Wilson Jones
Analyst · Jefferies. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Pat. Good morning, everyone. Before we talk about the quarter, I want to tell you how proud we are to be celebrating our 100th anniversary in 2017. The Company was started by two innovated and driven individuals that developed and patented a unique system for all-wheel drive on trucks. Thanks to their perseverance and drive and the hard work of all our team members over the past century. Oshkosh Corporation today is a Fortune 500 different integrated global industrial. We plan to celebrate our rich history throughout 2017 and buildup that excitement as we position ourselves for success going forward. Today, we announced first quarter earnings per share of $0.26. These results exceeded our 2016 first quarter results as well as our expectations for the quarter. In particular, we saw stronger than expected performance from our Access Equipment and Defense segments. Today’s part of the simplification activities in support of the Company's MOVE strategy, we also announced changes to our Access Equipment segment manufacturing footprint in both the United States and Europe, and we are streamlining our European telehandler offerings. I’ll talk about those actions in a few minutes. While there have been some minor updates to our assumptions for the year, I'm pleased to announce that we are maintaining our earnings per share estimate range at $3 to $3.40 on an adjusted basis. Before I comment on each of our four segments, let me make some remarks on the potential impact on Oshkosh with the new administration in Washington. It's clear that we have a unique mix of businesses. That's one of the reasons why we believe our Company is a different integrated global industrial. We have a positive long-term outlook even without the benefit of initiatives that maybe implemented by the new administration in Congress. We certainly believe we can benefit from an infrastructure stimulus package, increased defense spending or tax reform. However, these initiatives must first be passed by Congress and the President. That will take time and we don't know the details of how the final initiatives will look, so we are not incorporating any of these items in our outlook. Please turn to Slide 4 for discussion of our results and an update on our business. We're pleased with the Access Equipment segment performance in the quarter. Our sales were down year-over-year, they were in line with our expectations and a positive mix favorably impacted results. We also saw a little heavier weighting of sales in North America, but we don't have the headwinds of the strong dollar on margins that we have in other parts of the world. Dave will provide some more comments on the quarter results in a few minutes. Turning to market conditions, our customers continue to aggressively manage their fleets and their fleet metrics and we continue to see lower fleet replacement demand. Our customers’ cautious approach to fleet expansion and low levels of replacement demand for driving the market weakness we continue to experience. This reduced demand along with the strong U.S. dollar also continues to pressure pricing in the market. That said, rental customer sentiment in North America has remained strong and it's probably grow even stronger over the past six months. We believe it is driven by a number of data points, including continued solid utilization rates and a stabilizing rental rate environment. In addition, positive commentary on construction activity, an increase in benchmarks, like that Dodge momentum index and early signs of return of activity in the oil patch are also supporting improved rental customer sentiment. This positive sentiment by our customers along with what we expect will be an increase and rental fleet replacement demand starting in 2018 or 2019 help support our positive long-term outlook for the Access Equipment market. Finally, what we aren’t get factoring in the impact of any infrastructure stimulus package, we believe this segment could be a beneficiary of increased spending on our nation's infrastructure. Please turn to Slide 5 for discussion of the restructuring activities announced today in the segment. As part of our simplification activities in support of the Company's MOVE strategy, we continue to look for ways to improve our cost structure and optimize our operations. Back in September, we announced plans to consolidate and modernize JLG’s aftermarket parts distribution centers in the U.S. and Europe. Those actions are expected to save us about $6 million annually, beginning in fiscal 2018. This morning, we announced additional plans to streamline operations in our Access Equipment segment. These plans include the closure of our manufacturing plant and free delivery inspection facility in Belgium. We are also streamlining our telehandler product offerings in Europe to simplify our portfolio. We intended transfer manufacturing of reduced European telehandler range to our facility in Romania. This streamlining will also lead to reductions in engineering support staff in the United Kingdom and the closure of the UK based engineering center. Separately, we also announced plans to consolidate North American telehandler production at our facility in Pennsylvania. In total, the plans we’re announcing today for JLG’s global operations are expected to result ongoing pretax savings of about $20 million to $25 million per year and we don't expect to realize any benefits this year will expect to realize $15 million to $20 million of benefit in 2018 for getting full run rate savings in 2019. We expect the cost of implementing these actions will be approximately $45 million to $50 million including $10 million of non-cash charges with the majority of the charges to be recognized in 2017. These are difficult actions but we believe they're necessary to position our Company for long-term success. Please turn to Slide 6 for discussion of Defense. Building on our strong finish 2016, we start out 2017 on a high note that our Defense team reported improved operating income margins for the first quarter. Despite the expected sales decline, we experienced in the first quarter as a result of lower international vehicle sales, we delivered operating income that was roughly even with 2016. We experienced another very active quarter for the JLTV program. We are still in the early portion of the low rate initial production phase of this program with a lot of attention focused on supporting government testing of the initial production units. As many of you know this program is ramping up over the next several years and we expect it to become a significant revenue generating program in our Defense segment. We are pleased with our progress and it's our intention to continue delivering a model program every single day. We've talked previously about the strong potential for international JLTV sales and this continues to be the case. Our team is busy promoting JLTV during international tradeshows and conducting customer demonstrations to create demand. The Defense team continues to execute well on our FHTV and FMTV programs. You might recall during our last quarterly conference call, we report that one of our FMTV contract modifications was being protested by a competitor. That protest was withdrawn with minimal impact to our production schedule. We now expect to be building FMTVs for at least the next two years and maybe more. Before I leave the topic of FMTV, you should be aware that the submission date for the FMTV recompete or shifted from January 31 to May 8. We now expect a decision on the contract award be made some time in 2018 as opposed to our previous expectation for decision in 2017. Finally, the defense team is ramping up production of the nearly 1,000 internationally M-ATVs that we expect to deliver this year with initial deliveries scheduled for later this quarter. We're also taking actions to build our international sales pipeline for our full range of defense products including JLTV as I mentioned earlier. We're making good progress on securing orders to help achieve the sales and operating income goals through 2019 that we shared at our Analyst Day Let's turn to Slide 7 to discuss the Fire and Emergency segment. Our Fire and Emergency team is performing well and taking the advantage of the changes they have implemented over the past few years to simplify their business. They delivered another quarter of year-over-year revenue and operating income growth and we believe they remain oil path toward achieving double-digit operating income margins. Despite an overall fire market that was down approximately 5% in 2016, we successfully grew revenues and gain share. We still believe that the market will grow at a low-to-mid single-digit percent rate in 2017. With our extensive product line and strong dealer network, we are targeting to outperform the market again in 2017. The data we review on a regular basis continues to support generally positive market environment for fire trucks over the next few years. Specifically, we still expect municipal tax receipts and budgets for fire apparatus to be solid. We also believe that fair truck fleets remain older than they should be, so replacement demand should continue to be the driver for this market. Before turning to commercial, let's talk about one of my favorite topics which is our ascendant aerial ladder. We have talked about the revolutionary new product on a number of occasions and I want to congratulate the team on their continued success. Ascendant orders have exceeded our initial projections and the team remains positive about the future opportunities for this product as we look out over the next several years. Please turn to Slide 8 and we will talk about our Commercial segment. Last quarter, we talked about modest and choppy order flow for concrete mixers. We also talked about expecting the refuse collection vehicle market growth rate to moderate in 2017. These conditions have continued and they impacted first quarter performance in this segment. Our revenues were even over last year's first quarter we experienced lower unit sales in orders which had a negative impact on operating margins due to under absorption of fixed overhead. The partial leadership team implement cost reduction actions during the quarter to mitigate some of the impact, but the benefits of those actions will be realized throughout the remainder of the year not in the first quarter. We believe the cautious approach taken by concrete mixer customers will likely continue until they see stained positive economic and construction data that allows them to build confidence to refresh their age fleet. Construction forecast and industry metrics point to positive trends, so we continue to maintain our positive view on this business over the longer-term. Similar to our Access Equipment segment, we believe the Commercial segment would likely benefit from an infrastructure seamless package. In the slides we noted that the refuse collection vehicle customers pause in the first quarter. We typically see a bump in RCV orders late in the calendar year as companies and sanitation department look to use our previously budgeted capital, but we didn't see that order bump this year. We did have a number of customers tell us that we’re going to take a pause to see how the results of the election settled out. We currently believe we will see this market return to a more normal cadences year. This is something that we'll watch closely as the year progresses. We also continue to believe that fleets are getting older which should lead to increased replacement demand in the coming years. Earlier this month an accident occurred at the McNeilus Dodge Center, Minnesota Production Facility in which five team members were injured and taken to the hospital. Three team members were released within 48 hours, but two other team members were more seriously injured and are still receiving care. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families as they work through the recovery process. As a result of the accident, we temporarily lost some capacity in our Dodge Center pain operations. The commercial team has quickly taken action to recover much of the lost capacity to temporary outsourcing of certain pain operations, but we complete repairs the damaged area. We expect this temporary loss of capacity to have some impact on commercials results in 2017. Although at this time, we do not expect the impact to be material to the Company's 2017 overall results. That wraps it up for our four business segments; I am going to turn it over to Dave to discuss our financials and update outlook for 2017 in greater detail.