Core Molding Technologies Inc

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Core Molding Technologies Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A -and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Sandy Martin, three-part advisors. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for the Core Molding Technologies Conference Call to review our second quarter 2025 results. Joining me on the call today are the company's president and CEO, Dave Duvall, as well as COO, Eric Palamaki, and CFO, Alex Panda. This call is being webcast and can be accessed through coremt.com via an audio link on the investor relations, events, and presentations page. Today's conference 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 in today's discussion that are not historical facts, including statements or expectations or 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 are uncertain and outside the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. Please refer to today's earnings press release 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 technologies assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements publicly. Management will refer to non-GAAP measures, including adjusted EPS, adjusted EBITDA, the debt trailing 12 months EBITDA ratio, free cash flow and return on capital employed, reconciliations to the nearest GAAP measures can be found at the end of our earnings release. Our earnings release has been submitted to the SEC on Form 8K and now I would like to turn the call over to the company's President and CEO, Dave Dwall.

Thank you, Sandy, and thank you all for joining us today. Today, I'm excited to share that we've made major steps forward in our Invest for Growth strategy with respect to exceeding our targets for new business wins and a major organic growth investment as part of our capital allocation strategy. First, we successfully won $47 million of new business in the first six months of the year, with 99% of that being incremental. This exceeds our 2024 full year new wins of 45 million. I'm incredibly proud of our team for their hard work, multifunctional collaboration and full organizational engagement around driving this significant Invest for Growth milestone. We continue to add resources to our sales and marketing function to attack new markets with wins in aerospace, like satellite receiver bases and both EV cars and buses. We are seeing success with our campaign to market and sell our SMC or sheet molding compound. As we stated earlier, this has a short quote to cash cycle and we've developed the available capacity. Utilizing AI programs for lead generation, we have identified immediately addressable opportunities of over $200 million in SMC alone and we're currently in discussions with many of those potential customers today. We are seeing that all the advancements we've made in our SMC operations to improve our capacity, consistency and performance of our SMC formulations are providing a competitive advantage in the market. This is an exciting new revenue stream for our business that is already providing new revenues. We are gaining momentum in our Invest for Growth strategy and it's truly exciting to see the entire organization engage in supporting our many customer focused initiatives. Our new wins this year include being awarded the Volvo Mexico truck business. I'm proud of our team's success and our ongoing ability to deliver on what we commit. Winning this program and partnering with Volvo on their new Mexican facility is a rewarding accomplishment for all of us. We are proud to be a trusted partner as they launch production from their new manufacturing site in Mexico and I think it demonstrates the continued evolution and development of our organization's ability to continually improve, which is at the heart of our business goals. Secondly, to support the new business and anticipate an additional future business, we are investing $25 million, including an expansion of our Matamoros plant and a new plant and equipment in Monterrey, Mexico. Organic growth has been our highest priority for our capital allocation strategy and making this investment not only launches a major truck program, but adds DCPD molding or reaction injection molding and top coat paint capabilities to our Monterrey facility. We're excited about making these investments in our organic growth by adding capacity and capabilities to our Matamoros and Monterrey locations. As we have known incremental wins that support the investment model. The launch of DCPD molding in Monterrey puts us closer to other large customers that value this process and with the addition of top coat paint, we are able to provide the customer a fully molded, assembled and top coated painted product. Our voice of the customer program has clearly shown us the need for top coat paint, especially in industries like construction and agricultural machinery and aerial lifts. This is a major step in our capital allocation strategy and we look forward to continuing to grow our business with Volvo and other customers as we increase our capabilities and develop new revenue streams. These are long-term programs, which we anticipate will provide revenues of 150 million over the next seven to 10 years. I'm truly excited to share these new wins and expansion investments as they embody the significant progress we've made in our sales and marketing function and across our entire organization. With the new wins from this year and prior year, we expect that we would be back over 300 million of annual product revenues in the next two years, even at the current truck and power sports demand levels. When you factor in the magnitude of new wins on top of our continued margin expansion initiatives, it makes our future business model very exciting. All of our work in the operations, pricing, customer focus and sales development is absolutely showing in our results and our future business outlook. So in summary, we will continue to one, successfully drive our sales growth into new markets, two, improve our margin profile to operational excellence and our innovation pipeline, and three, invest in growing a business that has proven it can execute well. Developing a world-class engineered material and manufacturing solutions partner is what it's all about. Now, turning to our Q2 financial results, revenue was 79.2 million with gross margins at 18.1%. Adjusted EBITDA margin grew to 12% up 30 basis points from Q1, and cash flow from operations is over 9 million for the first half of the year, which exceeds our -to-date net earnings. As expected, tooling revenue increased by almost 13 million between Q1 and Q2, and we're projecting further growth in tooling this year from our new business wins secured last year. We again delivered strong gross margins this quarter within our projected range, with sequentially improving profitability compared to the first quarter, as well as positive -to-date free cash flows. As expected, sales declined in the second quarter when compared to the prior year period by low double digits, representing a sequential improvement from the first quarter. Sustaining strong gross margins, profitability, and positive free cash flow when -to-date double-digit revenue declines in the first half is strong evidence that our must-win battle initiatives over the last four years have been successful, and more importantly, we have demonstrated consistently good execution. Now, before I turn it over to Alex to give a detailed financial report, I've asked Eric to share comments on some Q2 highlights.

Thank you, Dave, and good morning. Many of you I have already met, and to those that I have not yet met, I look forward to speaking with you in the future. In a moment, I will share our newest footprint optimization project that fits well into our continuous improvement culture here at Core Molding. But first, I would like to share a few other notable accomplishments and accolades for our company and select employees. Our Director of Material Science, Vinod Arora, won the American Composites Manufacturing Association, or ACMA, Pioneer Award, honoring him for playing a pivotal role in advancing the composites industry through innovation and technical expertise. I personally have had the privilege of working with Vinod over the last seven years. His vast experience and 40 years in the industry is an incredible asset to Core Molding. We are proud of Vinod and the entire material science team for industry advancements and competitive proprietary innovations they have brought to our customers. Recently, our leader and my mentor, Dave Duvall, was nominated for a 2025 Smart 50 Award for leading the implementation of a smart organization and building an enduring organization of products with long-term sustainability. This is an honor for both Dave and the company, and we look forward to attending this event later this month. I'd like to also share an update on our footprint optimization initiative launched at the end of the second quarter, which we expect to complete by year end as part of our ongoing focus on product-level profitability. The current softness in the truck demand created an opportunity to consolidate our resin transfer molding, or RTM, process by relocating select programs to another one of our facilities. This strategic move will streamline operations at the originating site and is expected to deliver margin improvement. Alex will provide more detail on this shortly. Lastly, I want to call out our operational teams for their 99% on-time deliveries and excellent 62 PPM performance. PPM, which measures the number of defective parts per million produced, is used by our customers to measure quality performance. A rate of under .01% indicates a high level of quality and is a testament to the precision of our quality processes. We have also maintained industry low safety incident rates and employee turnover rates, which we take pride in. These favorably trending metrics reflect well on our culture and commitment to excellence across all of our plans. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Alex to run through the financials.

Thank you, Eric, and good morning, everyone. For the second quarter, net sales totaled 79.2 million, representing a .7% decrease from the same period a year ago. Similar to last quarter, product sales were down due to lower demand for power sports, building products, and in the medium and heavy duty truck verticals. This was offset slightly by new product sales to customers in the building products and industrial utilities markets. As expected, tolling revenues grew by over three and a half times compared to the prior year due to customer launches primarily resulting from our 2024 business development activities. Despite Q2 operating leverage pressure, we maintained our gross margin of 14.3 million, or .1% of sales. We are pleased with the stability of our gross margin rate, particularly given the significant shift in sales mix with increased tolling revenue. We continue to partially offset lower leverage with operational efficiencies, lower raw material costs, and margin optimization. We are maintaining our targeted gross margin range of 17 to 19% for this year. As G&A expenses for the second quarter were 9.1 million, or .5% of sales. Flat as a percentage of sales versus the year ago period. Excluding Q2 severance in footprint optimization costs of 479,000 and 200,000 respectively, adjusted SG&A costs would have been 8.4 million. As Eric discussed, we plan to invest 1.5 million this year in a footprint optimization project, which involves relocating the production of RTM products to an alternative plant. We anticipate that this project will generate direct cost savings of over 1 million annually, commencing in January of 2026. For the second quarter of 2025, adjusted SG&A expenses decreased compared to the same period last year due to lower labor and related benefit costs, as well as bonus accruals and favorable foreign currency translation. Operating income for the quarter was 5.2 million, or .6% of sales, down from 7.5 million, or .4% of sales in the same period in the prior year. The second quarter's interim effective tax rate was .4% compared to .3% in the prior year quarter. The increase was due to taxable income being generated in the higher tax rate jurisdictions this quarter. Net income for the second quarter was 4.1 million, or diluted income per share of 47 cents, compared to net income of 6.4 million, or diluted EPS of 73 cents in the comparable year period. Excluding the impact of severance in footprint optimization costs, our second quarter diluted EPS would have been 53 cents. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA was 6.5 million, or 12% of sales. We generated 9.6 million in gap cash from operations, and after capital expenditures of 4.4 million, our free cash flow was 5.2 million for the first half of 2025. We continue to expect our pre-planned physical 2025 capital expenditures to be approximately 10 to 12 million. In addition to the pre-planned capital expenditures, the company expects to invest approximately 25 million related to the award of the Volvo Mexico business over the next 18 months. With eight to 10 million anticipated to be spent by the end of physical 2025. As of June 30th, our balance sheet was strong with a total liquidity position of $93.2 million, comprising of 43.2 million in cash, plus 50 million available under the revolver and capital credit lines. The company's term debt was 20.6 million at the end of the quarter, and our debt to EBITDA ratio for the trailing 12 months remains less than one times. Our return on capital employed was 7.2%, and excluding cash, the rate was 9.6%. As we continue to launch new business, we expect this metric to improve by better leveraging top line performance and driving better asset utilization. Both ROC metrics are computed using the trailing 12 months of operating income and total capital employed, a pre-tax metric. Please see our earnings release for the gap to non-gap reconciliation tables. Our capital allocation strategy remains flexible with a significant focus on organic growth, as well as discipline management of debt and working capital and share repurchases. Throughout the first half of the calendar year, we repurchased 151,584 shares at an average price of $14.82, and we have $2.5 million remaining in our board authorized share buyback program. We expect sales to decline in the second half of the year by four to 6% when compared to the same period in the prior year. As discussed earlier this year, we expect tooling revenues to comprise a higher percentage of our total sales when compared to prior year. As a reminder, one-time tooling sales are recognized upon the customer's acceptance of the tools, which can shift between quarters. Regarding tariffs, our products in both Canada and Mexico are USMCA compliant and are currently exempt from tariffs. However, we will continue to closely monitor how changes in trade policies affect our customers and their end markets. We will continue to rebaseline expenses to better align them with customer demand. And with that, I would like to turn it back to Dave.

Thank you, Alex. Our 2025 First Half performance demonstrates that we are systematically driving continuous operational improvements, which is simply part of who core molding is. We are also highly focused on further scaling operations, leveraging our fixed cost base, and optimizing our portfolio footprint. As foundational to these endeavors, our sales and marketing team continues to prioritize sectors where our proprietary materials and our technical differentiation provide core molding with a distinctive competitive mode. We focus on large diverse sectors, including construction, energy, industrial, aerospace, and medical markets. Our sales teams are engaged early in the design cycle to expand wallet share and inform customers of our full range of value added capabilities, including SMC formulation, large part molding, and top coat painting. We're excited about the wins we're seeing this year in newer markets, such as the new pick-up box panels for small EV trucks, the satellite tracking systems, and winning the Volvo Mexico business, which are all data points demonstrating positive results. We are investing in the relocation and optimization of specific large presses and launching a new plant near our existing plant in Monterey, Mexico, to accommodate new business wins in the region. We plan to expand our DCPD, or reaction injection molding processes, for large OEMs in the area we already serve, and we'll add top coat paint to enable a full service partner model. We will expand on this more on our next earnings call, but overall, we are ready to invest when customers trust us with their long-term business. We're also proud that we have maintained gross margins in the 18 to 20% range, despite significant top line headwinds this year. Our focus on continuously improving our performance positions core, so that as our top line grows, the positive operating leverage will drop to the bottom line. We will continue to strengthen our operations and take the necessary action to drive long-term business capability and profitability. We are seeing the most promising opportunities in construction and transportation, but we are confident this is only the beginning. New areas are emerging and will continue to evolve in the construction sector, such as the windows market, and more in the industrial sector for customer seeking composite mats. As stated earlier, we estimate that the combination of new program launches from existing customer winds over the next two years will return us to the annual product revenues exceeding 300 million. Furthermore, our portfolio capacity, including presses, processes, and automation, is capable of supporting top line growth to 450 million. Despite our first half business winds, we are staying humble. We continue to see the major markets we serve in a lower than expected demand environment. Tariff uncertainties are causing some delays in the market, both in demand and in the awarding of new programs. We have one major truck customer described this year as the great pause, but we do see things starting to move towards stabilization and we are preparing for the eventual revenue rebound. We continue to move forward with our Invest for Growth initiatives this year, and we are finding ways to attract new customers and increase wallet share with current customers. Our must-win battle profitability improvements allow us to invest in future growth and significantly reduce the variations in our margins. So, on another topic, I'd like to address the announcement of my plan's succession, which was shared shortly after our earnings released this morning. At the end of May, 2026, I plan to retire as the company's president and CEO. As part of our succession plan, I will remain fully involved with the strategy as an executive advisor to the board and leadership team until December of 2027, the following 19 months. We've been working on the strategic transition for over two years, and the board and I fully support Eric Palamacki as my successor. Eric possesses the right passion, skill set, and leadership abilities for the position. Eric has been an integral part of developing Core's business systems, and his institutional knowledge of our systems will allow a seamless transition. Eric is a talented professional who has a keen ability to develop and drive innovations in product development, as seen with some of our new wins. Eric and I have partnered throughout the business transformation, and he has earned the respect of the entire organization and our customers, which will enable him to succeed in driving the company forward, upholding Core's fundamental values, and ensuring a disciplined execution of our investor growth strategy. During Eric's seven-year tenure working, he has consistently demonstrated exceptional leadership qualities, incredible innovation in new products, and a deep understanding of our industry. Like other executive transitions at Core Molding, Eric has undergone a rigorous executive training process, both internal and external to the company, and collaborated with the entire management team every step of the way. His promotion last year to Chief Operating Officer allowed him to lead and collaborate with all levels of the organization in preparation for this next step. Now, I want to thank our team for their continued dedication and excellence, our customers and shareholders for their trust, and our board for its ongoing support. Lastly, I'd like to share that Eric, Alex, and I are planning to attend the Midwest Ideas Conference in Chicago on August 26th. We look forward to connecting with many of you for further discussions while we are there. With that, let's open the line for questions. Operator?

Certainly. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions.

Your first question for today

is from Chip Moore with Warroth.

Good morning, hey everybody. Thanks for taking the question. How are you, Chip? Hey, Dave, I guess first off, congratulations are in order, Dave for you and Eric for you as well. So congrats. No,

thank you, Chip.

Thanks. Yeah, I wanted to start, Dave, you sounded very positive pretty bullish on the growth outlook, particularly getting back to 300 million plus of product revenues. I think you said within the next two years. And was that, did I hear you say even if truck and power stays sort of at depressed levels? How should we be thinking about that? And with Volvo ramping in 27, I assume, any thoughts on product revenues next year?

Yeah, I mean, we would expect that the truck market would start coming back. We see an ACT was at sometime in 26. We're not really, we're not banking on that. But with the new wins from prior year and this year, launching this year and into next year, and then with the Volvo program, we see clear line of sight being

back at product revenues of 300. Gotcha, and capacity 450. So

you're in good shape there. Yeah, the

only challenge that we ever had with capacity, similar to what we said is sometimes we don't have the right size press in the right location.

Yeah, yeah, okay, no, that's great. And just in pipeline and those new wins are impressive, right, 47 million more than last year. And I think it was 30 million just a couple months ago.

So where

are you seeing those incremental wins? And what's the outlook for the back half of the year on pipeline?

Yeah, I mean, we're real excited to continue to be excited in the industrial for the mass. We still continue to work on that. We have other opportunities there. We are working with some of our customers, like in the construction area, like UFP, on some really neat projects that have opportunities coming up. But I think in the wins, it's really, we look at the EV and the municipal buses and the small truck programs, as far as being able to use our composite processes for the beds and tailgates for the trucks. So that's some pretty high volume as well as the panels and the Volvo Mexico. I think the satellite is a new market for us where we see that potential to take off. And we've got some wins in that already that we already declared in this 47 million.

Yeah, it's helpful. And Dave, the...

I think the big one that we're really driving when we talk about the shorter term wins is really promoting our SMC. We've done a lot of work in our facility as far as cold storage and how to mature the SMC and investments in the capital to really stabilize, improve the output and consistency and the speed at which we're able to make that. So we've significantly increased our capacity and consistency in that. And now using the AI lead generation, it was actually a lot more than I thought. I thought I knew, but I didn't.

Yeah, the AI is amazing. And you said, Dave, I think you're tracking a 200 million plus lead gen. It's more than that.

Yeah, it's more than that. But we took out what we call captive. So if you look at the SMC market, those who mold SMC like a Kohler, they would be your largest SMC maker, but they're captive into their own industry. SMC is usually a big part of the value proposition. So you either need to make it as part of your value proposition or make sure that you're buying consistently good SMC that you can mold and has the features you need. So we subtracted out what we call the non-aggressibles.

Gotcha, so that's, yeah, that's immediately accessible. And you have capacity in place to serve that and doesn't have to be trucked with like, certain temperature and those types of things is just walk me through that.

Yeah, we had talked about that quite a bit. We have the capacity to get maybe three quarters of that. But in that timeframe, we would be able to install more capacity as needed.

Got it, okay, very helpful. Maybe I got asked one more, just speak one in that 25 million CAPEX in Mexico obviously for Volvo, but what about that adjacent opportunity with some of your customers? I think you talked about the paint, top coat and

- Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, as part of our strategy, you hit it right on the head is that's how we're looking at it. So the 25 million, we have to expand our matamoros facility. We're gonna move DCPD or reaction injection molding out of that. We're gonna move that into a Monterey facility that's close to our current Monterey. And if you remember our Monterey facility is only 50,000 square feet at least, and it's landlocked. So we really can't do more with it. So we're moving to a facility fairly close to where we are at 150,000 square feet. We'll be putting top coat paint, DCPD, structural foam, and we're also looking at large part high pressure injection molding. And that location puts us with DCPD close to one of our other major customers. So it significantly reduces their logistics costs and opens up the opportunities to grow more business with them.

Okay, great. Now I appreciate taking all the questions. I'll

hop back in. I appreciate it.

Once

again, if you would like

to ask a question, please press star one. Okay, all right. So I

don't know if we have any other questions. It doesn't seem to be coming up. Okay, so thank you for your continued interest in our company. We look forward to providing an update on our progress when we report our third quarter results. Thank you and have a great day.

This concludes today's conference and you may disconnect your line of business at this time. Thank you for your participation.