Brent Yeagy
Analyst · Stephens
Thanks, Ryan. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. We have a strong quarter and outlook to discuss, but I'd like to start by reviewing the exciting progress we've made in advancing our strategy over the past quarter. Our team has continued to execute on changes that are building the structure for Wabash to change how the world reaches you. During the third quarter, Wabash added 2 important partners to our industry-leading dealer network. Bergey's Truck Center and Alliance Trucks are both located in the Northeast and build a critical gap in the Wabash network by providing the type of high-level expertise and service our customers' desire to support their businesses in this rapidly changing logistics environment. We are very excited to welcome them to the Wabash family, and I believe this is another proof point on how we see our dealer network as a critical enabler to our strategy going forward. From a product brand standpoint, we announced the launch of our Acutherm portfolio of solutions for intelligent thermal management with superior thermal capability through the use of advanced materials and enhanced structural integrity enabled by breakthroughs and system design. Acutherm solutions are positioned to provide enhanced thermal management performance over a wide range of use environments and applications. The Acutherm product line shows our commitment to developing innovative cold chain solutions that ultimately will span beyond the transportation, distribution and logistics landscape. The overarching Acutherm brand umbrella encompasses our innovative EcoNex technology, which offers lighter weight, paired with thermal advantages that do not require sacrifice and structural integrity. In August, we announced a $20 million investment to be made in our manufacturing capacity by 2023 to produce EcoNex. These efforts have Wabash well positioned to generate an incremental $125 million of cold chain revenue by 2025. I'd also like to say a few words about our recently held stakeholder conference called Ignite. Held in late September, Ignite was created to foster powerful collaboration between our suppliers, dealers, customers and other innovative partners with expertise and experience in spaces like digital brokerage, electrification, cold chain, autonomous vehicles, regulatory forces, sustainability and social awareness and changing logistics models. With Wabash acting as the connective tissue between these diverse constituents, this conference provided a peek into the future of what our company is working to create as we continue to build an ecosystem of innovative partners to help us bring forward-looking solutions to the transportation, logistics and distribution space. At this event, we announced a new partnership with Feeding America, which builds on our decade-long history of supporting food banks and our local communities. As a Feeding America corporate partner, we look forward to working alongside some of our customers and suppliers as well as other global businesses in the fight to end hunger. Wabash's contributions to Feeding America are dedicated to supporting mobile food pantry programs, which increase the access to food and underserved areas and require equipment like Wabash's refrigerated truck bodies to keep the program running. We're excited to add this new partnership to a growing list of corporate responsibility efforts that positively impact our world. Before I move on, we also had the opportunity at our Ignite conference to recognize 34 of our top suppliers for excellence and performance during 2022. Although it has been a challenging year to maintain stability of supply throughout the whole of the industry, I believe our supply chain has worked diligently to ensure that Wabash receives supply commensurate with the strength of our product portfolio and our vision of the future. I also believe that we have done well to structure a supply base that is overwhelmingly centered in North America, insulating us from the geopolitical and port issues seen elsewhere. Finally, on the strategy front, I'd like to mention that we welcome the new director to our Board in September. Trent Broberg is the CEO of Osiris, an automotive logistics as a service platform. Trent previously spent time at truststop.com, Real Time Freight LLC and Swift Transportation. We look forward to the contributions Trent is able to pull from his extensive experience with major carriers as well as with digital and technology applications within the transportation management space. Lastly, with our Board of Directors' support, we amended our asset-backed lending facility, increasing the total credit facility to $350 million and creating additional liquidity up to $125 million. I'll let Mike give more details here, but the increased liquidity gives us even more optionality as we move forward with our Trailers as a Service offering as well as other investments required to move our strategy forward. Moving on to our third quarter financial performance, our team delivered record EPS of $0.73, which certainly exceeded our initial expectations for the quarter. Between increased volumes and improved pricing, revenue increased 36% from the same quarter last year to an all-time record of $655 million. Profitability also continued to sequentially strengthen as we achieved 14% gross margin and 8.1% operating margin. I'd like to call out that our operating margins expanded by 430 basis points relative to the same quarter last year. Moving to market conditions, I'm not trying to add to the debate on macro conditions. What I think is important to mention is that implied demand for our products is so far above industry capacity that even if implied demand is reduced by a macro event, we suspect that it will result in what we would consider a good year for the industry. Additionally, we have already learned in 2022 that supply chain conditions don't magically get better with the turn of the calendar year. And as our industry continues to be constrained into 2023, this actually has a way of smoothing demand in the future years. When you layer in the structural changes and demand coming from digital brokers, power-only solutions and the growth of trailer pools more generally, we continue to feel very confident in our longer-term financial targets into 2025. Our backlog remains very strong at $2.3 billion, especially considering our strong record revenue coming out of the backlog during Q3. For anyone concerned that our backlog didn't continue to go up and to the right, during the quarter, don't be. It's critical to explain that the way we are filling our backlog has changed. Although our backlog is open, this is not a first come first served construct. We are intentionally curating our 2023 backlog to center upon important strategic conversations with customers who are not only interested in buying across the Wabash First to Final Mile portfolio of solutions, but also interested in collaborative demand planning and securing capacity for a period that looks beyond the given year. As you all know, we have undergone substantial organizational change over the last 2 years to create the right structure in order to enable this type of strategic progress, and we are beginning to reap the benefits of our One Wabash organizational structure as long-term customer agreements come into focus. And I fully expect to have updates to share with you on that front in the coming weeks and months. Once again, our backlog remained at $2.3 billion in Q3, and that is a purposeful outcome that we're very pleased with. Our backlog ending Q3 represents approximately 20% increase in the same period last year and also implies $1.7 billion of orders for 2023. I'd like to conclude addressing our backlog by mentioning that cancellations across the business remain effectively nonexistent. As I mentioned before, with near and present constraints to industry production, meeting implicit demand, it's difficult to foresee a scenario where carriers meaningfully reduce their trailer purchases, knowing how many years it can take to make up for that on the other side as well as the opportunity cost of missing out on the hot market conditions that have historically followed periods of weakness. Given our exceptional Q3 results and the visibility provided by our strong backlog, we're excited to raise our 2022 EPS outlook to $2.15. There are multiple ways of backing into a reasonable 2023 outlook based on our 2022 performance. We'll save 2023 guidance for our Q4 call because I believe our backlog speaks for itself. But however you arrive at your thoughts for 2023, we're likely to substantially outpace our 2022 performance as well as any EPS figure from the prior decade. I also think it's reasonable to point out that with 2023 arriving in about 2 months and no clear return path to preâ€COVID supply chain conditions, demand may easily continue to push from 2023 into 2024, which may insulate our industry from some of the broader macro concerns. I hope that the execution against our strategy is becoming clear. It has not been for a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to structure organization to enable our strategy. But we're here and it's very gratifying to be in a phase where I can see progress quarter in and quarter out. We continue to engage an impressive array of strategic partners to help us move faster on our journey to bring innovative solutions to the transportation, logistics and distribution industries. Product demand remains robust, evidenced by our strong backlog, and we remain well suited in case the environment diverges from our expectations with a very strong balance sheet and excellent operators who generated $104 million of free cash flow during the turbulence of 2020. I'd like to close by thanking our team members who have executed extremely well to help us achieve record quarterly EPS and more importantly, an accelerating pace of strategic progress. With that, I'll hand it over to Mike for his comments.