Marvin Riley
Analyst · Sidoti & Company. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Chris. And good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I hope that you and your families are safe and healthy. 2020 has been a very unpredictable year as we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. As we navigate through these unprecedented times, our top priority remains the health and safety of our global employees, their families, our communities, customers and suppliers. I want to express my sincere gratitude to the heroes who continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, the health care professionals, emergency responders, grocery store employees, government officials and our EnPro colleagues working on the front line in our factories around the world. I'm very proud of the way our teams have continued to excel in delivering quality products and solutions to our customers, while adopting enhanced safety practices throughout the organization and keeping our core values at the heart of their actions. Before I begin my remarks on the quarter, I want to emphasize EnPro's core values of Safety, Excellence and Respect for all people. We hold dearly the sanctity of all human life and each person's inherent and equal right to grow and develop into the best and truest expression of themselves and start contrast to our enduring values and purpose. There's an acute and systemic racism against black people in the world today. This racism and discrimination of any type violates our values and what we stand for as a company. On June 5, our executive team and Board of Directors issued a statement that shared our company's commitment to being part of an enduring solution. If interested, you can read our EnPro Standing Together letter by using the link posted on the homepage of our website or the link in today's press release. Over the last year, we've taken several concrete actions to further these values that we hold so strongly, including increasing the diversity of our leadership team, creating a diversity and inclusion leadership position; implementing bias training, leveraging our internal leadership programs to provide a forum for small groups to talk openly about biases, belief systems and different perspectives; providing enhanced mental and emotional health resources and establishing an internal charitable foundation to support ongoing education, equality and diversity. We stand in solidarity with the African-American community, persons of color across the globe, our employees, our customers, our friends and our families. We stand together to create real and sustainable change starting right here at EnPro. As we begin our discussion on our second quarter highlights, I'd like to start by discussing four key themes. First, I am pleased to share that despite the impact of COVID-19 and weaker year-over-year conditions across most of our markets, our Q2 adjusted EBITDA margin held up extremely well, contracting approximately 30 basis points to 15.2%, with adjusted EBITDA of $37.5 million. When the pandemic emerged, we acted quickly to develop rigorous cost management plans to navigate this new landscape, and we are seeing the benefits of these savings on our bottom line. Second, we continued to optimize our portfolio. We announced the final steps in reshaping our heavy-duty truck business, which, upon completion, will significantly reduce our revenue exposure to the commercial vehicle and heavy-duty truck markets, while increasing adjusted EBITDA margins in that business. This is evidence of our portfolio evolution towards a more durable business in higher-growth markets that generate higher margins and cash flow. Third, I have commented before that we have a clear strategy, a cycle-tested and dedicated leadership team and a talented workforce. These elements have enabled us to adapt and act with agility in the changing economic environment. And finally, we continued to focus on preserving capital. We have a very strong balance sheet, fortified by cash proceeds from the recent Fairbanks Morse divestiture, which closed in January. Our net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA ratio was 0.4 times at the end of the second quarter, with $424 million in cash, a largely untapped revolver and a relentless focus on cash generation. We feel good about our financial position. We're poised to emerge from this economic downturn with the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. Turning to slide 5. I'd like to take a few moments to provide an update on our 4-phase approach to navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. To level set, I'll start with a quick summary. Phase 1 focused on health and safety; while Phase 2 centers on business stability and progression, including running our business in adverse conditions, calibrating the business to new demand levels, managing liquidity and being responsive to our customer needs. Phase 3 encompasses cost and process improvements based on our learnings from the previous phases, and Phase 4 is the post-pandemic period. We will be well positioned to capture growth as markets recover. During our first quarter earnings call, I discussed in detail the steps we took during Phase 1, and today, I'll delve deeper into phases 2 and 3, which we entered into during the second quarter. The second phase of our response involves a keen focus on business stability and progression. Leading up to and during the second quarter, we plan for several contingency scenarios of increasing severity. We took decisive informed action to prevent the spread of COVID-19, while ensuring business continuity and success in any environment. Each of our businesses enacted initiatives in line with their playbooks to adjust to new demand levels. While we took specific actions to address immediate needs, we also emphasize creating lasting changes that will fortify our business for the future by focusing on permanent structural changes rather than just short-term actions. For example, we reduced our cost structure by exiting and consolidating sites where possible. In total, we enacted cost reductions resulting in full year 2020 savings of approximately $30 million, of which we estimate, half will be sustained annual savings moving forward. These changes will result in higher profitability and will position us well when the environment improves. From a supply chain perspective, we maintained our focus on risk mitigation. Due to the diligent efforts of our supply chain leadership council, we have not experienced any material supply chain issues this year. We're utilizing best practice proprietary tools and techniques developed by our teams to understand operational status and are communicating regularly with our suppliers. Our supply chain organization is a notable strength during these challenging times. We have started to enter our third phase, which involves monitoring and improving the processes, procedures and new ways of working that have emerged from the first 2 phases. Early on, we re-imagined how our manufacturing teams conduct their work, implementing manual tracing at each of our facilities, along with temperature checks and additional PPE requirements. To date, we have had only 32 known infections out of approximately 5,000 employees worldwide. Now we're taking our safety protocols a step further and are in the process of implementing testing for all plant employees and contact tracing technology across our US manufacturing footprint. This technology is currently being tested in one facility and following pilot success, will be rapidly rolled out to the rest of our plans. While we cannot fully control the number of cases we may see, we can apply new tools, processes and technology to increase our employee safety while they deliver on our customer needs. Another initiative we're in the process of developing is called Working Together From Anywhere. Our teams have rapidly and effectively adopted new technologies that have achieved similar or better results than with the manner in which we were working before the pandemic. While we acknowledge that our sales and M&A teams will be required to travel to conduct specific aspects of their business, we do not anticipate that our company's overall travel will return to pre-COVID-19 levels. Through this initiative, we're confident that we will develop solutions to enable our employees to thrive in the new environment, while also maintaining a lower expense base related to these activities. Moving now to our fourth and last phase. Once market conditions return to a state of relative normalcy, we expect improved financial characteristics across our businesses as a result of the structural actions we've taken, including improvements in our cost base, productivity and supply chain. While demand continues to remain soft across several core businesses, we're focused on controlling what we can and executing our profitable growth strategy. Now let me spend a few moments discussing our strategy and actions taken this corner - this quarter to reposition EnPro. Our strategy is focused on three areas, first, reshaping our portfolio to include businesses focused on material science with compelling margins, leading technologies and strong cash flow in markets with favorable secular trends. Second, increasing our aftermarket exposure and driving greater recurring revenues. And third, maintaining a balanced, disciplined approach to capital allocation, while leveraging the EnPro operating system to increase margins and cash flow return on investment. As evidenced by our portfolio moves over the past year, including those announced over the past several months, we're taking proactive and aggressive actions to successfully position our company for the future. Let me briefly summarize the actions we've taken so far. First is the divestiture of our Fairbanks Morse division. In January, we completed the $415 million sale of Fairbanks Morse, which constituted the Power Systems segment. After careful review, we have determined, Fairbanks Morse was no longer a strategic fit, while a great business to sale, which was completed at an attractive valuation, contributed to our goal of owning businesses with high cash flow return on investment that are based on our core competency of material science. Second, in our Sealing Products segment, we conducted an extensive review to identify businesses and product lines that are no longer aligned with our long-term strategy. As a result, we exited or divested several businesses while reducing our exposure to heavy-duty truck. These actions include the recently announced agreement to sell our Air Springs business and our announced plans to exit brake products. With the announcement of the Air Springs transaction, we have now addressed all the portfolio reshaping actions in our trucking business. And we expect to complete this reshaping work in line with our previously communicated time frame of year end. These steps refocus STEMCO's resources on its higher-margin wheel-end business, which is aligned with our strategy to shift the EnPro portfolio to markets and products that offer the most value to our customers and our shareholders. With these exits, we anticipate that going forward, our annual sales to the heavy-duty truck market will be in the range of approximately $125 million to $175 million. These actions significantly reduced portfolio cyclicality and increased our exposure to resilient technology-oriented recurring revenue businesses. Further, these efforts will increase our adjusted EBITDA margins and cash flow return on investment. Finally, we made two strategic acquisitions in 2019, LeanTeq and the Aseptic Group, which expanded our reach into the attractive semiconductor aftermarket, pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries. Both companies have strong competitive positions in high-growth markets, excellent margins, compelling cash flow and strong secular trends supporting long-term growth. These acquisitions align with our growth strategy due to their technical expertise, niche market leadership, mission-critical applications and significant aftermarket contributions. Both businesses are performing in line with expectations and showing resiliency through the cycle with solid order intake and backlog. It is important to note that with the executed and announced portfolio-reshaping moves, we will have a more attractive portfolio with semiconductor as our largest end market. We're committed to continuing to seek organic and inorganic growth opportunities in faster growing, higher-margin advanced technology spaces. Third, let's look at our Engineered Products segment. In this segment, we're focused on increasing margins and asset efficiency while optimizing our cost structure. In support of this work, on June 18, we announced plans to exit operations at GGB's bushing block manufacturing facility headquartered in Dieuze, France, which will refocus the business on higher-margin product lines. Overall, the actions taken over the past year demonstrate our commitment to proactive portfolio management and strengthening the durability of our business. Before turning the call over to Milt, I want to touch briefly on M&A. Our growth strategy is focused on organic initiatives as well as strategic M&A. We remain focused on identifying opportunities that align with our strategy. We have built a strong M&A practice at EnPro and have a seasoned team overseeing this effort from sourcing and purchasing, to integrating and optimizing businesses. While deal volume decreased substantially during the first half of the year, we have seen increased activity over the past several weeks. We are diligently cultivating and reinforcing strong relationships with key advisers and owners of target businesses as well as briefing key contacts on our strategy and acquisition criteria so that we will be well positioned as an acquirer of choice. We're being patient and will remain disciplined while actively pursuing attractive opportunities. And now I will turn the call over to Milt for additional discussion on our second quarter results. Milt?