Mick Lucareli
Analyst · Sidoti and Company. Your line is open
Thanks, Neil. And good morning, everyone. Please turn to Slide 6. Second quarter sales were up 4% or $18 million with double digit increases in our building HVAC, CIS and HDE segments. Included in the sales increase was $25 million of pricing to help recover rising material and other supply chain costs. Excluding pricing and foreign exchange sales volume was down 3% as increases in HVAC, CIS and HDE were more than offset by a significant decline in automotive. Adjusted EBITDA declined $26 million driven by the significant rise of material costs. The quarter included nearly $45 million increase in commodity metals, freight, packaging and tariffs. In particular prices for aluminum, copper and steel were significantly higher than the prior year. As I mentioned as an element of revenue, we adjusted prices by $25 million to offset the significant cost increases. Despite the large amount of pricing this quarter had a $20 million net negative material impact. In addition to materials, the quarter had a difficult comparison from temporary COVID saving, which peaked during Q2 of last year. Compared to the prior year the absence of COVID savings resulted in an $11 million cost increase. Adjusted earnings per share of $0.15 with $0.28 below the prior year. As we look back at the quarter, revenue was somewhat lower than we originally expected and materials have increased beyond what we anticipated. In particular the auto segment sales were well below our expectations as customers failed to meet their target. Before moving on, I like to summarize the $5.9 million of adjustments incurred during Q2. First, we recorded $3.3 million of impairment charges related to automotive assets held for sale during the quarter. Next, we incurred $1.6 million of costs related to our 80/20 transformation with the majority relating to recruiting and severance. Finally, we incurred $700,000 of restructuring and environmental costs and $300,000 of other auto exit costs. As usual, our press release and appendix include additional information, U.S. GAAP results, and complete reconciliation. Now let's review the segment results, please turn to Slide 7. The Building HVAC segment reported sales growth of 13% from prior year. This increase was driven by continued momentum and U.S. heating sales, which were up 17%. In addition, commercial ventilation and air conditioning sales grew 12% as demand for school products remain strong. Data center sales were up 10%, sales were temporarily impacted by timing as a large dollar value of orders were completed, but certain customers delayed shipment. As Neil covered the order book is extremely strong and we anticipate very strong year-over-year growth in the second half. The macro-economic cost drivers that covered in my opening comments impacted all our segments, including HVAC and resulted in an adjusted EBITDA decline of $3 million. The lower adjusted EBITDA was primarily driven by two factors. First, net material costs increased by approximately $2 million, and second the combined impact of higher wages and COVID related items resulted in a negative $2 million in comparison. As I mentioned last quarter, we're actively raising prices to offset commodity trends, but in some cases there's a lag between the time of orders and delivery, which has been amplified by the supply chain challenges. The negatively impacted margins in several large custom orders, we fully expect the margin to improve as recent production orders, their shift and pricing actions fully take effect. Please turn to Slide 8. Second quarter sales for CIS were up 20% or $25 million with more than half of that increase coming from pricing. Revenue is up in most markets, including 30% or refrigeration, 21% in commercial HVAC and 30% in coatings. Despite the sales improvement in higher pricing adjusted EBITDA was down $1 million or 11%. Material costs net of any pricing recovery increased over $4 million and unfortunately offset the volume benefit. We anticipated a difficult SG&A comparison give the COVID savings achieved in the prior year. SG&A increased $1 million mainly due to wages and prior year COVID action. We are continuing to push through price increases and taking other actions to improve the profitability of this business. Given all of these activities, we anticipate finishing the fiscal year with a much-improved adjusted EBITDA margin in Q4. Please turn to Slide 9. Sales in the HD segment were up 18% or $30 million with about a third relating to pricing and foreign exchange. Adjusted EBITDA declined $8 million driven by decline in gross profit and higher SG&A. Gross profit decreased $5 million, which we anticipate to be the low watermark for this fiscal year. The lower gross profit was the direct result of commodity prices and logistics costs such as tariffs, packaging and freight. Material costs increased by approximately $12 million net of all pass-through pricing. In addition to the higher materials, SG&A was up $2 million, driven by the COVID cost savings actions taken in the prior year and higher wages. While we expect continued revenue growth in the second half, we're taking a more cautious approach from a revenue standpoint. If some customers have reduced orders due to supply chain issues. We have worked aggressively on multiple fronts to share and recover the rising costs, but in most cases we're under long-term agreements in this business, and must wait to implement material price increases. In some cases, the lag on these price adjustments is six months or longer, which can be challenging in periods of rapid cost inflation. We're working with our customers to shorten these legs wherever possible. The next wave of price adjustments will be in January, which should result in a significant Q4 margin improvement. Please turn to Slide 10. As I discussed last quarter, we anticipated that our Q1 would be the high watermark for automotive sale. During the call, we discussed the global semiconductor chip shortage combined with higher raw material costs and various COVID impacts. For the second quarter, automotive sales were down 40% with declines across all geographic regions. I'd like to highlight that approximately $18 million of the decrease was due to the sale of our air-cooled automotive business in Austria, which was completed in Q1. Adjusted EBITDA was negatively impacted by the lower sales volume as well as higher commodity prices and the lack of COVID savings. More volume accounted for approximately $14 million of the EBITDA decline net materials and COVID accounted for another $4 million of negative variants. As Neil mentioned, we have terminated the sale agreement with Dana and have further reduce their automotive revenue for the balance of the year. We anticipate is difficult comparisons in our automotive business to continue for the balance of the year. However, we're taking immediate actions to improve this business given the challenging market conditions. We'll provide more details regarding these actions during our next quarterly report. Now moving to the balance sheet, please turn to Slide 11. Year-to-date free cash flow is a negative $39 million, including a negative $18 million in Q2. As discussed last quarter, we anticipated that cash flow would improve each quarter and finish the year in a positive position. The major drivers of year-to-day cash flow have been higher working capital and capital expenditures in particular inventory levels have increased significantly as material costs have increased and supply chain issues that force us to maintain safety stock to ensure adequate supply. We're working hard to reduce our order backlog, which will help to reduce inventories over the back half of the year. Overall, we expect our cash flows to improve over the second half of the year as we improve working capital and keep tight controls over capital spending. Our net debt of $333 million is slightly higher than last quarter due to the negative cash flow in Q2. Our leverage ratio is 2.5 times, which lands on the higher end of our targeted range, but well below the maximum covenant level of 3.25. Based on our full year outlook, we anticipate the leverage ratio will return back to the 2 times range by year end. Now let's turn to Slide 12 and our fiscal 2022 outlook. Given the various and prolonged headwinds, we are lowering our fiscal 2022 guidance, the reduced outlook mostly relates to two issues. With the first being the automotive market and the second relating ongoing cost increases. Since last quarter, we've significantly lowered our outlook for the automotive segment. Given the continued pressures from the semiconductor shortage; like mostly believe the chip shortage will continue through calendar 2022. From a cost perspective, metal prices continue to climb, which further pushes out our ability to fully offset these increases. As I previously mentioned, aluminum and steel prices have risen further since our last earnings call. We now expect that material cost for the full fiscal year will increase by more than $130 million, to offset that we will adjust prices by more than $95 million. However, due to the additional increases in timing, the GAAP is temporarily widened from what we originally projected. To be clear, we will recover the majority of cost increases, but as materials have continued to increase the additional price recovery will likely carry over into the new fiscal year. As a result of these factors, we're lowering our sales growth range to 10% to 16% given this combined with temporary costs we now anticipate that adjusted EBITDA will be in the range of $145 million to $160 million. The team is working to reduce the lag on our pricing mechanisms and are pushing through price increases and other parts of the business leveraging the 80/20 data. We expect incremental margin and earnings improvements in Q3 above levels produced in the first half. However, we project the next large wave of pricing adjustments in Q4 with a more significant margin improvement in the final quarter of this fiscal year. In addition to the incremental pricing, we will not have the negative comparables in the second half related to prior year COVID savings. As we look at sales by end market, the demand in the majority of our end markets remain strong with double-digit growth. The auto market remains the main challenge, but we will begin our restructuring work. Our order backlog is unusually high, which has driven up inventory levels, and we expect to work through this in the back half of the year. Our focus is now on pricing recovery and order book growth, particularly in CIS and building HVAC. Based on the strong order book 80/20 and future pricing recovery, I'm quite encouraged as we look forward to calendar 2022. With that we'll take your question.