Bob McCormick
Analyst · Baird
Thanks, Sarah. Good morning, everyone. To start with, let’s discuss the most important point of our call today. Our 1,700 Douglas employees are healthy and back at work. After shutting down all of our U.S. facilities in mid-March, we began a rigorous process of creating a safe return to work environment. Upon reopening all facilities in early May, we had a 99% employee retention rate, that is something I’m very pleased to state and something that everyone at Douglas should be proud of because it took a real team effort to safely and successfully restart in May. As we discussed on our last earnings call in early May, we have and always will, focus on protecting the health and safety of our teams first. To date, we’ve only had a handful of people test positive for COVID-19 out of 1,700 spread over 20 locations. This is a testament to both our employees making good choices, plus the efforts of our teams to create and implement our safe return to work plan. Probability and data trends tell us to expect more cases in the future, but this situation was a good test of our systems and protocols and everything to-date has worked as intended. I am extremely proud of the way our teams have collectively responded to the pandemic. As an aside, after building a robust playbook, we chose to share these resources with our industry, including the National Truck Equipment Association by providing templates and examples of plans and procedures on our website for people that download and customized for themselves. The feedback has been nothing short of amazing. Today, we’ve had over 2,000 hits to the site from 9 different countries, including England, China and Australia. We take pride in the fact that other companies are implementing the frameworks that we’ve developed and that we are doing our part to help everyone get back to work safely across the country. With the pandemic discussion complete, let’s turn to our results for the quarter and more importantly, the future. Given the fact that we were shut down for half the quarter and faced additional external headwinds, we are generally pleased with our results. As we noted in the earnings release, there were three main headwinds to navigate, some familiar and some unique: First and most familiar, the impact of snowfall. As expected, we saw lower preseason orders in our attachment segment, followed by two consecutive years of below average snowfall in key markets, particularly the Northeast; second, the impact of the pandemic from our shutdown to the impact on our OEM partners and the overall economy; and finally, ongoing chassis chain – ongoing supply chain constraints in the Solutions segment. With that said, it’s important to remember that our organization is primed to continually adapt to changing external conditions, and we remain confident in our ability to maximize our performance, focusing on the factors within our control. Now I’ll talk in more detail about the segments. First, attachments, following 2 years of below average snowfall in key markets, our preseason period unfolded essentially as we expected, albeit at lower volumes than last year. As you would anticipate, some of our dealers are more conservative with their ordering this year and are likely to rely on our industry leading lead times to turn orders as they come in when the snow flies in the fourth quarter. In terms of dealer activity, it’s encouraging to note that the approximate same percentage of dealers opted for cash terms this year as they have in previous years, indicating both the general financial strength and confidence in the future of our dealer base. At this point, our network seems to be holding up well in the midst of this challenging economic environment. One of the positive things about our Attachment segment is that because of the influence of weather for the past 70 plus years, this team is not only accustomed to, but actually thrives on the rigors of constantly changing business conditions. Even prior to the emergence of the pandemic, our attachments team was expected a much tougher year than 2019 and had already pulled out the low snowfall playbook and began pulling levers to reduce costs and preserve cash. While the lack of snowfall and the pandemic have occupied the spotlight so far in 2020, I remain impressed with our attachment team’s resilience and ability to remain focused on delivering on our long-term initiatives, including rolling out our new product launches. Our half-ton deep plow offering was well received in the market, and we are very encouraged by the adoption and early order trends that we are seeing for this and other new products. That brings us to Work Truck Solutions. As you may know, our facilities are located in areas that were originally heavily impacted by the coronavirus throughout the Northeast and mid-Atlantic during the spring and summer. Thankfully, this situation has stabilized and improved in some of the areas, although nowhere near back to normal. As I said before, even in the Northeast, we were able to bring back 99% of our workforce in early May and are operating at near-normal levels to date. The teams at Dejana and Henderson have noted their appreciation of all of the safety initiatives that have been employed. Overall, the restart is going according to plan, and we are in constant communication with our OEM partners and component suppliers, as they safely begin to ramp up production. Of course, each partner is going through their own specific start-up plan. And while we are encouraged to hear their progress so far, we do expect there will be supply issues during the second half of the year. The good news here is that we still receive more pooled chassis than our competitors, and we have not seen cancellation of orders. In fact, in June, we saw a noticeable uptick in commercial orders at Dejana, when compared to the same time last year. This is a positive sign that customers on the East Coast are getting back to business, and this bodes well for the long-term prospects at Dejana. Despite pandemic related challenges, the municipal snow and ice control operations at Henderson are making good headway so far in 2020. We continue to have a strong order book and a healthy backlog, both of which we have seen for quite some time. Additionally, we have not seen any canceled orders despite the challenging economic environment and do not expect this to become a major issue, given the recession-resistant nature of snow and ice control budgets due to the importance of safety and maintaining commerce. As for Class 7 and 8 truck chassis, we began to see an increase in chassis availability in Q1 as expected. Obviously, the pandemic driven OEM shutdowns will impact availability during the second half, but it’s important to note that we believe that when OEMs complete their production ramp-ups, our Class 7 and 8 chassis supply will improve significantly, and we’ll see improved financial performance as a result. Overall, while we continue to work through these challenges, we remain confident in the long-term prospects for Henderson. I’ll touch on a couple of financial items, which Sarah will cover in more detail later. Importantly, we completed a $375 million debt refinancing near the end of the quarter. Sarah and her team did a fantastic job navigating this process during a difficult time. And needless to say, we are very pleased with the results of their hard work. This refinancing fortifies our already strong financial position, checks an item off of our to-do list, allowing us to focus on running the business, and provide us with enhanced flexibility to continue to make necessary investments to support our long-term profitable growth initiatives. When it comes to our priorities for cash, despite these difficult times, we remain fully committed to the dividend, which we paid as usual at the end of the quarter. The fact that we’ve been able to increase it 12x over the past 10 years speaks to our ability to ride out a variety of challenges through different business cycles. Finally, we are constantly monitoring the market for opportunities that will allow us to add important products and services to our portfolio and achieve our goal of continuing to expand our offering and grow market share. As always, we will carefully assess each situation with our thoughtful and disciplined approach and key eye on valuation. So all in all, despite the typical challenges associated with the slower preseason and the unprecedented impacts of the pandemic our team continues to strive to put the company in the best possible position to succeed and achieve our long-term goals. Finally, I just want to reiterate how much we appreciate the time and energy that our team extended getting our facilities back up and running this spring. We are very thankful that our workforce is healthy and that we have created a safe working environment for everybody to return to. As I’ve said before, I have no doubt that our organization will learn valuable insights from this experience and come out on the other side stronger than when we went in. Before I finish, I just want to take a moment to mention something that we are very proud of. We were recently recognized as the top workplace for the 11th consecutive year by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Only 10 other companies have been recognized every year since they started the program 11 years ago. I want to extend a huge thank you to our entire team of outstanding employees for their continual focus on integrity, teamwork and high performance, which has enabled us to create an ideal work environment for our employees, that promotes engagement and personal growth. A critical part of our success formula on this front is due to Linda Evans, our Vice President of Human Resources, who really is the driving force behind our programs. When employees are engaged and motivated, business partners continually see the value in working with Douglas, driving sustainable growth opportunities for everyone involved. And talking of awards, I also want to congratulate Sarah for recently being named CFO of the year by the Milwaukee Business Journal. This is a great achievement and very well deserved. We are grateful to have Sarah leading our finance group and being such an integral part of our senior leadership team. With that, I will pass the call on to the CFO of the year. I kind of like how that sounds.