Ronald M. DeFeo
Analyst · Ted Grace with Susquehanna
Thank you, Kevin. Turning to Page 6. I'm now going to go through the presentation for each one of our business segments. First, our Aerial Work Platforms business. Overall, strong demand continues in North and South America. As Kevin mentioned, very good incremental margins of 37%. The backlog is solid, up 13% sequentially and 10% over the prior year. And very nice, we see the European business, which is different than all of our other businesses, the European businesses are actually beginning the replacement cycle. Our European business was up strong double-digits in the first quarter versus the prior year quarter. Net sales overall for this segment was up 21%. And as you can see, we had a strong operating margin of 14% compared with the 9% of last year and the 10% of the prior quarter. Also interesting is the fact that 63% of our revenue comes from North America and the mix of our customers in North America has been different this year versus last year, with a couple of the bigger customers really strongly getting deliveries in the second quarter as opposed to the first quarter on a year-over-year basis. Western Europe, you see there, is 16%, but I would be remiss if I didn't emphasize Latin America, which had a very, very nice quarter-over-quarter performance. So overall, I think our AWP business is heading in the right direction, and if nothing else can be said about this business, it's a great contributor and we expect that to continue this year. The Construction business, a little bit of a different story, continuing to have this businesses go through a period of reconstruction, so to speak. We sold portions of our Roadbuilding business, and we have a few more product lines to go, but that was a good progress. We are in the process also of reconstructing our Compact business in Europe. We're going to be selling our components businesses in Germany. That will allow us to reduce substantially the number of people that work for us and focus on the most important value-added activities. We have had a pretty substantial reduction in working hours in the first quarter this year versus last year with very weak European demand. A substantial portion, over 50% of the demand that weakened in this business came from Europe. A little bit of an offset in the concrete mixture truck business, and we've seen the North American business improving. By the numbers, $280 million of revenue, obviously, 23% down from last year, a negative $13 million as reported. Operating margin, and as adjusted, $9 million. Obviously, we're not happy with that financial performance, but we do believe that change is underway, plus a moderation of some of the reductions in revenue will contribute to meaningfully improving the bottom line performance in the back half of this year. Looking at the split of the business, Western Europe is 30%, and that's a pretty significant reduction from where it had been historically, where Western Europe had been well over 50% for this segment. So some good work being done to try and diversify the revenue of the construction segment. Turning to the Cranes business on Page 8. Great incremental margins on this business at 46% in Q1 versus the prior year, reflecting the pricing in margin focus that we had put on the business. Rough terrain cranes continue to be the strongest performing product category. As predicted, our Australian Crane business came down 25%. It's a very profitable business for us, but tied to the mining industry and tied to commodities, we did anticipate that this business would come down. We also, as I think everyone knows, have resegmented and the North American Services and Utilities business has been added to this segment. The utilities operating margin discretely was up 2.3 points year-over-year, which is a nice improvement and a continued emphasis on this business to get its margins up. Turning to the numbers. Net sales, $471 million, up 4% from the prior year, down 8% from the prior quarter, not unexpected. And as reported, margin at $33 million, and then as adjusted, the $33 million compared with the $25 million of last year. So 5% to 7% improvement operating margin. Backlog is weaker than perhaps we would like, but we had a very good BAUMA show, encouraged by customer activity, encouraged by the reception to our new products. I'm sure we can talk about that in a little, but net-net, it's hard to say whether that backlog would have been higher, had BAUMA not occurred in April, but we're really positive about what we saw from BAUMA. And as you know, the revenue expectation we have for Cranes is probably one of our hardest numbers to achieve, but we're still pretty positive. Also, because of the utilities and services business, you might note that now, 47% of our Q1 business occurred in North America versus 14% in Western Europe. The good news is that 47% is in North America. The bad news is we'd like that European number to be a bit higher. So that's some of our opportunity going forward. Turning to Page 9 on the Material Handling and Ports Solutions business. Clearly, a disappointment for us as a company during the quarter. This is a lumpy business. The revenue suffered, 23% decline versus Q1 2012. Industrial Cranes was down 12% on global weakness. What happened here is many of our customers had pushed out their requirements for Cranes, whether it was a new factory that needed Cranes or new Cranes that were going in old factories, many of our customers delayed that, and that occurred pretty broadly, pretty much across the world. From India, China, as well as Europe and Africa, there was a lot of push out of business. The Port Solutions business was down 40% versus Q1 '12. We do expect some top line growth in the second half as these large projects that we have sold begin to ship. Many of you know that's what's impacted our backlog here. But the underlying port business, we really had a hole in our backlog that was created about a year ago at this time with soft orders, and that just showed up pretty substantially in Q1. We did expect it, but the absolute negative margin contribution was probably a little bit more than we thought that would happen. Additional actions, however, are going to be taken. As I mentioned earlier, we expect the restructuring charge of $30 million to $50 million, but it will have a 1 to 2 year payback. By the numbers, you see what they are, $339 million versus $438 million in sales, down 23%, as adjusted, operating loss of $26 million versus basically a break even during last year. The backlog is up, but a lot of that backlog won't be delivered until the second half of this year and into 2014. And as many of you know, we only report backlog that's deliverable in the next 12 months, meaning that, that $679 million actually is a larger backlog number than we're reporting here because some of the projects are for delivery, second, third and fourth quarter of next year. You can see the concentration of our sales, not a huge concentration in North America, pretty big exposure to Western Europe. I think that's contributed to our results. I believe the change in management is going to be helpful for this business. Steve Filipov is on the line and I'm sure he can take some and any of your other questions as we we'll discuss this business in some more depth. Turning to Page 10. Our Materials Processing business delivered pretty much as expected. Mineral markets are down slightly, mainly Australia and South America. European General Construction is weak. North America is stronger. SG&A was flat. By the numbers, $154 million, down 9% compared to prior year, $12 million of operating profit, down moderately from $15 million a year ago. Backlog at $85 million, up sequentially from the $70 million, but down from the year ago position. We expect this business to continue to be a solid performer. It has its pockets of problems, but it also has its pockets of opportunities. Turning to Page 11. I'm not going to go through this page in detail. We're providing it to you to have the details. We've structured this on the basis of the old reporting structure, the 2013 guidance that we initiated when we reported the 2012 numbers. On a resegmented basis, you see where that guidance is. We did not go back and try to reconstruct the guidance by segment at this stage obviously. There are areas where we believe we will overachieve. There are areas where we think we'll struggle to get to those numbers, but net-net, we still be feel very good about the company overall, and we wanted to also put this in context of our 2015 goals, which we are driving towards. So while we had mixed results, as I indicated, some positive, some negative. We continue to remain -- we remain committed to the $10 billion of revenue, 10% operating margin, which results in a $5 plus per share objective for 2015. It's an objective that we think the company is focused very much on trying to get to. So in summary on Page 12. It's important to reflect on who we are and what we're trying to achieve. We're a lifting and material handling solutions company. We are focused on operational improvements, and it's obvious, we've been successful with some operational improvement and have ways to go in other areas. We believe we're a leader in substantially all product categories. We're a geographically diverse company, which gives us exposure to many of the end markets, both up and down. And we believe profitable growth and consistent cash generation is an important area of emphasis and we are really encouraged by the cash generation, as is the last point here, strong free cash flow in the quarter. More work to do in the MHPS business, a little slower start of the year than perhaps was anticipated, but I think within the context of our overall guidance, we remain committed to achieving those targets. With that, I'd now like to open it up, Stephanie, to questions, and we'll take your questions, encouraging you to have 1 and a follow up.