Jean Savage
Analyst · Cowen. Please go ahead
Thank you, Steve, and good morning to everyone joining us today. I hope everyone is enjoying summer so far, especially as the world continues to get back to normal. As you can see from our results, we are very pleased to see the market continue to recover as well. Some demand improvement across both our leasing and manufacturing businesses is obviously a welcomed development. And when combined with the great progress we continue to make on our internal effort to enhance returns, we're excited for the years ahead, at Trinity. As we discussed at our Investor Day last fall, we see significant opportunity to drive returns through the optimization of our fleet, our operations, and our balance sheet. In the second quarter, we made meaningful strides across each initiative, keeping us on track to achieve our three years strategic goals. Let me now summarize the key themes from our second quarter. While we're still recovering from the lower order volumes, and weaker demand of 2020, you can see improvement across most of the indicators for industry. First, railcar loads continue to ramp up from the lows of last year. Additionally, the supply of existing railcars is contracting thanks to elevated scrapping activity driven by higher steel prices. As a result, we saw improving asset demand and steady Trinity fleet utilization and rising orders. While we are only in July, from our perspective, we expect each of these industry trends to continue to improve into 2022 based on what we see in our business and the overall economy. If we turn to Slide 4, you can see how this backdrop, in combination with our internal efforts, positively impacted our summary financials. First, our second quarter revenue of $372 million, was down 27% from a year-ago, which was in line to slightly better than my expectations. Our GAAP EPS for the quarter was $0.12, compared to an adjusted EPS for the quarter of $0.15, which includes a $0.03 adjustment primarily from the loss on extinguishment of our partially-owned subsidiaries debt. Our results were positively impacted by our Rail Products Group operations, which achieved breakeven margins from our ongoing optimization efforts. The last time, we're at these, excuse me, the last time we were at these low production levels was in 2010 and we lost money. We're encouraged that we achieve breakeven margins despite the near-term headwinds of input cost inflation and low volume. As in previous quarters, Trinity's Rail platform continues to drive solid cash flow relative to our earnings. In the quarter, cash flow from operations totaled $265 million and free cash flow or excess cash after all investments and dividends was $269 million. Eric will go into more details on our cash flow results in a moment. To recap, we're very pleased to report that our operational performance and railcar inquiries continue to turn the corner and we're increasingly optimistic about the year ahead. Let's turn to Slide 5 and I can provide a little more color on the overall railcar market. First, as you know, consumer confidence is very strong and that activity has begun to ripple into our markets as we're seeing increasing railcar loads, which are now running roughly 8% above 2020. However, carload volumes have been below 2019 levels so far this year, so more recovery is required to reach the pre-pandemic levels. The year-over-year carload trends continue to benefit each of the other metrics on Slide 5. Railcars and storage declined 5% compared to a quarter ago, which is also been aided by strong scrappy market, I mentioned. Our utilization rate remained relatively flat compared to last quarter. As a result, our Future Lease Rate Differential or FLRD metric, which is the average of the rates transacted in the current quarter, as compared to the average of the next 12 months expiring rates improved to a minus 2.5% compared to last quarters minus 14.8% continuing a recovery that we believe began in the third quarter of last year. This marks a significant inflection point and demonstrates that higher new car pricing is beginning to feed into the overall lease market. While different markets will have different trajectories, this is a very encouraging trend. Lastly, the demand is beginning to show up the orders, which were up 224% compared to last quarter. As we mentioned at our Investor Day, we continue to anticipate that industry deliveries will improve in the coming quarters and settle in line with replacement levels in 2022 and 2023. Before I move on to our segment results, let me give a quick update on steel prices and inflation in general. At a high-level, as I mentioned, we and other railcar manufacturers will face a headwind on the production side of our business. Although we're experiencing an increase in new car orders, some of our customers are still hesitant to place orders. Markets demonstrating the most strength are chemical, construction, and intermodal. So we’re seeing improving trends across many segments of the fleet. While it is important to realize its, excuse me, what is important to realize though is historical inflation driven by expanding economic growth is a long-term positive for fixed asset businesses like ours. As an example, inflation has already impacted the underlying economics for many of our end customers in markets like agriculture, construction, chemical, and energy. Inflation supports fixed asset prices in two key ways. First, asset replacement costs grow with rising prices for input materials like steel. Second, increasing commodity prices for asset users make higher lease rates and prices for equipment more acceptable. Turning to Slide 6, let's walk through Trinity's segment results for the quarter. For the leasing business, Trinity's lease revenue improved compared to last year, as we experienced higher per diem asset usage and lease fleet growth. This was somewhat offset by slightly lower utilization, primarily attributable to softness in energy-related markets and a corresponding effects on remarketing rates. Most notably, there are clear signs of a strengthening recovery as renewal success rates continue to improve to a level not seen in recent history. And renewal rates, while in total, still slightly down for the quarter, moved into positive territory compared to expiring rates as the quarter progress. Further supporting this improvement and momentum is a recovery to our FLRD rate that I mentioned previously. With respect to our cost, as noted on prior calls, we continue to maintain a strong discipline. It is expected that maintenance and other operational expenses required to position the lease fleet for increasing demand will be a headwind to the leasing segment margin for the year. As part of our strategic initiatives, we continue to work toward increasing the percentages of maintenance and compliance events handled internally within our shop. Over the last few years, our service capacity has increased from roughly one-third to over half of our maintenance events, achieving the target we set out at the end of 2018. With our current footprint, we have the ability to get to 70%, which will continue to reduce the effect of maintenance costs of our fleet and improve our railcar serviceability for our customers. As a good indicator of our progress, year-to-date 2021 over 60% of our fleet maintenance spend was internal. Turning to our Rail Products segment, as I noted, we're pleased to have achieved breakeven margins despite a challenging near-term headwind from higher steel costs and the lowest quarterly production volume since 2010. The incremental margin progress we've made over the past six months is almost entirely attributable to our operational efficiencies, cost initiatives, and internal supply chain initiatives. We're optimistic that we will see improving margins in the segment as railcar pricing potentially increases, given tighter supply and rising demand. In our maintenance facilities we're expecting continued headwinds in ramping up our new Midwest facility as we're experiencing difficulties in filling open positions at that location. What is most exciting is what we are seeing in the orders, which totaled 4,570 in the quarter, up 224% compared to last quarter. As you'll recall from the past few quarters, we had an increasing level of interest in inquiries, and it's now great to see those materialize in orders. This is the highest order quarter since the fourth quarter of 2018 and approximately half of our backlog value is expected to deliver in 2021, resulting in declining year-over-year deliveries, although we do expect our delivery rate to build through the year to meet demand from new orders. Let me wrap up my remarks on Slide 7, with an update on our return optimization initiatives. Similar to last quarter, Trinity was busy and executed against both our costs and our balance sheet goals. First on our balance sheet, Eric, will give more detail here. But we've made the most of a low interest rate environment and have added significant value as a result. In total, Trinity has issued and refinanced approximately $2.3 billion of debt since the onset of the pandemic, including our partially-owned subsidiary. In aggregate, we have lowered the company's borrowing costs by 100 basis points over that time. On top of that, we have continued our disciplined commitment to return capital to shareholders. In the quarter, Trinity repurchased 60 million of stock in the open markets, and also completed a $223 million block purchase from ValueAct as they monetize a portion of their investment. These repurchases accounted for just under 10% of the company shares. Turning to our enterprise and manufacturing costs, we continue to make progress on both fronts, which is contributing to our goal to enhance return. And we continue to optimize our fleet as you saw by our transaction activity in the quarter. Over the quarter Trinity was active in the secondary markets and book gains on lease portfolio sales of $11 million. That said, we expect as railcar demand improves, Trinity will have opportunities to both buy and sell in the secondary markets, which continue to open and broaden. Finally, to update on our new product initiatives, we're proud to report that Trinsight continues to see strong uptake. Although the product is still in its early growth stage, we're ahead of plans and interest continues to build. We're also seeing strong demand for new covered hopper product, which is hitting the market in the Ag market at an opportune time. Also, our redesigned intermodal products are being well received by customers and are driving some of the order activity we touched on earlier. To summarize, the whole Trinity team is executing very well against our near and long-term plans to drive returns and add value for shareholders. We feel confident in the three-year plan we outlined at our Investor Day last fall, and we look forward to updating you on the progress in the quarters to come. With that, let me hand the call over to Eric for more detail on our results.