Marvin Riley
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is now live
Thanks, Jerry. And good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I hope you and your families continue to remain safe and healthy. As vaccines become available, we're hopeful that the severe impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic will begin to subside. Our organization continues to remain vigilant about enhancing safety protocols, updating operating processes, and adapting to new ways of working. Together, we are exemplifying EnPro’s core values of safety, excellence and respect for all people, while continuing to excel at delivering quality products and services to our customers. We have remained steadfast in our commitment to these core values, and to all of our team members which has been demonstrated through our public stance against discrimination and social injustice. Human Capital Management, including diversity and inclusion has enabled EnPro to achieve success. Over the last year, we have made progress in our commitment to our employees and society, including establishing our charitable foundation with an initial commitment of $1 million in support of education, equality, diversity, and the preservation of human dignity, as announced in our February 11 press release. Developing are working together from anywhere initiatives to enable our global workforce to collaborate in new ways, increasing the number of females and minorities on our senior leadership team to 35%, creating and filling a diversity and inclusion leadership position to further strengthen our commitment to equality for everyone and developing a platform for small groups to talk openly about biases, belief systems and the importance of valuing different perspectives. Moving on to our fourth quarter highlights, I'd like to discuss three key things reflected in our results. First, I am pleased to report better than expected fourth quarter results, despite the continued challenges created by the pandemic and further lockdown across much of Europe. Our fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 230 basis points 17.4% with adjusted EBITDA of $48.1 million, an increase of 11% year-over-year. The strong performance was the result of actions taken to reshape our portfolio, including the acquisition of Alluxa and several strategic divestitures as well as our quick and decisive cost mitigation initiatives in response to COVID. Second, we maintain a disciplined approach to capital allocation and a strong balance sheet as we drive long-term shareholder returns. With approximately $230 million of cash on the balance sheet at the end of the quarter, and untap revolver, and our relentless focus on cash generation, we're well positioned to consider additional bolt-on acquisition opportunities. And third, we have made significant progress over the last 18 months stabilizing our financial results and evolving our portfolio towards more profitable businesses and higher growth markets to improve cash flow return on investment. With the successful acquisitions of LeanTeq, the Aseptic Group, during 2019 and the most recent acquisition of Alluxa, we have a solid foundation for our organic and inorganic strategies to drive profitable growth. Turning to slide five, as we look back over the year, we have adjusted successfully to pandemic conditions, and are now in the final stage of our COVID pandemic response plan. As a consequence of the pandemic, we fundamentally changed several aspects of our business. We developed a number of enhanced safety practices during the pandemic that we will continue to use even after the pandemic has subsided; we have established appropriate inventories of PPE and a full loop system to test, trace and monitor employee health. We hold the safety of our team members to the highest standards, while they continue to deliver the exceptional level of service that EnPro customers expect. We are committed to maintaining the advantages of our working together from anywhere initiatives for salaried employees where it makes sense on a permanent basis. Our IT team has put new tools and cyber protocols in place to allow us to enhance connectivity, engage collaboratively, and work productively across our businesses and geographies. Our reimagined way of working has provided a new lens through which to think about how we can take advantage of the unique talents of colleagues across our global organization. The new way of working has allowed us to experiment and as a result has provided us with insight on how we might connect in a more meaningful way with our customers. Our supply chain team remains a notable strength, as we have had no significant supply chain disruptions during the pandemic. We fortified our supply base in 2020 by establishing strategic secondary sources for critical raw materials. We work with reliable suppliers in multiple geographic regions to mitigate a broad spectrum of risks and promote supply continuity. Our transportation agreements with multiple ocean over the road and small parcel carriers allow to work flexibility in how we optimize inbound and outbound movement of goods. Our nimble response to the COVID pandemic and robust cost mitigation initiatives together with our portfolio reshaping actions enabled our company to achieve last year-over-year adjusted EBITDA, despite a nearly 11% decline in sales during 2020. This represents an adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of 170 basis points for the full year, a tremendous feat for the input team and mid 2020 macroeconomic challenges. Our strategy has remained clear and consistent .We're focused on four areas first; reshaping our portfolio to accelerate growth in niche, high margin materials science related businesses with strong cash flow. Second, maintaining our high aftermarket exposure and increasing our exposure to faster growth businesses. Third, leveraging the EnPro capability center to increase margins and cash flow return on investment, and fourth, maximizing long term shareholder returns through a commitment to disciplined capital allocation. Through the capability center, we leverage continuous improvement methods across the company to improve productivity, efficiency, pricing and Salesforce effectiveness to drive increased margins and increased cash flow. Since its inception, the capability center has utilized industry best practices, and a collaborative approach to problem solving to drive improvement throughout our businesses. The capability center methods and tools are fully integrated in our company, serving both existing and newly acquired businesses and reaching from the C-suite all the way to the shop floor. We look forward to talking more about the capability Center at our upcoming investor day. We continued our actions to reshape our portfolio during the fourth quarter by closing the acquisition of Alluxa in late October, completing the sale of STEMCO’s Air Springs business in November and completing the sale of GGB’s bushing block business at the beginning of December. The Air Springs and bushing blocks divestiture will allow us to refocus their respective businesses on higher margin product lines. Specifically, the sale of STEMCO’s Air Springs business marks the completion of our efforts to reduce our heavy duty truck market exposure. Our remaining STEMCO heavy duty truck business will now be focused on high margin, wheel and ceiling systems and suspension components. With these actions, we anticipate our heavy-duty truck business annual sales will range from $125 million to $175 million, reducing the percentage of our total sales in trucking from the mid-20s to the mid-teens. On February 4th, we issued a press release announcing the re-segmentation of our business into three reporting segments. The re-segmentation aligns our technical and operational expertise, improves performance management decision making and enhances transparency for investors. Our new segments are; first, Sealing Technologies, which is comprised of Garlock, STEMCO and Technetics Sealing businesses. These businesses are focused on safeguarding critical environment. Second, Advanced Surface Technologies, which is composed of Alluxa and our semiconductor business including LeanTeq. These businesses are focused on advancing precision, services and solutions, and third, engineered materials, which is composed of GGB and CPI. These businesses are focused on enabling high performance polymer applications. Let me now highlight the success of our recent acquisitions. The three acquisitions made within the last year and a half are great examples of investments we're making to execute our profitable growth strategy. The Aseptic Group acquisition closed in July 2019, followed by LeanTeq which closed in September of that year and Alluxa which closed in October 2020. These acquisitions expand our reach into the attractive semiconductor aftermarket, pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical, and life sciences industry. All these companies have strong competitive positions in high growth markets, excellent margins, robust cash flow, and serve markets with secular trends supporting long term growth. These acquisitions also align with our capabilities and growth strategies, due to their technical expertise, niche market leadership, mission critical applications and recurring revenue models. The Aseptic Group, which designs, manufactures and distributes Aseptic Fluid Transfer products to support manufacturing of next generation biopharmaceutical by the world's largest pharma companies has performed well since 2010 and has been integrated into the Sealing Technologies segments. During this integration, our growth initiative is focused on geographic and product range expansion. By leveraging our resources in the capability center, we move quickly to bring in talent, increase warehouse capacity, and implement new supply chain policies to improve response time to our customers. This resulted in a 30% increase in backlog mainly driven by an increased order flow from heightened demand for Sealing [ph] services. LeanTeq, which provides cleaning services for critical components used in leading edge semiconductor equipment, has been a very successful acquisition. Over the past year, the business has maintained its high profit margins, while increasing revenue approximately 40% driven by continued demand for advanced node semiconductor chips. To manage the tremendous growth we're experiencing, we are opening new capacity in a different facility in Taiwan that is specifically designed to increase our capabilities in five and three nanometre applications. We're also in the midst of increasing capacity utilization within LeanTeq’s Milpitas California facility to support next generation wafer fab equipment development. And finally, Alluxa, which provides precision optical, filters, and thin film coatings for the industrial technology, Life Sciences and semiconductor markets. While we're still in the early stages of integrating this business, its potential contribution is every bit as promising as LeanTeq's. Our integration approach is very balanced, focusing on utilizing the EnPro capability center, while being careful not to disrupt day-to-day business. Even in the early innings, the capability center has already identified ways to reduce logistics costs, and is currently working to enhance the quality system at Alluxa. Our goal is to allow the experience management teams to the successful businesses, the latitude to continue to run their operations effectively and efficiently, while providing them with info resources in the form of capital, talent, functional and organizational support. With Alluxa, we anticipate a strong first quarter, given their order intake momentum, and backlog heading into the year, which gives us great confidence in the initial stages of the acquisition. We have been very pleased with the overall performance of these acquisitions to date. And as we enter 2021 we're focused on capturing the full benefits of these acquisitions to drive further value creation for shareholders. Now, I will turn the call over to Mil for a deeper dive into financial results for the quarter Milton?