash flow in the first quarter representing 143% improvement over the prior year. Next, let me highlight the health of our financials and particularly the strength of our liquidity. For the past several years we have built a tremendous balance sheet that has been solidly fortified by many strategic decisions that preserve our investment grade quality for times like these. When a crisis like COVID-19 hit and you have the balance sheet that we have, you know that you are entering the crisis with a strong competitive advantage. So our liquidity position of approximately $1.2 billion is just one element of our financial strength. We will also continue to drive down our net asbestos liability by generating favorable cash settlements like the $66 million settlement we executed in Q1. Many of our actions like these have contributed to a 46% reduction in our next asbestos liabilities -- liability and a 64% reduction in our net environmental liability since then, and as a result of this settlement, we have ample liquidity in our Qualified Settlement Fund to respond to legacy liability outflows in 2020 which will further preserve ITT’s cash during the pandemic. Lastly, the decision we made at the end of 2019 to freeze and immunize our U.S. Pension Plan at 108% funded status could not have come at a better time. So our strong liquidity is not only a tremendous weapon to combat current conditions, but it will also enable us to seize on opportunities that will power ITT’s future when these crises dissipate. Now, let me turn it over to Tom to briefly discuss Q1 results before we highlight the decisive actions that we have taken to address market conditions for the balance of 2020. Tom?