Phil Eyler
Analyst · Steve Dyer with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Tanya and thank you all for joining us today. Before we cover the results of the fourth quarter and the full year as well as our outlook for 2018, I wanted to share a few thoughts. As most of you know, I joined Gentherm in early December having previously run the connected car division of Harman International, a $3 billion plus in the automotive industry. When I was presented with the opportunity to take on the leadership role at Gentherm by due diligence proved to me that in addition to an innovative company and a strong business, there is significant untapped potential in this organization. Gentherm’s industry-leading position is a direct result of the unique thermal solutions that it brings to the market as well as its sustainable competitive advantages. The company has not only penetrated the auto market across numerous geographies, it’s also begun to leverage its unique technologies and hundreds of patents to bring that technology into the medical and industrial markets. Over the past 4 years, Gentherm has acquired Global Thermoelectric, Cincinnati Sub-Zero and Etratech, strong R&D organization that continues to design and develop innovative new products as well as improvements to existing products across the company. Because of this, we see significant growth opportunities in our automotive segment driven by the combination of new content, more content per vehicle and more vehicle platforms. This, along with growth in our industrial and medical businesses, gives us a powerful platform to drive revenue and earnings growth. Over the past 78 days, I have begun to deep dive into this organization meeting with leadership across the enterprise, visiting our key customers, our core production and R&D facilities, speaking with suppliers and a number of our largest shareholders on what I would describe as a listening and learning tour. This has afforded me the opportunity to really did in, ask a lot of questions and solicit unvarnished input on what we as a company can be doing most effectively to capture the opportunities before us. And on that note, in the next few days, many of you will receive an invitation to participate in an investor perception study. Gathering the feedback of all of our constituents is fundamental to helping us plot the next course for Gentherm. Over the next few months, our management team and Board of Directors will be finalizing our refined strategic growth plan. After it’s been finalized in the late spring, we expect to share it with you shortly thereafter. You may rest assure that the primary goal is to drive shareholder value through accelerated revenue and earnings growth. This strategic plan will address first, continued and accelerated revenue growth in the short and mid-term through our core product and expanding portfolio; second, developing an automotive product and technology solution strategy which will address the opportunities of the car in the future. Third, a diligent portfolio analysis of all businesses and product lines and fourth short-term and long-term operating margin expansion opportunities. There will be no sacred cows. We will aggressively look to drive the company into the future through focused execution. Now let’s turn to the results of the quarter and the year. Please turn to Slide #3 in our presentation deck. As we announced earlier today, we achieved 8.7% top line growth in the quarter of which 4.1% was organic, excluding the impact of acquisitions and foreign exchange. That brought our revenue for the full year 2017 to $985.7 million or 7.4% above the prior year, of which 4.6% was organic growth. These results reflect solid growth even as market conditions remain challenging and I will touch on this in just a moment. As you all know well the recent changes in tax laws introduced a lot of noise in the earnings numbers for the quarter and the year. Barry is far more adept that walking through that with you than I, so I will defer that commentary to him, but if we tune the signal from the noise and look at adjusted EBITDA, we see a modest improvement year-over-year for both the quarter and full year periods, this is a start. But it’s clearly our intent to improve on those results as rapidly as possible. Before Barry dives into the detail I would like to review some highlights from 2017, let’s begin with Slide 4. Over the course of the past year in the automotive business, we have significant growth in both seat heaters and steering wheel heaters as well as solid growth in cabling system and some early traction in battery thermal management. Although we saw a decline in climate control seating revenue in the period, we did see growth in CCS vehicle shipments of 2.5%. The pricing mix from the ship to heat event is near stabilization and we expect to move to growth within the next year. Given the declining North American automotive market over the past year, our overall growth is not an insignificant achievement. Now let me touch upon a few highlights from the past year. First, our team executed strongly with launches of systems on 141 different nameplate models across 22 customers. A few examples, the Audi A6, A7, Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, Mercedes E-Class, Jeep Cherokee, Infiniti QX50, Mazda 6, Jaguar XE, Tesla Model S, Chevy Cruze, Lexus GS and the Hyundai Genesis. In addition, we launched 28 steering wheel heater solutions over the course of the year, a record number for us, upholding our position as the clear market leader of this feature. During 2017, we saw a positive trend for increased vehicle content by more often supplying the electronic controlling devices along with the climate delivery element for certain programs. In battery thermal management, we launched our thermoelectric based product with a German OEM and we are in the ramp-up phase of our second launch with another customer in North America. We have already won follow-on awards with these existing customers which we expect will contribute $216 million in lifetime revenue for battery thermal management. But this is just the beginning. We fully intend to expand our customer base well beyond these first two customers. The transition of electric vehicles over the coming years will provide significant opportunities for our company. For instance, the anticipated application of 48-volt mild hybrid systems which one third-party source expects to account for 14% of global new vehicle sales in 2025, will create significant opportunities in the battery thermal management and other battery related technologies for Gentherm. And as the market moves more towards fully electric as well as autonomous vehicles, the number of applications of our climate control and electric – electronic systems technology will expand rapidly. Simply put, we have only just begun to penetrate this large and expanding market. Also we won two global supplier of the year awards with Honda and Bosch, a true testament of our operational excellence. Another notable achievement during the quarter was the acquisition of Etratech, which significantly expands our capabilities and advanced electronic controls and control systems. With the acquisition of Etratech and expansion of our electronic product capabilities, we are creating integrated intelligent solutions that will allow us to increase our value content as well as extending into other automotive applications. In addition, we are working on a number of very exciting opportunities which I look forward to reporting back to you over the next few quarters. Next, I would like to share some news with you on the platform awards we have received over the past year. As you can see on Slide 5 during 2017 we received more than $1.2 billion lifetime revenue in new program awards across 21 different customers, including several high volume platform awards for CCS, including GM Trucks, Ford F-series trucks, RAM Truck, Hyundai Santa Fe, and Acura MDX to name just a few. As OEMs look to increase climate personalization and preconditioning into vehicles, we are seeing continued interest and awards in our active cooling and heating product. We also expanded our portfolio of Japanese OEM business with Subaru and Mazda, both small customers for us now, but with significant upside. We won our first CCS program with a major German luxury brand and this is on the Mercedes S-Class. And finally, we are awarded our first major Chinese domestic OEM, CCS and thermal convenience awards with [indiscernible] two of the strongest players in China. As you can see from these accomplishments, our core automotive business is strong and OEMs as well as Tier 1 suppliers recognized the superior technology that we offer and they are awarding significant business to us across vehicle classes, including luxury and across numerous geographies. Now, let’s turn to Slide 6 for a discussion of our industrial segment. At the CSZ, Cincinnati Sub-Zero, we achieved 10% organic growth and 44% growth overall in 2017, which benefited from a full year of revenue versus 9 months in the prior year. The year-over-year growth was propelled by sales of environmental chamber products due to strong demand for both standard and customized chamber applications. On the medical side of the business, the strength we saw in 2016 for our Hemotherm product, a blood heater and cooler used in hospital operating rooms during open heart surgery continued into 2017. Allow me to share a few additional highlights from this business. We delivered a custom thermal test chamber for a NASA space project, a true testament to our thermal capabilities. We lost our new filter flow pediatric underbody blanket, a product that completes our portfolio of offerings. CSZ is a 9/10 of the top children’s hospitals in the United States and having this full breadth of products strengthens our dominant position in this market. We successfully passed the critical design review gate on the development program for a non-invasive warming and cooling device product for the U.S. Air Force. We launched the 100-volt normative blanket warming solution providing a unique solution for the Japanese normothermia market, which is a fast growing untapped market for CSZ. This product differentiates us as the sole warming-only device in the market creating flexibility for hospital operations. We were awarded the CSZ Warm Air system with St. Joseph’s Health integrated healthcare system, a 17 hospital network and an important market on the West Coast. And finally, we secured a 3-year supply contract extension with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center with CSZ’s largest customer. During the past year, we made a significant investment in expansion of the sales force in this business. As the new personnel come up to speed and improve productivity, we expect further improvement in performance in this business over the coming year. Medical is another application where I believe we are just getting started at penetrating the sizable patient thermal management market. Now, let’s turn to our Global Power Technologies on Slide 7. Our remote power generation business benefited from a strong rebound in orders versus the prior year. As you maybe aware, our primary customers for this business are gas producers utilizing our technology in remote often harsh locations. These producers are also generally involved in the oil business, which was under pressure in recent years having a residual effect on orders for our equipment. That cycle has moderated and we shipped numerous custom orders across 2017. As a result, remote power generation revenue rose 71% in 2017 versus 2016. While the 2018 outlook is more flat, we are developing new opportunities to penetrate new geographic region for our existing products and developing new products to open up additional markets. Let me also share a few highlights from this business. Methane reduction is a new market driver for us that has arisen in the past year driven by more stringent government environment regulations. We have an immediate opportunity due to the cleanliness of our thermoelectric generator technology to sell our products for methane reduction applications. In 2017, we sold over 400 TEGs generating $2.5 million of revenue in this market. Because of our market and technology position, we also received $1.8 million grant for an emissions reduction program sponsored by the Alberta government. This is to develop more advanced products to address a broader range of methane reduction applications. We are spending these funds, along with our own research dollars in developing new and proprietary products for this market. In addition to broadening our product offerings, we continue to find success penetrating new markets geographically. Two examples include the expansion of our offshore platform success in Southeast Asia to places like the Caribbean and India. 2017 marked the first success with the shipment of one of our offshore platform systems to de novo energy in the Caribbean. Finally, demand for our products has recently been growing in Australia as a number of new LNG facilities have been constructed for purposes of export to Asia. As this trend continues, the demand for gas transportation across the continent to feed these facilities has grown, along with the need for lower operating costs, if this lower cost that creates a need for GPT’s product. Now, that I have shared the highlights of the business, I will ask Barry to give you a little more color commentary on the results of the quarter and then we will be pleased to take your questions. Barry?