Wilson R. Jones
Analyst · Jerry Revich with Goldman Sachs
Thanks, Charlie and good morning, everybody. Charlie mentioned disciplined execution, and that's what you're seeing now in the Access Equipment team. Our operations and supply chain teams work successfully to move equipment over the mountain, in McConnelsburg, and around the world from inclement weather to serve our customers in the second quarter. We also have numerous MOVE initiatives ongoing in the Access Equipment segment that are enabling the team to deliver on their margin improvement goals. Our global markets have supported the price increases that we announced effective January 1, and the team continues to lower our product, process and overhead costs. Today, trends that we've seen over the past few quarters continue to drive this segment. In North America, we continue to see demand driven largely by rental company fleet replacement, although we are beginning to hear some customers talk about fleet expansion in 2014. And the Independent rental companies are coming back to market for new equipment. For any of you who've visited our booth at the ARA rental show in February, you saw firsthand the high level of activity by independents. Lenders are becoming more active, and helping independents secure the financing they need to replace some very old access equipment. Outside North America, the markets continue to be mixed. Overall, we're experiencing slow growth in Europe with activity better in Northern Europe, activity remains at very low levels in Southern Europe. Moving around the globe, the Latin American market continues to grow. The story in this part of the world is infrastructure buildout. And 2 highly visible drivers are the World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016, both in Brazil. Turning to Asia Pacific. Sales were up except in Australia, where a large customer paused its purchases and a slowdown in mining energy projects has curtailed demand. Translating this to activity levels in the second quarter, we experienced a solid quarter in terms of orders. As we have previously mentioned, we believe customers, in general, are using a more balanced approach to placing orders, now that they have greater confidence in equipment OEM's ability to meet their requirements. We believe our backlog in this segment, which is down year-over-year, but up sequentially, reflects this pacing of orders along with lower requirements for military telehandlers and lower sales in Australia. Before I close out the Access Equipment segment, I'd like to make a few comments about the bauma show in Munich. Despite choppy markets in Europe, bauma has solid attendance and we introduced several new products that round out our product portfolio. Customers are looking to replenish their fleets. We believe they're excited about the value we offer with the recently launched European versions of our rental series scissor units, as well as our new 17- and 20-meter compact crawler booms, and new 2 can mass booms. Additionally, we've upgraded our powerstrip telehandler lineup for Europe with improved visibility along with several powertrain options on our proven platform. We're excited about our product pipeline over the next year, as JLG looks to reinforce its leadership in the work at height business. Now please turn to Slide 7 for some comments on our Fire & Emergency segment. Our Fire & Emergency segment continues to deal with challenging market conditions. The sequestration compounding, already weak federal spending, including funds for fire apparatus and airport products, we still have not turned the corner in the federal portion of this market. However, we believe that we have turned the corner in the U.S. municipal fire market, as we are seeing signs of improvement across the U.S., including Florida, the Southwest and several other areas that were hit hard by the recession. Jim Johnson and his team are moving the business in the right direction, as the segment posted a modest profit in the quarter, which is a significant improvement from our loss in the prior year quarter. Obviously, we're encouraged, but we still have a long way to go. As a result of our actions and a solid backlog, we believe this segment will deliver stronger results in the second half of 2013. In July of 2012, we announced our intentions to exit the ambulance business. We completed our last ambulance build during the quarter and are now able to fully focus our efforts in the Bradenton facility on our fire apparatus products. This is important as we strive to deliver improved efficiencies in all of our facilities. During the quarter, we also increased spending on MOVE initiatives to drive the segment to higher margins over the longer term. As I mentioned, U.S. government demand for our airport products, namely ARFF unit and snow removal of units used in airfields and other government facilities, is soft. This is in contrast to our international ARFF business, where demand remains strong. In fact, we recently received an order to supply the Japanese military with 22 global strikers. And as Charlie mentioned, Pierce is celebrating its 100th year anniversary, 2013. This is a business that has seen a lot over the past 100 years, including up and down markets. Through it all, Pierce has maintained its focus, and today, Pierce is the market leader for fire apparatus in North America and locations around the world that require the best in firefighting equipment. Over the years, Pierce has compelled some impressive figures. During its 100th-year history, we've built and sold more than 50,000 fire trucks and a little over 1/2 of those utilize a custom chassis, a market segment that we lead by a wide margin. Custom fire trucks have only been around for about 30 years. So in relative terms, it's still a fairly young market. It's a market that we intend to keep leading and defining with technology, with superior customer service, and with outstanding quality and reliability. I'll wrap up my portion with some comments on our Commercial segment. Please turn to Slide 8. We introduced Brad Nelson as President of our Commercial segment in February. Brad comes with position from our Access Equipment segment, where he serves as our Vice President of Global Marketing. Before coming to Oshkosh, he held leadership positions at both EMC and Eaton Corporation. Brad is currently busy coming up to speed in his new role. Fortunately, he is a quick study, and he will need to be, because this is an exciting business due to the ongoing rebound in the U.S. housing market and residential construction in general. He's already making an impact with our team at Commercial, and we welcome him to his new role. Similar to our Fire & Emergency business, Commercial is actively investing in MOVE initiatives. I'm not going to go into great detail at this time, but the changes we're implementing in this segment are helping improve our performance, both in our factories and with our customers in the marketplace. Turning to the segment's largest businesses, the concrete mixers and refuse collection vehicles, our concrete mixer business saw orders in the second quarter more than doubled over the prior year quarter. Furthermore, we continue to experience growth in our aftermarket parts and service business. The concrete mixer market in the U.S. declined over 90% during the downturn. While it still has a long way to go to fully recover, it feels good to be part of the pickup in this business. Our RCV business has been choppy this year. Notably, one of our largest customers has pushed a large portion of their expected 2013 orders to the back half of this calendar year. We recently started to receive their 2013 orders, but we won't start to see these orders reflected in sales until our third quarter, and some of their orders are likely to slip into our first quarter of 2014. CNG powered units continue to be a big component of our RCV sales. As they generally average anywhere from 30% to 40% of our shipments. We're also seeing more CNG -- more orders for CNG mixers, reinforcing our view that there is significant opportunity for CNG mixers, as that market continues to recover. To conclude my comments on the RCV business, we look forward to meeting with customers at the WasteExpo show next month in New Orleans, where we will introduce some exciting new vehicles. I'll hand it off to Dave now to review our financial results for the quarter, and comment on our expectations for 2013.