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spk03: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Core Molding Technologies third quarter fiscal 2022 financial results conference call. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note that this event is being recorded today. Now, I will turn the call over to Stephen Hooser, three-part advisors. Please go ahead, sir.
spk01: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for the Core Molding Technologies conference call to review third quarter results for 2022. Joining me on the call today are Core Molding's president and CEO, Dave Duvall, and the company's executive vice president and chief financial officer, John Zimmer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call is also being webcast and can be accessed through the audio link on the events and presentations page of the investor relations section at coremt.com. Today's call, including the Q&A session, will be recorded. Please be advised that any time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of the date of any replay or transcript reading. I would also like to remind you that the statements made during today's discussion that are not historical facts including statements or expectations of future events or future financial performance are forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements by their nature are uncertain and outside the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. Please refer to the earnings press release that was issued today for our disclosures on forward-looking statements. These factors and other risks and uncertainties are described in detail in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Core molding technology assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. Management will refer to non-GAAP measures including adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow, return on capital employed, and adjusted net income and earnings per share. Reconciliations to the nearest GAAP measures can be found at the end of our earnings release. Finally, the earnings press release we issued earlier today is posted on the investor relations section of the website at coremt.com as well. A copy of the release has also been included in the 8K submitted with the SEC. And with that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Dave Duvall. Dave?
spk05: Thank you, Stephen, and good morning, everyone. I want to start today with a summary of some recent good news. A few weeks ago, we executed a new agreement with United Forest Products to extend our relationship for another five years. We supplied decorative lattice products that UFP provides to commercial and residential customers throughout major big box home improvement retailers throughout the U.S. With this long-term relationship and others like it, we look forward to continuing to be a valuable partner for building products, industrial, utilities, packaging, transport, power sports, as well as critical infrastructure businesses throughout North America. Although we remain cautious in our outlook, like most companies in this environment, demand remains solid, and in certain end markets, demand is strong. Fortunately, we are a key and trusted supplier in a number of growing companies and industries. And as businesses plan for their 2023 production, they are locking in agreements with us. We have done a significant amount of work to develop supply agreements that are mutually beneficial with our partners, and our new agreements will allow for price escalations when input costs increase. We remain an essential manufacturer in vital end markets, and as macroeconomic headwinds hit, U.S. businesses want security and confidence in their supply chain, especially after navigating the recent supply chain disruptions and sea freight challenges we've experienced. Turning to our performance for the first nine months of the year, net new wins this year grew to 24 million, and our opportunity pipeline remains robust at 110 million. As a reminder, our aggregate pipeline represents all active new business opportunities. This year, we are pleased with the wins we are capturing, which I believe further demonstrate our ability to select and manage projects that best utilize our assets and our ability to capture higher margins. Results for the third quarter were strong, but product mix was the primary influence on margins in the quarter. We are pleased to report record high sales this quarter, growing net sales by over 25 percent to nearly $102 million. Despite the strong revenue performance, normal seasonality revenue diversification tipped back towards medium or heavy duty truck, which moved from 39 percent in the second quarter to 49 percent in the third quarter of this year. John will cover this in more detail in a few moments, but from a high level, this is the primary reason our sequential gross profit margin was essentially flat between Q2 and Q3 of this year. I also want to point out some meaningful progress in product launches during the third quarter. Product launches and product sales represent net new wins communicated in 2021 and 2022 that are in production and currently being launched. we reported strong third-quarter increases in product sales, up 36.5 percent. A few example of product launches include the Last Mile Truck project, which is now in full production. And in addition, we launched a number of new power sport projects. Finally, in the industrial and utilities categories, we had a major launch that is now in full production, as well as a number of projects related to stormwater solutions, flush cover products, and other industrial utility projects. that are expected to be in production by Q1 of 2023. We're excited about each of these customer launches because they are in large end markets where we have provided engineering solutions with the help of our technical solution team. Each of these projects are important because they align to our strategy of continued diversification and providing an engineered solution, which directly drives our margin enhancement initiatives. With that, I would now like to turn it over to John to cover the financials in more detail.
spk06: Thank you, Dave, and good morning, everyone. Third quarter 2022 net sales totaled $101.6 million, up 25.4% versus a year ago, and product sales increased 36.5% versus the prior year period. Revenue increases were largely driven by higher customer demand in our transportation and power sports industry, new program launches, as well as raw material recoveries. Gross profit for the third quarter was $13.3 million, or 13.1% of sales, compared to $6.4 million, or 7.9% of sales in the prior year quarter. Recall last fall, in 2021, that we experienced a period of rapid inflation in the U.S. so our margins reflected that impact to our business. We quickly reacted last year and started to work with our customers to recover raw material price increases. As expected, efforts to pass through raw material inflation have been challenging with significant ongoing negotiations. The results of our efforts, though, can be seen in improved gross margin. The net impact of changes in selling price and ongoing raw material inflation resulted in an increase in reported gross margin of 790 basis points in the third quarter of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021. The gross margin in the third quarter was primarily impacted by product mix shifts coupled with production inefficiencies. As Dave previously discussed, sequential gross margin for the quarter to the quarter three of 2022 was basically flat, which was due primarily to product mix. The medium and heavy duty truck market was approximately 49% of product sales in the third quarter of 2022, compared to approximately 39% in the second quarter. This shift in revenue mix was driven by normal seasonality, along with a heavy push by our truck customers for increased demand. Raw material inflation has somewhat leveled out in the third quarter, and we have seen some decreases in revenue prices. We will continue to work with customers to pass through changes in raw material costs going forward. As Dave mentioned, we are carefully watching for customer demand changes, which we could see in the last quarter of 2022 or early 2023 if recessionary pressures increase, but nothing meaningful yet. Selling general and administrative expenses for the quarter were $8.7 million, compared to $8.8 million in the prior year period. Prior year SG&A included $1.8 million of closing costs from shuttering the Cincinnati plant. Excluding last year's plant closing costs, SG&A cost as a percent of net sales remained approximately flat compared to 2021. In the third quarter, the company reported operating income of $4.6 million. Q3 net income aggregated $1.3 million, or 16 cents per share, which included a one-time $1.6 million, or approximately 19 cents per share, loss on extinguishing of debt, resulting from our debt refinancing that was completed in July. The loss resulted from non-cash write-off of previous debt issuance costs of approximately $1.2 million, and early extinguishment fee of approximately $350,000 to repay approximately $12 million of 8.25% fixed-interest debt. The 2021 third quarter net loss was $3.3 million, or $0.41 loss per share. Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter of 2022 was $8.4 million, or 8.3% of sales. You can find the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation tables at the end of our press release for both third quarter and year-to-date numbers discussed today. Now turning to results for the first nine months of 2022. Net sales totaled $290.9 million, up 24% versus a year ago, and product sales increased 28% versus the prior year period. Sales increases were largely driven by strong customer demand and new program sales, demonstrating success of our strategic revenue diversity objectives and raw material recoveries. Gross profit for the first nine months was $40.9 million, or 14.1 percent of sales, compared to $32.9 million, or 14 percent of sales, in the first nine months of fiscal 2021. Gross margins were impacted by favorable net selling prices in excess of raw material cost increases, offset by unfavorable product mix and production inefficiencies. The company has experienced operational inefficiencies and program launch startup costs in two of our plants, which we are working on reducing. SD&A costs for the first nine months were $25.9 million, compared to $23.7 million, or $21.7 million, excluding plant closure costs in the prior year period. Year-to-date operating income was $15 million, and below the operating income line, we recorded the write-off of debt issuance cost of $1.6 million. Net income for the first nine months aggregated $7.4 million, or 87 cents per share, compared to net income of $4.2 million, or 50 cents per share, in the prior year. Year-to-date adjusted EBITDA was $25.9 million, or 8.9 percent, compared to $18.7 million for the prior year. Turning now to the company's financial position, cash flow, and balance sheet. The company's cash provided by operating activities totaled $8.5 million for the first nine months ended September 30, 2022, and capital expenditures for the same period were $12.3 million. The increase in working capital, specifically accounts receivable, is related to increased sales this year. Approximately $7.5 million of the year-to-date capital expenditures relate to capacity increases and or the launch of new programs. We estimate that our capital spending in 2022 will now be approximately $18 million, and two of our new presses and robotics came online and are operational. Adding presses and automation this year allows us to maximize our current footprint, add capacity, and drive higher throughputs and efficiencies, which have incrementally increased our revenue and reduced our reliance on labor. At September 30, 2022, the company had available liquidity of $46.5 million, consisting primarily of $20.9 million under our revolving credit facility and $25 million of available liquidity under our capped line of credit. The company has term debt of $24.5 million at the end of September, and our term debt-to-trailing 12-month EBITDA ratio was less than one times adjusted EBITDA at quarter end. The company's working capital remained strong, and we ended the September quarter with accounts receivable at $54 million and day sales outstanding, or DSO, at 48 days. Our return on capital employed, which is a pre-tax return metric, was 14.6% on an annualized basis. We continue to believe that our strong balance sheet, coupled with sufficient liquidity, provides the company with the flexibility to continue to grow. Recall that in July, the company successfully refinanced its debt facility and entered into a new aggregate $75 million credit agreement for its revolving loan, term loan, and CapEx loan commitment. We also swapped daily floating SOFR for a fixed 2.95% interest rate on the term loan as part of a swap agreement. With the accredited agreement margin of 180 basis points, our term loan debt increased interest rate at September 30, 2022, was 4.75 percent. Concurrent with the new credit agreement, we repaid all of our existing credit facility, which charged higher interest rates than the new facility. These activities improve our liquidity position, strengthens our balance sheet, and lowers our weighted average cost of debt and debt service cost. Although our strategic business transformation continues, we see changes quarter to quarter related to product mix shifts that impact revenue diversification targets, as well as production efficiencies that impact gross margin. We remain laser focused on all of our controllables related to input costs and productivity, and our technical sales teams are continuing to make progress on designing engineered solutions and conversions that enhance gross margins. Improving operational efficiencies on the production floor of our plants, with the addition of more presses in certain facilities, allows us to immediately ramp through throughput and sales. Of our six manufacturing facilities, we are working to improve one plant more than the others for two reasons. One, from a product mix standpoint, this facility handles more volume in the heavy-duty truck. And two, the plant is less efficient based on facility infrastructure that we can improve, which we are working on. We remain firmly dedicated to core strategic growth and profitability goals with programs to drive long-term value creation in 2022 and beyond. Although we are encouraged by strength in customer demand currently, we are closely monitoring volumes and forecasts and remain conservative with regard to cash and our capital allocation decisions for investments in capital expenditures, acquisitions, people, and all other costs and expense. With that, I would like to turn it back to Dave for some final comments.
spk05: Dave? Thank you, John. We continue to see strong orders for truck and power sports with growing demand for industrials, utilities, packaging, and infrastructure solutions. As we think about capacity, not all work is created equal. We are focused and disciplined in our commitment to be purposeful in the utilization of our assets. Like all businesses right now, we are focused on profitability and asset utilization while watching for signs of changing order forecasts. For core, we will continue to diversify revenue by end markets to reduce the risk of concentration in the single customer or end market. This reduces the risk of one industry from significantly affecting our business and helps us stabilize our gross margin performance when the market does change. Our team continues evaluating internal factors to improve the efficiencies of our manufacturing processes so that we maintain a culture and discipline of continuous improvement within our organization. We are investing more in automation and the speed at which we can process materials. We're also making steady progress on our sustainability efforts. We will publish our first sustainability report in Q1 of 2023, which will highlight some of the areas we are advancing. Every day, we make choices in our lives that affect the environment, the climate, and other species. If we can make decisions each day that help make a better future, We believe that these incremental changes will create a powerful flywheel effect for our families and our communities. Last quarter, I shared that in our packaging category, we were partnered with the design and manufacture of containers for a customer to grow millions of crickets that can serve as protein-rich food for countries that are underserved or as a base for animal food. I am happy to report that this automated cricket farm is in full production and we are meeting the customer's ramp-up volumes today. We're also focused on energy savings projects, utilizing state-funded energy and thermal audits to scope projects that improve the power factor in our plants, which will reduce the electricity consumption in our larger locations. I do want to reiterate what John said about cash and our capital allocation strategy. As we prepare budgets and look at our three-year strategic plan, We are carefully evaluating how best to use cash for long-term value creation. And although we are pleased with our record sales and optimistic about the growth potential for some of our newer end markets, we plan to remain cautious and disciplined with our capital allocation strategy. This means that we will continue to monitor cash, value creation, and our return profile, especially as the macro environment change. Before we open for questions, I want to thank our entire core molding team for their hard work and dedication through another challenging and successful year. Simply stated, I'm a proud member of a great team. I believe most businesses would say the last couple years have been challenging as we navigated through COVID, rapid inflation, and more recently, the weaknesses in the overall global supply chain. It has been challenging to produce strong results, and I want to commend our team for staying focused and alert while continuing to execute and move the business forward. We are fortunate at CORE to have strong cooperative teams that put excellence and diligence at the center. John and I want to continue to also thank analysts and investors for their support, and we welcome your questions either on the earnings call today or in a follow-up call to answer all your questions. With that, I'd like to open up the line for questions. Operator?
spk03: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause just momentarily to assemble our roster. And our first question here will come from Chip Moore with EF Hutton. Please go ahead. Hey, good morning, Dave, John.
spk04: Thanks for taking the question. Hey, Nacho. Good morning. Good, good. I wanted to ask about gross margins. You know, you talked about mixed shifts and some of the production inefficiencies. Can you maybe help us, you know, understand that impact a little better? And then it sounds like, you know, in addition to seasonality, there was maybe a little bit more demand on the trucking side. So just remind us how that seasonality should work. And then also just any raw material cost recovery impacts to take into account on margins as well.
spk05: Yeah, we have a normal seasonality to where we would see the Q3, Q4, where we have a majority of our sales into maybe margins that aren't as high on some of our products. So really mainly mixed driven, you'll see that in our history as well. Q1, Q2 will always be our higher margin. relative to the business. I think when we look at Q3 in particular, it's about 270 basis points for Q3, the majority of that being product mix, as you saw in percent of sales. Some of that we do have some operational inefficiencies. We have some large launches in one of our plants. And then the other plant, when John talked about some of the infrastructure, it's really looking at some of the large facilities in that plant, like the electrical systems, the steam systems, and the press systems.
spk06: Yeah, and Chip, I'll address your on raw materials. You'll notice that what's happening in raw materials, we're kind of actually at that point year over year where we're starting to get some comps, some comparability from quarter to quarter. I know last year, third quarter, we just started getting something comps. You know, we're still getting significant recovery. We actually have recovery mechanisms in place for the most part all of our business, you know, either formally or informally, and we're recovering. What we're starting to see now, though, is that I've got ups and downs. Certain raw materials are starting to go down in price, and so as part of the raw material recovery, we actually have some revenue decreases to certain customers as that happens, and at the same time, we have revenue increases for other raw materials. The other thing that we're seeing, at least right now, is the raw materials are starting to stabilize as of right now. We saw some pretty big increases early in the year, but most of our raw materials have now come to a little bit more of a stable and hopefully maybe even start to decrease a little bit. Some of the steel prices and stuff like that that we pay on hardware should hopefully reset early next year as steel prices kind of zoomed up earlier this year and now have come back to earth, so we'll start maybe seeing some of that. I really think where our revenues are going to be in gross margins, we're going to see less effect of raw material recoveries being a factor in the gross margin numbers because I think they're just stabilizing a little bit at this point.
spk05: I think the challenge, I think as we talked before, is that the acceleration of the increase and the decrease was really a challenge, especially on the upside of that.
spk04: Yeah, that's helpful, guys. And then I wanted to ask, you added some more that new business in the quarter, you know, can you talk about sort of where that lies? Is that, you know, continuing to diversify into new areas? And then also on CapEx, I think right now maybe one more press coming in this year to just remind us on where that stands and some of the automation and what we should expect.
spk05: On the net new wins, a little over 50 percent of that, we would say that's in industrial and utilities. The rest of part of that would be in heavy truck.
spk06: So heavy truck, marine has a little bit also for the year. So would you say for the $24 million for the year, About $4 million of it is transportation truck, so what, 15%. The rest is a mix between last mile delivery, a little con ag, little power sports, utilities, those types of things. We continue to see diversification with the net new wins being a little bit less truck. And, again, I think one of the things that we are key on is that there's still good truck business out there. So we're going to win some good new truck business that makes sense. And so we'll always go for the stuff that makes sense there. You know, it's just some of the other stuff we're probably higher focused on because just the margins are a little bit better on those.
spk04: Got it. Perfect. Makes sense. Maybe just one more for me. This bigger picture, you know, kind of talked about the macro and being a little cautious, appropriately cautious. and monitoring things. I guess at this point, where would you typically get more visibility from customers at this point in the year and just given where you're bumping up against capacity constraints, when would you potentially consider adding capacity or just given the potential macro slowdown, that's where you're going to be more cautious near term. Thanks, guys.
spk05: Yeah, I think When we look at next year, we obviously, same as everyone else, we anticipate some type of a decline in the revenue. Right now, we're not really seeing that. We see still continued increase in strong demand in the truck. We would expect to see it first in probably personal watercraft, ATV, more of the discretionary spends. We would expect to start seeing that maybe by the end of the year, beginning of the first quarter. But we're going to be cautious about moving forward relative to investing in new capacity. I think with the four machines that we've installed this year, we have enough capacity at least until we see more growth going into the end of next year. Got it. Great. All right. Thanks very much. Yeah, I think the big thing, too, is we're being a lot more selective on the growth, where we decide to grow and what we're deciding to grow in. The year before, we had $75 million in net new wins, and we're probably going to hit $75 million in net new wins again this year. But being able to install that capacity, launch it, and have it all at the same level of value is probably – we'll focus more on the value of the new business.
spk04: Yeah, yeah, and risk profile sounds like you feel very good. All right, thanks.
spk03: Our next question will come from Mike Hughes with – SGF Capital. Please go ahead.
spk06: Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. Just on the program inefficiencies and launch costs, can you put a finer point on that if possible and quantify the hit to gross margins in the quarter from those issues? Yeah, it's really tough because what will happen is, you know, during a launch, you've got kind of, you know, inefficiencies that happen throughout the plant. So we've always tried to grab it and say, hey, we know, you know, you can measure some scrap and those things. But, you know, it causes a significant launch will usually create inefficiencies throughout all types of jobs. You know, all of a sudden everybody's focused on, you know, a bonder that's not bonding right. And so you're, not working as much on just your normal day-to-day stuff. And so it really has a way to disrupt the whole facility. The nice thing about those, those usually can kind of get cleaned up in about a six-month period. What we say is with a major launch, you've got that six-month period where you're really working through bonder issues or scrap issues or where do you place the charge pattern, all those things that you get worked out eventually and you get your normalization back into the plant. We would hope to see that the impact from that launch, you know, would be really kind of in Q1 next year would start to disappear, the impact of it. You know, on the other facility that we talk about, you know, again, we don't really break out the individual piece. We do believe that, you know, the inefficiencies out there, I think you'll see in the 10Q we had inefficiencies in the mix of, you know, versus last year of another 270 basis points. You know, I think we really believe if we can get that plant, once we get that plant, you know, kind of reworked and working well, that, you know, not going to give a number out there, but it definitely will show up on the margin. It won't be something so small it would be a point or something or, you know, 10 basis points. You know, it's going to be something that will show up on the margins as we keep working through that. We would expect as we fix that that we would see our margins start to head back up towards the mid-teens to high-teens as we get through that and we launch other products.
spk05: Yeah, I think one of the challenges you get into, as you know, on any launch, it's customer has challenges. They'll stop production, start production back up, some of the supply base that maybe the customer put in place has challenges. So it's working through all that. It's not just, say, a plant operational necessarily.
spk06: Okay. So, John, just to follow up on your comments, so once this – it sounds like it's concentrated in this one plant. Once that plant's running more efficiently, you can recover 200 to 300 basis points of gross margin just from that alone. Is that correct? Yeah. So, I mean, what we would be saying is I think, you know, we're at 13 today. I mean, our goal is that we get back to that 15 to 20 percent. I think, you know, with the one facility that we get the stabilization on the from the launch, and then the other one where we get through and work through the issues we're having there, again, that would be our goal to be back in that 15 to 18 range. And so you've got mix that will come in every quarter and those types of things, but that would be the range that we would definitely be trying to head back towards. Okay. And that launch, is it with a Class 8 existing customer? Yeah, it's a Class A customer, yes. Okay. Okay. And then you had a really strong tooling number in the quarter. In some respects, I guess that could be a forward-looking indicator unless you're transferring business to an existing customer. So how much of the tooling number is related to new businesses? Yeah, so during the quarter, I know we had a couple big ones. One is actually for a business that actually is launched during this quarter also, so it was definitely brand new. So a good piece of that was for that piece that was launched during the quarter. And actually, when I say that, both of them, both the two biggest ones were for a business that was launched. One was that Class A truck that we were talking about, which is a new program. And the other one was, you know, some stuff that is non-Class 8, but it was a new program also. So both of those do – or both of the – majority of the stuff was definitely for future revenues or new revenues. Okay. And then I think year-to-date, $24 million in net new business wins, and last year was $75 million. So that's just shy of $100 million in net new business wins. How much of that has launched already?
spk05: In Q3, there's about $10 million of that just in Q3 alone.
spk06: That's actually the revenues in Q3 from the launches. What will happen during these launches is when I go down my sheet here, a majority of those programs have launched in some form, but what will happen is they will take multiple quarters to get up to speed, ramp up to speed in those. What we can tell is what we're tracking is that in Q3 we had about $10 million of new revenues just for that quarter from programs that were out of that 75 and the 24. Okay. So if I annualize a $10 million, it's $40 million. That would leave an additional $59 million to launch, correct? And what's the timeframe on that? So it would either be launch or ramp. Like I said, some of these are launch but not ramp. And so, again, what we would expect is that they would start ramping through the periods next year additionally. Now, again, these were $75 million in 2024 of net new wins when they were won. I'll be cautious on that number like I am on the rest of my business. I don't know what's going on with the Fed and what they're trying to do to slow down business. but I think it will impact all our business eventually from what they've said. So, you know, I think you would definitely have the ramp. And then there are several programs, like I'm just going to cross my sheet here, four, five, six, seven of them that haven't even launched yet. So they'll launch later this year. Actually, some will launch throughout next year as we have. I think my latest one is actually – One launches in Q1 of 2025. I mean, that's how far some of these programs can get out there just because, you know, major OEMs will award those programs, you know, that far ahead. Okay. But I'm just thinking about your core business. If it were to decline 10% next year on the current run rate, that's about $40 million. There's a potential that the launches or ramps could offset that, right? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay. And what's the margin look like on these launches and ramps that are ahead of you? Putting aside, you discussed the issue with the one big program that's having some issues.
spk05: Yeah, I mean, that's always our goal is to, you know, improving our margins as we move forward, whether that's with an engineered solution or in a different industry or being able to do a conversion from some traditional material. So, absolutely, the main goal is to move further into the customer's design cycle and further integrated in a higher-value solution.
spk06: Okay. Just two more quick questions for you. You were at a conference over the summer, and I think you mentioned one large customer. You hadn't received the price recovery yet. So have you received the price recovery on the raw materials from all your major customers at this point?
spk05: Yes, we have.
spk06: Okay. And then last question, just on the raws. Polypropylene, the October pricing looks down about 20% from the average from the third quarter, and polyethylene down about 6% from the third quarter average. As raws fall, isn't there a little bit of lag where you'll benefit, just like your hurt as they go up? Yeah, and unfortunately, all material adjusted costs aren't created equal, and we live in through that where we have some that move as fast as monthly, some move quarterly, some move every six months. So, yeah, we would expect a little bit of a lag, but, I mean, I will tell you some do move as fast as monthly, that we will change prices monthly. But overall, that's what we would expect is that you get some lag benefit as those prices do fall. Okay, and then just one follow-up on that. Fiberglass, I had read that there's going to be another price increase early next year. Does that impact you, or do you have that locked in at this point? We are locked on our major fiberglass, other than they have an actual kind of adjuster clause that would move every six months, and that one's driven more by energy, a couple of other raw materials that go into it. I can't remember exactly. So the majority of it is really locked, but you can see probably moves of three, four, five cents per pound just based on that adjuster clause. So that's locked. I will tell you that we're not fully locked, and we're seeing that there might be some opportunities in glass otherwise that's actually maybe a little bit lower priced that we might be able to take advantage of that. Some of this stuff coming out of China. thanks to shipping rates coming down, those types of things have actually gotten a little bit more beneficial. But I will tell you that we still have the majority of our glass comes from North America. We just think that's the better supply chain right now, the more stable supply chain right now. But we can get a little bit of benefit from buying some from China. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Yep.
spk03: As a reminder, if you have a question, please press star then 1 to join the queue. Our next question here will come from J.P. Gagan with Global Value Investment Corporation. Please go ahead.
spk02: Hey, good morning, gentlemen, and congratulations on a nice quarter. It's obvious to us that your efforts to transform the business are bearing fruit.
spk06: Thanks, J.P. Thanks, J.P.
spk02: I have a couple more strategic questions this morning. Number one, you've been clear that you're adding new verticals to the business, which should help dampen some of the cyclicality we've historically seen with the Class A truck market. How should we be thinking about end customer demand in these verticals as we're starting to see signs of an economic slowdown?
spk05: Yeah, I think when we start looking at infrastructure and utilities especially, we're continuing to see an increased demand. There's a lot of excitement around the infrastructure bill. and how that's being divvied up. You know, things like fiber optics and communications have actually been translated just into the state's budget so that the states can then perform what they need to start launching projects. Some of the other ones on, you know, maybe some of the stormwater drains relative to buildings, we might see some, I guess, leveling off of that. But right now, what we see, anything to do with fiber optics, and communications data transmission, and then general infrastructure, we're seeing an increase.
spk02: Great. All right. You've alluded to discussions that you've had with customers about raw material price escalations and maybe more generally about negotiating more fair and balanced terms and conditions. Can you provide some more color on how these stocks have progressed and how we should really think about T's and C's in the new contracts that you're announcing, such as the contract with UFP?
spk06: Yeah. And, again, I'll use the statement again. Not all customers are created equal either. And so we do go through the T's and C's with different customers. We really understand our different customers. There's just different levels of – customer partnership, and so some of the T's and C's will be different for others. What we are looking at is that we will have a raw material adjuster clause, some type of adjuster clause in every contract going forward. Some will be pretty easy negotiations. Some will still be pretty tough negotiations. A person like UFP, again, in the thermoplastics area with an index, it's a pretty straightforward conversation, and it happened very quickly. And so I think that we'll continue to see that, primarily in the thermoset plastic areas. The thermoset guys will continue to have an RMA clause, but maybe a little bit, probably more negotiation. And so as we hit each of those negotiations, and I think we've talked, we've got a couple more negotiations coming up where we are getting raw materials, but we've got new contracts coming up that we're going to, work through those with the customer and then, you know, try to make sure that we get probably a little bit more balanced contracts on some of those that maybe historically we were able to get.
spk05: Yeah, I think it's a business model and a culture change for some customers. They face their entire business model on set pricing and then being able to increase their pricing onto the end customer.
spk02: All right, thanks for the additional color. Finally, as you begin to offer more solutions-oriented or highly engineered products or solutions, how should we expect project-level economics to develop over the life of a project, and particularly as it relates to project capital costs or timing?
spk05: Yeah, I mean, it definitely extends the timing if you're early in the design phase. It doesn't necessarily extend when we look at the quote, the cash, when we look at the net new wins, because once they've decided to launch it, It's already, you know, you're looking at the tooling at that point, but we definitely have more time and more resources involved being earlier in the design and development cycle. We're doing a lot more validation to federal requirements for loading and relative to the material and the product in itself.
spk02: And I would assume, but maybe you can confirm that that sort of early engagement really makes these contracts a bit more sticky.
spk05: Absolutely. I mean, if you're the only one that can provide that solution, I think some of our programs are very, very clear on that. I mean, we're able to use two different processes to optimize the solution when we're the only supplier in the world that has those two processes to offer that solution.
spk02: Great. Thanks for taking my questions.
spk06: Thanks, JP. Thanks, JP.
spk03: This concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Dave Duvall for any closing remarks. All right.
spk05: Thank you for your continued interest in our company, and we look forward to providing an update of our progress when we report fourth quarter results in a few months. Thank you.
spk03: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.
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