Tom Burke
Analyst · Dougherty & Company. Your line is open
Thank you, Kathy, and good morning, everyone. In the past few months, we have seen a significant decline in many of the key end markets served by our VTS and CIS segments. In addition to the Automotive slowdown mentioned last quarter, we are now projecting additional weakness in the commercial vehicle and off-highway markets that we expect to continue through the remainder of our fiscal year and into fiscal 2021. We are also seeing lower orders in our CIS segment, including both cooler sales to the data center market and coils sales to the HVAC and refrigeration markets. These conditions have led to our second quarter earnings being lower than we had originally expected and to a significantly lower outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year. We have therefore lowered our sales and earnings guidance for fiscal ‘20. Mick will provide additional details later in the call. Given the significant change in our order outlook and market conditions, we are rapidly implementing a number of aggressive cost-containment measures. Some of these are immediate actions that will drive short-term cost savings and some are longer term initiatives, designed to deliver between $25 million and $30 million of annual savings over the next 18 months. These measures include operational and SG&A expense reductions, resulting from accelerated procurement savings structural changes and headcount reductions with the immediate goal of improving our operating earnings and cash flows. It’s important for our shareholders to know that we are experiencing a major correction in some of the markets we serve and are taking the appropriate actions now to ensure we stay on path to meet our performance goals. Before turning to the segment results for the quarter, I would like to provide an update on the potential divestiture of our Automotive business. As most of you know, we entered into a formal sale process in the late spring, early summer timeframe and we have been diligently working to prepare for the sale of the business over the past several months, while managing through a challenging industry environment. Throughout the process, numerous companies expressed interest in the business and we see -- we received bids from both strategic and financial buyers. Over the last several months, we narrowed the group and believed that we could reach an agreement with one particular buyer. Unfortunately, negotiations with the counterparty have recently been terminated. This is due to a combination of factors, including general market and economic conditions, deal complexity and overall value. We have other interested parties and we will continue with the sale process, while continuing to analyze all strategic options. Though the process is taking longer than anticipated due to the industry and economic uncertainty, but we will make the right decision for our shareholders. The team has worked extremely hard on the separation and the investment is significant. But we believe this is a prudent investment because it is a necessary step for Modine to exit the Automotive business. We believe that becoming more diversified industrial company is in the best short-term and long-term interest of our shareholders, and will make Modine a stronger, more profitable business once complete. Now turning to our second quarter results, overall, second quarter sales decreased 9%. Our Building HVAC segment had another strong quarter with sales up 12% on a constant currency basis versus the prior year. However, both our VTS and CIS businesses had year-over-year sales declines, primarily due to continued weakness in our end-markets and unfavorable currency impacts. Our second quarter adjusted operating income was $20.2 million down $6.3 million or 24% from the prior year, primarily due to the lower sales volume in our VTS and CIS segments. Turning to page four, sales for the VTS segment were down 11% from the prior year or 9% on a constant currency basis. Our key vehicular markets have slowed significantly, overall sales to commercial vehicle customers were down 15% and off-highway sales were down 22%. We start seeing a decline late in the first quarter with only significant sales softening in our Automotive markets. Early in our second quarter, commercial vehicle market still appeared stable, but we began to hear early word of inventory adjustments from our off-highway customers. At this point, third-party market research estimates continue to signal year-over-year growth. By the end of the second quarter, we saw a significant drop in off-highway orders and started receiving mixed signals for the rest of the year. It wasn’t until early October that third-party market data to begin reflecting a portion of these market declines and that we learned a full extent of the impact of the second half of our year for both off-highway and commercial vehicle sales. We continue to monitor publish market data, but as we talk with our customers, we now understand that the volume declines in the fourth calendar quarter of 2019, in the first calendar quarter of 2020, maybe significantly worse than the current data would indicate. In some cases, we expect year-over-year volumes declined by as much as 20%. We base our forecast both our market data and customer feedback. In the current environment, we are taking a more conservative approach and are preparing for volumes to continue to decline for the balance of our fiscal year. Within the off-highway space, the area most negatively impacted has been large engines and high horsepower equipment. This includes high tonnage escalators, harvesters and large tractors, where we have a higher mix of business. These impacts were generally in line with what we have seen and heard from the earnings commentary of our large OE customers in this quarter. Sales to customers in the Americas region were down 9% from the prior year, primarily driven by lower sales to Automotive and off-highway customers. Sales in Europe were down 13% from the prior year, due primarily to a steep drop in commercial vehicle sales as programs continue to wind down. In Asia, sales were down 12% due to lower off-highway sales in China and Korea. This was partially offset by higher Automotive sales in China. Adjusted operating income for the VTS segment was $9.3 million for the quarter, which is $6.7 million lower than the prior year. Adjusted operating margin was down 170 basis points to 3.1%. This volume driven decline has lowered our segment returns to a level that is clearly below our targets. So far, we have rapidly adjusted our direct labor costs, but the VTS team is now focused on quickly reducing our fixed cost as well. Our operations team is aggressively rebalancing production schedules and adjusting labor requirements in overhead spending in line with our latest sales forecast. Please turn to page five. Our CIS segment also had another down quarter, with sales decreasing 12% from the prior year. Sales to data center customers were down 26% from the prior year. Similar to last year, we knew this quarter sales will be down from the strong level in the second quarter of last year. We still have a strong relationship with our largest customers in this segment and they are happy with our performance. We are actively working with them to find opportunities to grow this business and even though they are still growing their data center capacity, the rate of this growth has slowed, which impacted both the second quarter and our forecast for the rest of the fiscal year. However, our future initiatives for the data center piece of our CIS segment is the diversification of our customer base. This market is fairly concentrated, which makes this effort difficult, but we believe the relationship and success we have had with our largest customers is a testament to our products and services. It gives us confidence in our ability to obtain new customers. In addition to data center, sales to other end markets in our CIS segment were down as well, due to a tough industrial environment. This segment reported adjusted operating income of $8.9 million, down 31% from the prior year. This decrease was primarily due to lower gross profits, driven by lower sales volumes and negative sales mix. We recently announced leadership change over our CIS segment was Scott Bowser, Chief Operations Officer, assuming responsibility for the segment. We will also be making further structural and leadership changes to ensure we drive improvement in both the commercial and operational sides of this business. We clearly have some work to do in this segment. I am confident in Scott’s proven leadership that this team will execute on our growth and profit improvement plans. In particular, we are focused on profit improvement in our coils business, where we are reviewing our profitability by product and by customer and believe there is room to strengthen our pricing structure and distribution channels. In addition, we are also examining the organizational structure of this business. Last year our VTS business moved from a regionally manage business to a global structure. In CIS, the group is still managed regionally with different areas of focus, strengths and weaknesses around the world. We are now looking to move to a global product structure that will help to improve profitability in our coils business and further strengthen our market presence in our coolers business. Please turn to page six. Turning to our bright spot in the quarter. Sales for Building HVAC segment increased 10% driven primarily by higher sales of school ventilation and heating products in North America and higher data center sales in the U.K., partially offset by lower non-data center product sales in the U.K. Adjusted operating income increased 35% from the prior year to $8.8 million and adjusted operating margin increased 300 basis points to 15.8%. This increase was driven by higher sales volume and favorable sales mix. We continue to be encouraged by the strong performance in our competitive position in this segment. We recently announced that we entered into a supply agreement with CyrusOne, a global owner and manager of data center properties to provide cooling solutions for the data center projects in Europe. Our Airedale business unit in U.K. is in a great position to provide energy efficient cooling solutions to this growing market. With that, I’d like to turn over to Mick for an overview of our consolidated results and to update our outlook for fiscal ‘20.