Julie Schertell
Analyst · CJS Securities. Your line is open
Thank you, Bill, and good morning, everyone. While we started out the year strong, there was no avoiding the significant impacts from the pandemic in the quarter and I am very pleased with how our Neenah team has responded. In this time of great uncertainty, we responsibly managed operating schedules and inventories, aggressively reduced spending and delivered strong cash flows, all while continuing to support our customers with the highest level of quality and service. I am confident with the work we have done we will emerge in a strong position. Last quarter, I shared our plans to address the pandemic covering five key areas, maintaining the health and safety of our employees, exceeding our customer’s expectations and working with them on future needs, driving operational excellence in manufacturing and reducing costs in all areas, preserving our strong liquidity position and continuing to execute our long-term growth strategies. I will update you on our progress in each of these areas. Our top priority is always the health and safety of our employees. With enhanced protocols and practices, we have implemented numerous changes to the ways we operate. Our employees quickly adapted to these changes while remaining focused on delivering the high quality and service our customers expect from us. Most importantly, they have done all of this while working safely. In fact, we reduced injuries by almost 30% this year, as we continue our progress to ensure that no one gets hurt while working at Neenah. Second, is serving the needs of our customers, who have also been impacted to various degrees by this year’s unpredictable environment. Neenah is known for our flexibility, speed, nimbleness and responsiveness in the marketplace. During these times of increased volatility, our customers value these characteristics more than ever and our global footprint has helped us effectively support customers with a local supply chain. At the same time, we continue to develop innovative new products for the long-term. I mentioned in May, our success in commercializing media for high performance face masks. Recently we have also launched replacement filtration media for consumer branded face masks. This business while small today continues to grow and we have accelerated efforts to increase throughput on our assets in Europe. In addition to face masks, we have grown our high efficiency HVAC applications and expanded our high performance industrial filtration media to address the needs for data storage. Growth in both of these markets continues to accelerate. While we have introduced proprietary, new, environmentally-friendly digital transfer products that expand our addressable market and provide increased customization and cost efficiencies for our customers. We are developing new tape backing applications to meet the increased demand for painting and other do it yourself home projects and not to be outdone, our consumer fine paper team recently designed and launched new teacher tool products under our well-known ASTROBRIGHTS brand and began selling new SOUTHWORTH brand planners and journals. These products are available at major retailers both online and in stores and help extend our reach beyond the traditional paper category. A third area of focus has been operational excellence and cost management. In the quarter, our team significantly reduced costs, both temporarily in line with reduced operating schedules and also on an ongoing basis as a result of restructuring efforts. We reduced over $15 million of manufacturing costs in the quarter as we optimized capacity, restructured parts of our organization, improved asset yields and deferred spending in multiple areas. In addition, our procurement team did an excellent job negotiating lower prices and more favorable terms with many vendors. Our hard work extended beyond manufacturing, and SG&A was more than $6 million less than last year, with reduced payroll costs, of course, lower travel expenses and spending decreases in virtually all other areas. These reductions included nonrecurring savings above $1 million from furloughs. Additional initiatives included optimizing certain brands and SKUs, and as noted in May, idling a fine paper machine and reallocating its volume to other assets. While these efforts didn’t overcome the significant impact of under absorbed fixed costs in the quarter, the changes we have made clearly set us up for more efficient operations as volume return and are expected to generate ongoing savings of around $7 million a year. Next, we focused on preserving our strong liquidity. Cash generated from operations in the quarter was almost $30 million. In addition to cost reductions, we reduced working capital, nonessential capital spending and discretionary pension contributions. In May, I communicated a targeted cash flow improvement of $50 million versus our base plan to help mitigate impacts of lower volume. I am pleased to note we are on track to surpass this target. These efforts, as well as the successful refinancing of our debt helped us end the quarter on sound financial footing. Last but not least, we remain resolute in our efforts to create long-term value through executing strategies to invest efficiently in platforms that deliver attractive returns and enhance our growth rate. We have important foundational categories like fine paper and backings that generate meaningful cash flows that we can redeploy in four targeted growth areas, filtration, custom-engineered materials, premium packaging and design, and specialty coatings. We are continuing to act on organic opportunities in these areas, while maintaining an active, but cautious M&A process and recognize it’s our ability to execute well, while maintaining financial discipline that ultimately drives value. Before wrapping up, I’d like to comment on the one-time charges in the quarter. While these included costs for actions we have taken to restructure and optimize our business for the future, the largest impact result from -- resulted from lower near-term demand due to the pandemic, which triggered a partial impairment of our U.S. filtration asset. As we have noted in the past, qualification on some grades has taken longer than anticipated and we have also made investments in Germany that have provided incremental capacity. Our objective is to optimize total cost of this business, these items now combined with an additional slowdown due to the pandemic has extended the U.S. ramp-up curve. We continue to see transportation filtration as a strategic and attractive market. Our expectations are to fill the U.S. asset over the next several years and deliver our historic above market growth rate for this category. I can assure you, our teams remain very focused on this and we view it as an important catalyst for growth at Neenah. I am sure it was no surprise that the quarter was challenging. As you have heard, we have acted aggressively to protect employees, support our customers, manage our costs and improve our financial position. We remain well-positioned in our markets and have the organizational capabilities and financial strength to address short-term challenges and deliver on our long-term strategies. I have been encouraged by the sequential improvement in demand in the past few months and we will talk more about our outlook later. I will now turn things over to Paul to cover our financial results in detail.