Scott Cottrill
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead
Thanks, Joe. Let me now shift to our year-to-date financial results, a summary of which is provided on slide 6. During the nine months ended December 31, 2016, we generated net sales of just over $1 billion, down 3.1% compared to the prior year. The year-to-date sales decline was primarily due to significant headwinds in our agricultural end markets in both the US and Canada as well as continued weakness in Mexico. That being said, our domestic non-residential end market has performed very well, increasing 5% year-over-year. On a product level basis, our allied products have grown 4% year-to-date, partially offsetting the 6% decline in pipe sales. Strong allied product sales reflect market adoption for our comprehensive product package for storm water management solutions. Our gross margin has increased 270 basis points to 25.3% as compared to 22.6% last year. This improvement is primarily due to effective price management and lower resin costs. And finally, our adjusted EBITDA increased 9% to $181 million year to date. Our adjusted EBITDA margin improved 190 basis points to 17.8%, primarily due to the same factors impacting our gross margin, partially offset by higher SG&A expenses. Moving to slide 7, we provide an overview of our Q3 performance. During the third quarter, we generated net sales of $295 million, down 5.8% from $313 million in the prior year. The lower sales in Q3 of fiscal 17 were due to our domestic construction markets being slower than we initially anticipated and ag continuing to be a significant headwind. While we are encouraged by signs of stabilization in Mexico, the Canadian market softened during the third quarter, driven primarily by a lower ag market. Our gross margin decreased slightly to 23.6%, 30 basis points lower as compared to the same period last year and our adjusted EBITDA margin decreased by 110 basis points to 14.7%. Favorable resin costs, net of pricing, were offset by higher transportation, manufacturing and G&A costs. The higher transportation and manufacturing costs were due primarily to lower absorption of overhead due to the reduced volumes in the quarter, while the higher G&A costs were primarily driven by our financial transformation initiatives. Slide 8 goes into a bit more detail on what is driving our domestic performance by end market. Our non-residential end market continues to perform well in a difficult market environment with the result up 4% year-over-year. But pipe and allied product sales increased with growth of 2% and 7% respectively. Year to date trends at our residential end market continued during the quarter as a 6% increase in new residential construction sales was offset by a 7% decline in our retail channel, resulting in an overall 1% decline during the third quarter. The decline in the retail channel was primarily due to the favorable weather and sales we experienced in Q4 of last year as well as the inventory management and destocking practices many of our retailers implemented this past year. In our infrastructure end market, our sales declined 4% in the quarter. Longer term, we feel very good about our position in this market and look forward to continued success of our HP product line as well as the rollout of our HPXR 75 product that Joe mentioned earlier. Finally, sales in ag were down 27% on a year-over-year basis, primarily as a result of an earlier start to the planting season as well as weaker underlying market conditions in the agricultural economy. As we mentioned on our last call, we will continue to evaluate our facilities and production capacity in locations that primarily support this market, given the weak market conditions we are experiencing. In addition to the actions we discussed on the last call, we are accelerating our efforts to optimize our domestic network of approximately 50 plants and 20 distribution yards to become more efficient as well as to make sure we have the right product at the right plant at the right time. Turning to slide 9. Year to date, we have generated $80 million of free cash flow, a decrease of $18 million when compared to last year. The increase in free cash flow attributed to higher adjusted EBITDA was offset by additional cash required for working capital as well as an increase in cash paid for restatement related costs. Lastly, we repaid $33 million in debt since December 31st of last year and ended the quarter with net debt of $370 million. Through December 31st, we’ve invested approximately $3.5 million this fiscal year at our new manufacturing facility in Harrisonville, Missouri, which should open in the first half of this calendar year. As we noted on our prior earnings call, we are still on track to hit our expected range of between $50 million and $55 million of CapEx for the full year. Slide 10 highlights our disciplined capital deployment strategy. Our highest priority use of cash continues to be investing in our business through various initiatives to accelerate profitable growth and to drive margin expansion through ops excellence and superior performance initiatives. We remain committed to returning a portion of our excess cash to shareholders through our dividend and will consider opportunistic share repurchases in the future. Turning to slide 11, we provide our 2017 outlook. We're maintaining our previously communicated net sales and adjusted EBITDA guidance. Our expectation for net sales are still in the range of $1.225 billion to $1.250 billion and our adjusted EBITDA is still in the range of $190 million to $210 million. On slide 12, we have provided our outlook on the end market dynamics as we head into fiscal year 2018. We anticipate our domestic construction markets will grow low to mid-single digits. We also expect the soft agricultural market to continue into fiscal year 2018 with low to mid single digit declines. Finally, we expect low single digit growth in our international markets with improvement in Mexico, partially offset by continued weakness in the agricultural market in Canada. We look forward to providing you with additional details regarding fiscal ’18 on our fourth quarter earnings call in May. Finally, we plan to file our third quarter Form 10-Q later today. Now, we’ll be happy to take questions. Operator, please open the line.