Jason Lippert
Analyst · Citi
Thank you, and good morning, everyone and welcome to LCI's Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2018 Earnings Call. We are pleased to report a record annual revenues of approximately $2.5 billion, a 15% increase over last year, and fourth quarter's revenues that reached $537 million, which were down slightly from the prior year. On a segment level, our OEM sales were down 4% to $486 million in the fourth quarter. I would note that while the industry and wholesale was down around 20% for the recent quarter, our sales were only down modestly due to the successful execution of our diversification strategy. Our focus on diversifying our business has been very intentional to first mitigate the cyclicality that we see in our RV business, and second, to leverage our expertise in sales and operations for other markets, where we believe our focus on innovation and broad product line ownership will drive market share gains and success like we've experienced in RV. We remain confident that in the next four years, our RV segment can be less than 40% of our total business and our results to date are on track with that goal. For 2018, RV represented approximately 63% of our total revenues, down significantly from approximately 90% shortly after the last recession. We expect this growth in our other markets to be organic as well as large gains through our M&A activity, looking to identify and integrate strategic acquisitions that support strong returns to shareholders and non-RV categories in Europe, adjacent markets and the after markets. We have proven our ability to outperform industries in 2018 and we believe we will continue to do so as we execute our strategy in the coming years. Turning to the RV OEM Segment. As we have stated before, the originally forecasted growth of 540,000 units for 2018 fell short. Wholesale shipments did not grow for the first time in nine years, dropping 4% for the year according to December's shipment reports. We believe this correction, which started in early spring of 2018 is nearing the latter innings. Dealer sentiment has remained stable and better than expected retail traffic has been reported at many of the large retail shows over the last month. All in all, we are still looking at nearly 484,000 units for 2018, which is still an Top 5 all-time year-end finish for the RV industry. With that in mind, if retail stays healthy as it has been, we expect that by sometime in second quarter, dealer ordering rates will become more normalized. The long-term outlook for the industry is still very positive with plenty of macro-economic conditions playing in our favor. The most encouraging factor of all is how younger buyers are continuing to spend their disposable income on the RV lifestyle. By 2025, this younger generation will reach 30 years to 45 years of age, which is decidedly in the RV industry's long-term favor. We believe this generation should continue to come into the RV line lifestyle with big numbers, supported by the fact that RV's continue to be designed better every year, with very affordable price points and more creative floor plans and content. Despite the decrease in wholesale shipments and decontenting by RV OEMs in 2018, largely to help offset pricing increases caused by tariffs and tariff-related commodity increases, our content per towable RV and motorhome both increased over the prior year. Content per towable RV increased 6% to $3,450, and motorhome content increased $2,491, up 12% from the prior year. LCI continues to increase product content at a time when many of our OEM customers are taking content out of their units, which speaks to the volume and value of the functionality of LCI components bring to the market. We credit this increase in content per vehicle to the hard working, innovative teams at LCI, our focus on being value-added engineering products company for all markets we serve continues paying off. In 2018, much of our content came in the way of new entry steps, newly designed awning products as well as new improvements to our core products like furniture, axles, chassis, doors and windows. Other drivers, through the last 12 months, have been through our partnership with Furrion, who unveiled new appliances including refrigerators, air conditioners and camera systems. Many of these products also have large aftermarket potential as well, and are just starting to see penetration into the markets this year. While consumer RV trends are very positive, we feel that there are significant opportunities outside the RV industry that will contribute greatly to the long-term health of LCI. We focused on diversification very heavily over the last seven years in what we call adjacent markets. Our four year plan is to have the RV OEM Segment of our business to be close to 40% of our total revenues by 2022. This means these emerging OEM markets for LCI, like Marine, often on highway vehicles, trailers, building products, Europe and our after markets will be the majority of the revenues for LCI. Our sales trend over the last couple of years, which suggests that we're well on our way to this goal. Within the adjacent market category for LCI, we've seen solid gains for fourth quarter revenues increasing to approximately $146 million, up 45% from the same quarter last year. As previously stated, growth in these markets will continue to be one of our largest focus points going into 2019. There are several markets that we feel we can have immediate impact on based on the products that we currently manufacture and how well they fit into these new markets. Just recently we were awarded a several million dollar contract with a large construction equipment company that probably would not have come our way without some recently acquired businesses as we been successful at pairing newly acquired products with existing customers and likewise, newly acquired customers with existing products. We will continue to focus our resources on these emerging OEM segments as well as acquisition synergies for LCI. We've also continued turbo charge our focus on the residential building products markets. We have an array of products that fit into this market, including windows, doors and kitchen and bath products, just to name a few. It's easy to forget that we've been manufacturing Vinyl residential windows for over 40 years, but we believe our design, volume and cost-effective products are perfect for these commercial and residential opportunities. We will continue to make this industry a big focus in 2019. In addition, opportunities in the college and hospitality industries continue to present themselves to LCI. To date, there have been over 50 colleges and universities that have either tested or bought LCI's newly designed queen mattress products. Our large scale furniture and mattress operation and manufacturing capabilities lend themselves very well to these two market segments, with 2,900 colleges and universities that buy tens of thousands of mattresses every year around the country, this is a great opportunity for LCI. In addition, we are looking at mattresses for campgrounds, state camps, prisons, hospitality, medical, and many other non-RV related industries. We currently build over 3,500 mattresses per day and can use this scale to easily enter other mattress and furniture market opportunities. Our aftermarket business continues at strong growth as sales rose to $51 million for the quarter, up from $41 million, a 24% from the same quarter last year. Year-over-year growth in this area is starting to become very meaningful as operating profits for 2018 rose to $31 million from $24 million or 33% from all of 2017. 2018 sales were up $62 million to $233 million over 2017. We believe continuing to build relationships and offering strong technical training programs to dealers and the aftermarket is the key competitive advantage for the long-term. And it is exactly why we've added significant resources to our call center, warehouses, technical training facility and training and call center teams. As a result, we believe the replacement parts business and aftermarket will continue to grow and add meaningful margin to our bottom line. Billions of LCI RV content each year means more aftermarket opportunities. Also in Q4, we brought on a seasoned aftermarket leader and executive to head all of LCI aftermarket operations and strategy as we continued to grow this segment. Our international business is yet another important part of our diversification strategy. In 2018, our Europe business grew $58 million over 2017 to $104 million. We have a high-level structure now with a CEO for our European operations and strategy and are continuing to elevate our organic growth as well as looking to acquire other suppliers to the caravan, marine and rail markets. We see this opportunity in Europe much like we did the RV opportunity in the U.S. 15 years ago as a supply base is made of many small fragmented suppliers that can be strategically rolled up to create larger and better suppliers for that market. The OEM can benefit from having a more sophisticated supply chain and stronger partner with innovative products and talented leadership teams. Since Thor has just purchased Hymer, there are even more opportunities in Europe for LCI than ever before. Maintaining and enhancing our focus on innovation is one of our top priorities for 2019, as it will be critical to our success over the long term. We put a lot of emphasis on this throughout all levels of the company, even assigning a senior leadership position, to head up the entire innovation team and process throughout all levels of LCI. With this commitment to innovation and sheer volume of our core products, we have proven time and time again, we can effectively develop meaningful revenue by delivering new products to market or adding value to our existing core products for all customers and all our markets. We're also starting to use our innovation team more heavily in marine and adjacent OEM markets. In the marine business, in partnership with a key OEM in the boat industry, we debuted a slide-out system, which expands and widens the deck of a pontoon boat up to eight additional fee. This boat is making its debut at the retail boat shows that started at the beginning of this calendar year. Never before has a retail customer been able to order a boat with a slide out. This could be an entirely new stream of revenue for LCI and will likely lead to additional marine project collaborations, and give LCI a great name in the marine business as an innovator. Other exciting marine projects on the horizon include: aluminum pontoon rails, flooring for boats and onboard Wi-Fi as well as hydraulic power steering systems. In the end, our goal is to mirror the strategy we executed on the RV business through focus on new product development, a broad product offering, excellent customer partnerships and willingness to build almost anything our customers ask us to build. The Trump administration tariffs and the resulting action by domestic suppliers has certainly had an adverse impact on many of our raw material prices in the last four quarters. The good news is that steel and aluminum prices seem to be leveling off and even falling in places over the last couple of months. As a result, we believe some of these commodity headwinds should start to turn into tailwinds in Q2 and should put us in a much less constrained position with respect to raw material pressure on margins. That said, our margins did suffer last year for a couple of key reasons. First and largely because the pace we were getting the commodity increases outpaced the rate at which we could successfully put increases into place with our customers. We probably could have put increases in faster, but the result would have been damaged customer relationships. We believe in spending a little bit more time as prices rise, finding ways to mitigate some of the increases so that our customers have time to react and not to take on any more costs than necessary. This has been key to us becoming such a strong player in the RV market over the years and attaining high market shares. On January 1 this year, we implemented the final phase of our pricing increases related to commodities and tariffs, so we will be in a better position going forward as we have covered more of the tariff-related increases and other commodity increases from 2018. Going forward, we are poised to realize more normalized margins as long as commodities continue to trend toward normalization. The second large issue in 2018 was the abrupt slowdown in production over the last eight months of the year in RV. We entered the year preparing for 540,000 units and customers continuing to add capacity when suddenly and without noticing industry hit the brakes in May. For the prior several months, we were adding capacity ourselves, adding structure and people and spending capital to prepare for a huge growth here. Spending the last months of the year, changing plans and ramping down swiftly came at a cost of the business. The respect of the - with respect to the reduction in RV wholesale volume, we've taken swift action around several cost corrective measures within the company to prepare for lower volumes. We've scaled back our capital expenditure budget in 2019 by almost $60 million compared to 2018 in order to boost ROI and improve cash flows. In addition, run rate savings around lean, continuous improvement and automation initiatives will likely be above $7 million for 2019. We continue to invest in our team member retention and engagement programs, which will have a positive impact on quality, safety and efficiency. In 2018, we've had over 1,500 additional team members complete lean training as part of our efforts to build a culture of continuous improvement and finding more projects that will have positive impact on cost. Our goal is to create a positive working environment where people don't want to leave, and we are proud to say that our attrition rate has fallen below 30% from 80% just a few years ago. This is well below the industry average, and it was possible through - being extremely intentional about our culture improvement and leadership development. We couldn't be proud of our teams for how quickly they've adjusted to the industry wholesale change this past year. In closing, I just want to thank all of our teams at LCI for a great year. As stated before, even though we've faced many challenges this past year, there's a lot to be excited about, new innovations, new customers, new markets and a continued focus on acquisition and innovation and diversification should make for a great 2019 for LCI. I will now turn to Brian Hall, our CFO, to discuss Q4 and the full year financial results.