Ronald DeFeo
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and we appreciate your interest in Terex today. On the call with me this morning is Phil Widman, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Tom Gelston, Vice President of Investor Relations. Also participating on the call and available for your questions are Kevin Bradley for the Cranes segment, Tim Ford for Aerial Work Platforms; George Ellis for the Construction business; Kieran Hegarty for Materials Processing; Steve Filipov for Developing Markets; and Ken Lousberg for our China operations. Many of our management team are participating on this call from India, as there is a significant trade show taking place in Mumbai this week. As you know, India is a growing market for our industry and an important market that is developing for Terex. A replay of this call will be archived on the company's website, www.terex.com, under Audio Archives in the Investor Relations section. I'd like to begin with some overall commentary on our business, followed by Phil Widman, who will provide a more detailed financial report. I'll summarize, and then open it up for your questions. During the Q&A period, please ask one question and a follow up. Thank you for that. The presentation we'll be referring to is accessible on the company's website. Let me begin by referring to the forward-looking statement commentary on Page 2, which I encourage you to read and review, as well as our other disclosures that are available in our public documents. And now let me turn to Page 3, which is marked Overview. During 2010, with the sale of the Mining business, we have been transitioning to becoming a smaller company. The changes required here are substantial and remain underway. Nevertheless, the balance sheet remains strong and our capital structure healthy. Earnings from our remaining businesses are expected to return and accelerate over the next several years. We believe we have a disciplined process in place relative to acquisitions. And so far, we have not been able to complete a significant acquisition that we felt would be substantially accretive to our future returns on capital. Consequently, our operating focus is on the basics. Over the next several quarters, we will continue to streamline our organization to improve customer responsiveness, which is a real focus of the Terex leadership team. We expect to continue building market share, as our market share, particularly in the back half of 2010, increased in many of our product categories. We're going to focus on managing our costs aggressively, including reducing additional costs in some of our segments while investing in developing markets and the systems required to build Terex solidly for the next several years. Turning the page. Commenting on specifically the fourth quarter, our net sales increased 31% compared with the prior year quarter. And fundamentally, all segments saw an increase in revenue. Our operating profit was breakeven over the past two quarters, and we have seen the backlogs that we carry and the inquiry rates that we discuss with our customers improve across most, if not all, of our businesses. This has led to increased production and a positive absorption impact from running our factories more regularly. Nevertheless, we continue to face pricing and cost challenges across most of our businesses. This has put pressure on our margins, which we believe will improve gradually throughout 2011, with a marked increase expected in the second quarter. Inventory reduction remains a significant opportunity for the company, in particular, a significant opportunity in cranes. Our capital structure did improve, as we repaid our bank debt in the fourth quarter and our 7 3/8% subordinated notes were repaid in January of 2011. We see our markets improving. And let me make a few comments by segment on Page 5. First, with regard to Aerial Work Platforms. It's clearly on the recovery path in North America. Both the market and Terex are up approximately 50% in units shipped versus 2009. The vast majority of this growth did take place in the back half of the year. Terex had a particular strength in articulated booms and large rough terrain scissors, both on a unit and share gain basis. In Europe, the market was basically flat as an industry, but Terex European shipments actually grew 29% from the low period in 2009. While this is a substantial number, this took place on mostly smaller lifts, so the absolute sales recovery, in our view, is still to come in Europe. Our Construction business had a particularly positive result in central Europe, following the market, really, which we believe grew 65%, but obviously, from a very low base. Our global off-highway truck demand improved substantially with articulated dump trucks up 150% to 200%, depending upon what period this was measured against, but this mostly reflects the recovery in the industry, which was extremely slow in 2009. We also had a strong performance from our material handling products, but as you may know, this is a specialty product, scrap handlers, and there is no consolidated industry data available to measure market share. But this has been a very good and recovering product for us. On our rock crushing and screening business, or the businesses we refer to in the category of Materials Processing, we saw a year where our factories began to deliver again to North America and Europe as dealers completed their destocking. We actually completed a deplete-the-fleet promotion in North America that we believe was very successful. In addition, we saw strong growth, as anticipated, from the developing markets, led by India, Russia and Eastern Europe. We expect this to continue. We also expect Europe to improve and be strong in these products over the coming quarters. Finally, our Crane business, which is difficult to predict, had a strong fourth quarter and showed very good growth from developing markets. But we still expect a choppy industry in 2011. The North American markets are clearly bottoming and improving. We have seen share gains in a number of our product categories in North America, but our largest market is Europe, and it is difficult to predict. Terex's business pretty much mirrored the market in 2010. We are concerned that large projects are hard to forecast, with customers often postponing delivery of machines from month to month. The port equipment market, as in general, is improving. But much of this business will be delayed until late 2011 and/or 2012. North Africa has been a strong market for our businesses. And as you may expect, the current political climate being uncertain in markets like Tunisia, Algeria, et cetera, that have been good areas for our business, is creating a little difficulty for us in forecasting. But despite all of this in our Crane segment, our book-to-bill ratio is still meaningfully positive for the Crane segment overall in the last quarter. Now I'd like to pass it on to Phil, who will discuss our results in some detail.