Earnings Labs

Zurn Elkay Water Solutions Corporation (ZWS)

Q2 2022 Earnings Call· Wed, Jul 27, 2022

$51.90

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Zurn Elkay Water Solutions Corporation Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Results Conference Call with Todd Adams, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Mark Peterson, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Dave Pauli Vice President of Investor Relations for Zurn Elkay Water Solutions. This call is being recorded and will be available for one week. The phone numbers for the replay can be found in the earnings release the company filed in the 8-K with the SEC yesterday, July 26. At time for opening remarks and introductions, I will turn the call over to Dave Pauli.

Dave Pauli

Management

Good morning, everyone and thanks for joining the call today. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call contains certain forward-looking statements that are subject to the Safe Harbor language contained in the press release that we issued yesterday afternoon, as well as in our filings with the SEC. In addition, some comparisons will refer to non-GAAP measures. Our earnings release and SEC filings contain additional information about these non-GAAP measures, why we use them, and why we believe they are helpful to investors and contain reconciliations to the corresponding GAAP information. Consistent with prior quarters, we will speak to certain non-GAAP metrics as we feel they provide a better understanding of our operating results. These measures are not a substitute for GAAP and we encourage you to review the GAAP information in our earnings release and in our SEC filings. One final reminder, we closed the Elkay transaction on July 1. So our second quarter results that we will be walking through today do not include the impact from Elkay. We will start reporting a combined Zurn Elkay with our third quarter results. With that, I'll turn the call over to Todd Adams, Chairman and CEO of Zurn Elkay Water Solutions.

Todd Adams

Management

Thanks, Dave, and for everyone out there, just recognize Dave is a brand new dad three weeks ago. His wife Laura had a new son Nolan. So when you call him be sure to congratulate him, he's burning both ends of the candle here. So, thanks Dave for everything and congratulations. So, well, good morning, everyone. And hopefully everyone had a chance to read through the earnings release last night. And we do certainly appreciate everyone taking the time to join the call this morning. As Dave said, the merger was completed on 7:1. And we've been working really, really closely together in the last few months in preparation of bringing these two businesses together. The strategic logic around the transaction continues to be exceptional. Complementary North American water quality, safety flow control, conservation and hydration products and solutions serving the same end markets and the same customers with both significant operational and commercial synergies. I'm really pleased where we are with respect to the integration, probably three to six months ahead of where I thought we'd be at this point, because we've got a lot of important things already behind us in the few short weeks since we've closed. We’ve aligned the sales and marketing organizations into a single team just last week and we've already made or decided upon essentially all of the third-party rep changes that we want as a single business. In doing so we've established a single go to market and we'll be leveraging our proven demand creation capability which is super important and doing it right away will help us build the kind of momentum we want heading into fiscal year ’23, as opposed to dealing with that much change to start our full fiscal year as a combined business that maybe we contemplated…

Mark Peterson

Management

Thanks, Todd. Let's turn to slide number four. On a year-over-year basis our second quarter sales increased 17% to $284 million. On November '21, Wade Drains acquisition accounted for 2% of the year-over-year growth and the core business drove 15% of growth with generally balanced core sales growth across our water safety and control, hygienic and environmental and flow control product categories. With respect to profitability, our adjusted EBITDA, excluding corporate costs totaled $71 million in the quarter and our adjusted EBITDA margin was just over the high end of our expectations for the quarter at 25.1% and improved 60 basis points sequentially from our first quarter of 2022. On a year-over-year basis, about the benefits of the sales growth, inclusive of price realization and our productivity actions was partially offset by the increase in material and transportation costs as well as our investments in our growth and supply chain initiatives. With respect to our corporate costs, it totaled $7 million in the quarter as we had expected and it should remain at that approximate level per quarter for the balance of the year. Please turn to slide number five, and I'll touch on some of the balance sheet and leverage highlights. With respect to our net debt leverage, we ended the quarter in line with our expectations at 1.9 times pro forma for the adjusted annual corporate expense run rate I just discussed. When it includes Elkay, our leverage will continue to decline, and by the end of the third quarter will be at a level that will trigger a 25 basis point reduction in our base term loan rates. As we look to the end of the year, we continue to anticipate and in the year in the low 1 times range. With that, I'll turn the call back the Todd to cover some highlights from the Zurn Elkay combination.

Todd Adams

Management

Thanks, Mark. I think I'm on slide six. So on this page, this is what constitutes Zurn Elkay in terms of the sectors of the water solutions market we serve. In drinking water, the legacy Elkay brand is the gold standard for providing clean drinking water in public and private spaces. In terms of relative market share and specification rates, nobody comes close. The fundamental growth drivers in drinking water is really twofold, access to clean filter drinking water coupled with the sustainability aspect of eliminating plastic bottles into landfills, where we see billions of water bottles annually. The second growth driver is the retrofit replace market of the traditional drinking fountain. With over 8 million of these installed and only about 1.4 million bottle fillers installed, we see significant runway as we drive conversion in key institutional end markets, while building an even larger installed base. We also see path to add-on and build the filtration aspect of the product and category, leveraging our connected capabilities for seamless monitoring and also signaling the replacement of that. In water and safety control, where we've seen significant share gains in the last several years, we provide back flow prevention, pressure relief valves, irrigation valves, as well as all the valves required in a quench fire protection system. Superior flow curves, ease of installation and by far the lowest total cost of ownership, puts us in the driver seat from an industry perspective trend. As labor savings and availability become huge factors in decisions the customers make. The amount of patented third-party approved innovation in this category is critical and we believe that we have the number one single brand in the back flow. The hygienic and environmental sector is essentially everything required to create a safe hygienic space inside of a…

Mark Peterson

Management

Thanks, Todd. Please turn to slide 10 and I'll cover some of the highlights of our outlook for the third quarter. For the third quarter of 2022, we are projecting Zurn sales to increase year-over-year by a high-teens percentage and we anticipate Elkay related sales to be between $145 million and $155 million. With respect to margins, we expect our Zurn Elkay adjusted EBITDA margin, excluding corporate costs to be between 21% and 22% in the quarter, which result in 100 basis point to 200 basis point expansion year-over-year when you pro forma the third quarter of 2021 for Elkay. We anticipate corporate costs in terms of adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $7 million in the quarter. Before we open the call for questions a few comments on our interest expense, stock comp expense, depreciation and amortization, tax rate and diluted shares outstanding for the September quarter that will include the preliminary estimated impact of purchase accounting, as well as the new shares issued with the merger. Please note, the depreciation and amortization will most likely change as we finalize the purchase accounting over the coming quarters. But as of now, these are our best estimates. We do not expect a material deviation. We anticipate interest expense to be approximately $8 million, our non-cash stock comp expense to be about $8 million, depreciation and amortization will come in around $22 million, which consist of approximately $8 million of depreciation and approximately, $14 million in amortization. Our tax rate and adjusted pre-tax earnings to be between 27% and 28%, and diluted shares outstanding will be approximately $179.5 million to $180.5 million in the quarter. So, before we turn it over to questions, I'll just make a few final comments. Number one, I'm sure there are a lot of questions with respect…

Operator

Operator

Thank you.