Jason Lippert
Analyst · CJS Securities. Your line is now open
Thanks, Tyler. Good morning everyone and thanks for joining us on today’s call. As we continue to focus on strategic plan and objectives total revenues in Q1 reached approximately $498 million up almost 18% from $423 million in first quarter of 2016. Our EPS grew from $1.45 per diluted share to $1.71 per diluted share an 18%. April sales were very strong coming [indiscernible] million compared to $145 million in April of 2016 a 15% increase. The industries that we serve on a roll and enjoying steady and solid growth, the top story for our company through Q1 is continued RV industry growth the shipments top the record 40 year high. Backlog are at record leveled off so with some OEMs backward into August on several product lines and dealers are reporting great retail traffic and record show attendance. Additionally OEMs are continuing to add capacity in opening new production facilities to meet continued increased demand. Once you factor these and along with the customer confidence at a near 60 year high and the stability and gas and consumer lending always indicators point to a banner year for 2017 where shipments could reach over 450,000 units. In addition we remain very positive about our organic sales growth as we estimate our total addressable market opportunities are just over $4 billion. We and other industry leaders have been saying for the last two years now that we feel confident that the industry will hit 500,000 units at some point before 2020 and we still feel strongly about that statement. RV products are attractive and more affordable with more technology and features that are clearly attracting new age groups and authenticities to the European outdoors lifestyle. In a recent RV business in Wells Fargo survey 88% of the dealers surveyed said they notice an appreciable amount of first time buyers in 2016, which is huge for our business. Gen x and millennial generations are purchasing their first entry level RV’s and are adopting the mobile lifestyle in bigger than anticipated numbers. And as these younger generations are first time buyers adopt the mobile lifestyle it will help sustain long-term help of the RV industry. The Outdoor Industry Association recently released a study showing that the outdoors industry in total generates almost $900 billion in annual revenue twice that of automobiles and other big ticket consumer items. This point to the fact that the outdoors lifestyle is one that is a very important to may Americans. Community, family and outdoors are ingrained deeply in American way of life and this will continue to bring more people to the RV lifestyle. Our content for the trailing 12 month was up about $80 from Q1 2016 to $3,058 for towable RV and up about $164 over Q1 2016 to $2,022 per motorhome. Increasing demand for travel trailers continue to be a trend and while we have less content on travel trailers and fifth-wheels we have demonstrated the ability to increase content per vehicle year-over-year for over 20 years. We have a proven ability to develop product and add content and new features to existing products and penetrate all vehicle classes and brands as well as execute on growing market share in existing and new product lines. Because we realize how important new product growth is to our continued strategy and success we have bolstered our world class research and development teams. Last year we released the industry’s first ever one touch automatic leveling system designed for travel trailers and it was a big success. As the only true and patented automatic leveling system for trailers on the market we are already averaging a few 100 systems per week. We expect at the open house in August that many other brands will pick up this popular trend started about six years ago when we launched the first ever patented fifth-wheel automatic leveling system. The days with manually cranking jacks up and down on any sized RVs are coming to an end. Our leveling systems have been working their way into lower and lower price points and now are hitting the travel trailers, which is the largest segment in RVs. This year we will release an aftermarket version of leveling that can be installed on any of the several million used travel trailers that are already on the road today. We also recently launched some great new hitching concepts such as the jacket bike carrier and [indiscernible] crack. Hitch related products are approximately $600 million market because our dealers are taking more and more things with them when they travel. We are trying to develop more creative hitching solutions that fit right into our chassis products. Also we are continuing momentum with our myRV product line, which allows RVs to connect many of their RV products and functionality to their mobile devices. We expect to see significant traction in the coming years and feel we are in the driver set as we not only develop the technology but many products our viewers want connectivity to our LCI products. We have also recently launched more new warning products in the OEM and aftermarket as well as the new entry step, which are all creating a lot of excitement in the industry. And another development we launched our marine R&D recently and now working on some exciting new seeding, electronic and hydraulic related products for both. All in all R&D will continue to be a huge driver of our organic growth at LCI. Growth outside the RV industry and our adjacent markets continued as our sales were up here 17% from Q1 2016. Recently we attended two shows in the heavy trucking industry as well as a national educational procurement show touting our vast manufacturing capabilities. Feedback and reception at these two shows were extremely positive and present new revenue opportunities for our many product lines. The marine industry continues to grow at a steady pace and has plenty of market share opportunity we have several new products in the pipeline designed specifically to enhance the boring lifestyle and an exciting new development for us next month we will be attending the home and hardware show and debut our residential awning product line, which we believe is approximately a $70 million market. We’ve also designed new mattress products for college dorms which is approximately $50 million market. Considering we build more mattresses annually than anyone else in the country we should be in a great position to own in this new space. Whether it’s awnings, windows, mattresses, furniture, steel or aluminum products we have the facilities, the products, the leadership teams and a proven ability to develop customer relationships with our fantastic sales and operations teams. Our adjacent market strategy will continue to be very important to our growth story as we organically and through acquisitions grow in these adjacent markets. Aftermarket sales grew 20% from Q1 2016 to $36 million in Q1 2017. We have invested heavily in this area over the last 12 months by adding over 100 professionals in our call center. Along with personnel additions we’ve added some significant one-time cost to get our awning program rolling at many RV dealers and wholesale distributors. Mix shift also contributed to our decrease in operating profit compared to Q1 2016 in the aftermarket segment and we believe we will see improvement in coming quarters. We are still in early innings in the aftermarket opportunity as we continue to set up more and more dealers and wholesale distributors and really work to make sure there will be a long-term margin growth and traction in all aftermarket not just the RV aftermarket. Most importantly LCI puts over $1 billion plus in component parts into new RV vehicles every year. We’ve expanded our content into other adjacent markets, which will lead – which will lend itself eventually to aftermarket sales in those markets such as marine, buses and cargo trailers. April’s aftermarket sales were $13 million up significantly compared to $10 million last April a 28% increase. With over $8 billion worth of components in the RV market today coupled with our continued focus on being the industry leader on OEM component sales and customer service along with turbo-charge new product development aftermarket sale should continue on a great pace of growth for the foreseeable future. In February we announced the acquisition of Sessa Klein outside of Milan, Italy which manufactures highly engineered window systems for high speed and commuter trains. There are train systems all over the world that utilize Sessa Klein’s window systems and with their excellent leadership team we’re confident that we will be able to grow this new adjacency given LCI’s commitment to add resources. Even more exciting is our strategy to engage them to help design window products for the caravan industry in Europe, Sessa Klein sales total approximately $11 million in 2016. Beside somewhat restricted them from landing larger contracts with train manufacturers, but now with the backing of our company of our size and integrity, there are more of these larger volume opportunities available for them. We are seeing new acquisition opportunities, the pipeline remains full. Seven of our last nine over $150 million revenues of acquisitions have focused on products that are outside of our core RV market, while we plan on making opportunistic acquisitions in the RV industry, we are laser focused on signing good acquisition candidates to supply products to the bus, marine, heavy truck, cargo trailer, trains and international caravan markets as well as aftermarket for all these markets. As our brand and reputation has grown over the last several years in these areas acquisition conversations become easier much like it did in the RV market. Our long-term focus on strategy in these markets is working and potential customers are taking notice and are excited about our people, our product development and service strategies. In addition, as part of our acquisition strategy we are focusing our attention on acquisition candidates, whose revenues are much larger than in past acquisitions. I want to take a second, make sure we address the well documented tight labor market in our industry specifically in Elkhart County. As a result of the outstanding industry growth, very long appointment often comes higher attrition and our industry has not been immune to this problem. Overtime it’s been running higher for everyone to these labor constraints and the average wage for employ is up, as every business in the areas fighting for employees. Although it says, increased attrition and labor costs in most businesses. We feel, we are very much better than most of our industry peers in the category of attrition due to our intent preparation of focus. We’re working more than ever on continuously improving our organization by focusing on how we touch the lives of our team members and boosting the cultural environment and strategy of our business and more harmony with our business strategy. As a result, we believe our increase in our labor costs year-over-year were not a size it could have been, wages that LCI definitely increase, but our attrition rate has helped to lower the overall impact as we drop 24 points over last year’s attrition results through the first four months. In addition, we’ve invested heavily in employee programs that we believe will help us to retain our team members over the long-term. These added resources range from leadership personnel, operations and HR personnel to training and leadership programming. These costs are short-term but we believe they will help us sustain lower attrition over the coming years and make our business even more successful. Then we’ll ultimately improve key metrics like quality, safety and efficiency. We can’t solve all the industries labor issues what attrition initiatives alone. So we’re continuing to dedicate a significant portion of our CapEx budget to various automation projects in the coming years. Our spend on automation in 2016 was approximately $5.5 million and we expect that to increase and increase in 2017 and 2018. Automation coupled with our lean manufacturing initiatives freed up over a 150,000 square feet of additional manufacturing space in 2016. In Q1, 2017 alone leans saved about $2 million and freed up approximately 65,000 square feet of manufacturing capacity. Lean initiatives have been critical for LCI as the industry has continued to grow at a record pace. We are currently adding building capacity in excess of 1 million square feet and putting this online between Q2 of 2017 and Q2 of 2018 to handle increased demand, in addition, to our lean efforts to free up more space. We want to thank all the people and teams here at LCI for their efforts in another great quarter. And we thank our customers for putting their trust in us and we’re forever grateful for these partnerships. I’ll now turn to Brian Hall, our CFO, who’ll discuss the Q1 financial results.