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Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the DXP Enterprise, Inc. 2020 Third Quarter Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Kent Knee, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Kent Knee
Kent Knee Christine, that was Chief Financial Officer, but thank you. Thank you. This is Kent Knee, and welcome to DXP's Q3 2020 conference call to discuss our results for the third quarter ending September 30th, 2020. Joining me today is our Chairman and CEO, David Little. Before we get started, I want to remind you that today's call is being webcast and recorded and includes forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. A detailed discussion of the many factors that we believe may have a material effect on our business on an ongoing basis are contained in our SEC filings. However, DXP assumes no obligation to update that information as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we may present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in our earnings press release. The press release and an accompanying investor presentation are now available on our website at ir.dxpe.com. I will now turn the call over to David to provide his thoughts and a summary of the third quarter.
Kent Knee Christine
Good morning and thank you Kent. Thanks to everyone for joining us today on our 2020 third quarter conference call. We are pleased with our results for the third quarter and year to date. Obviously, there are some areas where the impact and progress is not where we would like it to be, but given the unprecedented nature of COVID-19 and the continued effects of managing a virus pandemic, I am proud of all our DX people and how we collectively find ways to move forward. DX people have continued to find ways to deliver financial results for all our stakeholders in the face of extraordinary challenges. My heart goes out to those that have additional challenges of the California wildfires and multiple hurricanes along the Louisiana coast. We remain focused on driving sales growth and achieving our vision of excellence for our DX people, customer, suppliers, shareholders, and communities. I will start this call by updating you on developments since our second quarter call. and discussing some of the actions we are taking to successfully navigate the rest of the year and beyond. Kent will then take you through the key financial details after my remarks. After his prepared comments, we will be open for Q&A. As we continue to navigate through the sales and operating challenges associated with COVID-19, We feel very fortunate to be here at DXP and a part of the essential industry. Our strategy has always been to combine the financial strength, talent, resources, technology, and capabilities of a large company with the fast, flexible, and entrepreneurial capabilities of our local businesses to deliver superior value to our customers and to our suppliers while providing better growth opportunities for our DX people. There has been no better time than now to emphasize these qualities while being fast, flexible, convenient, providing technical solutions for the different end markets we serve. We continue to build our capabilities to provide complimentary set of products and services in all our markets, which makes DXP very unique in our industry. It gives us more ways to help our customer win. We also are constantly looking at reviewing opportunities where we can grow market share. We complement our strategy with a relentless drive for progress that includes business and operational initiatives which we believe will allow us to steadily improve our performance for all our stakeholders. As we finish out the year, we are excited about the opportunities ahead and the potential DXP has to continue to scale and grow within existing and new markets. We are a financially strong industrial leader, and we are finding ways to work through and remain successful today while putting us in a position to be successful for tomorrow. And we also believe that we must be opportunistic and find ways to move forward with safety in mind and drive strategic growth. Finally, given the fragmented nature of our industry, we continue to build DXP by adding the best local and regional companies to our team through acquisitions, enhancing and filling in our product lines, expanding our reach, and adding terrific talent along the way. Our third quarter results reflect us beginning to deliver on these priorities while finding ways to work in our new normal. As we discussed during the second quarter call, The recovery or rebound that we somewhat expected in May and part of June was short-lived as COVID cases picked up after stay-at-home orders relaxed and businesses began to return to work. DXPs cropped in July while the economy was fighting to get back to work, but began to rebound in August and September. July sales per day dropped at 3.2 million and subsequently increased in August and September. For the third quarter, we averaged 3.4 million sales per day versus our year-to-date average of 4.1 million sales per day. We anticipate closing the year closer to our average sales per day, assuming there is no setback, in the fourth quarter, including future lockdowns or surges related to COVID. I would like to share with you some of the diversity of our end markets. We do water and wastewater slash municipal, 2%. Food and beverage slash sanitary, 6%. Aggregates and agriculture, 2%. General industry, 15%. manufacturing 6%, chemical 7%, fabrication and construction 9%, military 1%, mining 2%, power 1%, pulp and paper 1%, refining 4%, steel 2%, transportation slash aerospace 3%, upstream oil and gas 8%, midstream oil and gas 15%, alternative energy a half a percent, and resellers 5%. ESP's goal is to grow all our markets and have a balanced in-market exposure. Our biggest opportunities and targets are food and beverage, sanitary, water and wastewater, municipal, chemicals, alternative energy, refineries, and military. We continue to believe the pace and magnitude of recovering going forward will vary greatly by geography and customer type. Despite these challenges, we continue to execute on our value proposition for our customers and our company. Our third quarter financial performance results reflects the results of these executions. Total company sales were $220 million, down 12% from the second quarter, an adjusted operating income of $7.1 million, an improvement of 12% compared to the second quarter. During the third quarter, as expected, we also experienced the largest sales decline with our innovative pumping solution business segments. IPS is tied to capital budgets, and the oil and gas industry has yet to work through what ultimately is a demand problem that has been accentuated during the COVID crisis. We have been cutting expenses to make money on lower sales demand, including shuttering one of our fabrication facilities. However, as my previous comments suggested, we do see the the start of a slow demand recovery. BXP sales professionals continue to use a variety of virtual tools to contact customers, as well as they have started going back to traditional methods of entering customer facilities. Customers are focused on those partners that they have an existing relationship with prior to COVID-19. We will continue to use whatever medium the customer prefers and tailor our approach to their needs. DXP is always customer focused, especially in the environment we have today, where listening to our customer matters. What makes DXP and DX people great is not just our technical expertise, but also being fast and convenient for the customer. Being fast and easy to do business with is not easy when we tailor each solution to how the customer wants to do business with BXP. Our omnichannel approach is not new, but does improve every year with new technology enhancements. Our smart solution suite of services driven by digital systems include programs that are flexible to adapt to each customer's unique supply chain challenges. VXP's customers can pick the suite of programs they want or need. VXP has a variety of solutions that the customer can choose, including VXP Smart Solutions suite of products that includes the following. Smart agreements, MRO commodity purchase agreements. Smart buy, outsourcing MRO procurement with order management functionality and reporting. Smart serve, warranty and repair management that manages the life cycle of the equipment. Smart source, storeroom management. Smart store, web-based ordering and customized e-catalog solutions. Smart bin, Industrial vending, including software, setup, training, service, and support. Smart VMI, vendor-managed inventory solutions with a technology suite and EDI requirements. Smart reliability, which is a suite of products to provide proactive health monitoring of capital equipment. Smart virtual store and unmanned storerooms. Today, 35% of our transactions are digital. 68% of all purchase orders are electronic. 87% of all our AP processing is touchless. The question is not the DXP and most of our suppliers are ready for digital transformation. But the question is, is the industrial customer ready to become digital? In terms of our service centers and regions that experience growth year over year, This included Alaska, California, North Rocky regions. Sequentially, the service centers grew sales 7%. Supply chain service experienced a slow decline in Q3, going from 37 million in Q2 to 33 million in sales in Q3. Supply chain service business believes that it has turned the corner and from customer demand perspective is anticipating sequential growth in Q4. In terms of the strength in the IPS backlog, we are now approaching the 2017 average backlog numbers and continue to see declines that are consistent with our customers cutting capital budgets. Our main focus within IPS is maintaining the demand level where we have today and find opportunities in other markets such as biofuels, food and beverage, and water and wastewater. Regarding cost, we are tightly managing our business to a performance standard that results in overall company profitability. From an EBITDA perspective, we increased EBITDA margins 68 basis points from the second quarter as we were able to improve gross margins by 12 basis points and drive efficiencies on lower sales demands. This led us to continue to produce positive free cash flow. We produced $29 million in free cash flow during the quarter, and we are on our way to have a $100 million free cash flow generation year. With the strong cash flow generation in the third quarter, we were able to manage our capital structure appropriately. Our strong cash flow resulted in meaningful improvement in our liquidity and a reduction in total debt. Maintaining a strong balance sheet is critical to our strategy to invest in our capabilities through organic growth and acquisitions. I am very pleased that we were able to quickly reunite our acquisition discussions during the second part of the second quarter. And at the start of the third quarter, As we mentioned during our last call, we made the decision to resume our acquisition discussions, and we are already moving forward. We have two letters of intent in place, and we are actively conducting due diligence and anticipate closing one or two deals at the end of the year. We are adding companies that have a focus on non-oil and gas markets specifically, water and wastewater, food and beverage, and other general industrial end markets. To summarize, I am very proud of how our team has performed in this extraordinary environment to keep everyone healthy and safe, serve and support our customers, manage our business to the lower near-term demand, take care of each other along the way. As a leading distributor of highly engineered products and services, we believe DXP remains well-positioned to support our customers and to navigate these changing periods for the benefit of all stakeholders. I would like to sincerely thank all of our DX people who continue to show up to work or whom are working remotely every day with their passion, commitment, and teamwork. We have a tremendous team and it is an honor to overcome the collective adversities we are all experiencing and deliver value for all our stakeholders. With that, I will now turn it back over to Kent to review the financials in more detail.
Kent Knee
Thank you, David. And thank you to everyone for joining us for our review of our third quarter financial results. Overall, DXP's third quarter results were good to see and reflect the following. Sales demand likely bottoming from the pressures of COVID-19, business segment strength within service centers, followed by supply chain services, and then IPS, which was impacted the greatest given the ties to oil and gas CapEx budgets, consistent gross margin strength, SG&A reductions, and strong quarterly free cash flow generations. During our second quarter conference call, we were still looking for the full impact of COVID to show in our financial results. The third quarter reflects the full impact of the COVID-19 related sales demand pressures as we likely hit a COVID related sales bottom in July with sales per business day at 3.2 million. As such, during the third quarter, we took a 48.4 million pre-tax charge related to an impairment of goodwill and related assets. Throughout the remainder of my comments, I will adjust for these impacts as they are non-cash and relate to following the appropriate accounting guidance. Turning back to our operating results, the demand deterioration associated with our customer spending reduction was most evident in our IPS business segment, which followed the decline in rig count incompletions. However, Our end market diversity proved to be a mitigating factor within our service center business segment, and we look forward to strategically adding other end markets over the next 12 to 24 months, which David alluded to as we press on with organic and acquisition initiatives. For the nine-month period ending September 30, 2020, total sales were $772.6 million, and adjusted operating income was $25.2 million. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was $0.16 per share. As I mentioned earlier, during the third quarter, DXP incurred a pre-tax non-cash impairment and other one-time non-cash charges of $48.4 million related to Goodwill and certain assets. In terms of the quarterly income statement highlights, total sales for the third quarter were $220.2 million compared to $327.2 million for the same period in fiscal 2019. Sequentially, this is a 12.4% decline versus Q2 and a 32.7% decline compared to the third quarter of 2019. Year-to-date, this reflects DXP sales hitting a trough in July with subsequent rebounds in August and September as well as October. Acquisitions contributed $5.1 million in sales during the quarter, which was a sequential increase of 13.7% versus Q2. Average daily sales for the third quarter were $3.4 million per day versus $5.1 million per day in Q3 2019 and $4 million per day in the second quarter of 2020. Adjusting for acquisitions, average daily sales was essentially flat at $3.4 million per day. Regions within our service center business segment which experienced sales growth year over year include Alaska, California, and the North Rockies. Key end markets driving the sales performance include food and beverage, mining, municipal, and specialty chemicals. Service centers' sales were up 7.2% sequentially and declined 14.9% from Q3 of last year. The sequential growth reflects the diversity of end markets within service centers and the strength in markets previously mentioned. In terms of innovative pumping solutions, sales were down 63.8% sequentially and 73.4% compared to Q3 of last year. As David reviewed, we are monitoring the backlog as we experience declines within innovative pumping solutions. As we review monthly bookings and backlog, we are comparing these data points to our fiscal year 2015 and 2016 averages, the last time we experienced a contraction in this business, as well as the fiscal year 2017. Our Q3 average backlog is below the fiscal year 2015 monthly average by 15% but remains above the fiscal year 2016 monthly average by 44% and ahead of our 2017 average by 4%. The conclusion here is that we are training towards 2017 12-month sales based upon where our backlog stands today. However, each quarter we decline, we reset based upon the new level bookings and corresponding ending backlog. Our IPS customers have cut CapEx budgets and a majority are waiting until the U.S. election settles and they can reset budgets based upon political direction, clarity around OPEC producer cuts, and the timing around a vaccine for COVID. As we always say, volatility and uncertainty is not good for our CapEx related customers. It becomes difficult for them to make capital allocation decisions. And we find ourselves in that environment today. Supply chain services sales declined 9.9% sequentially and 34.8% compared to the third quarter of 2019. Supply chain services third quarter sales performance reflects significant pullback in activity at oil and gas and transportation related customer sites. Additionally, supply chain services has been dealing with customers temporary closing facilities for an extended period due to COVID or rationalizing some facilities altogether. During July, a subset of our supply chain customers closed for the holidays. Going into Q4, our supply chain services segment is anticipating sales growth. Turning to our gross margins, DXP total gross margins were 27.8%, a 49 basis point decline from Q3 of 2019 and a 12 basis point improvement sequentially. This is a result of 185 basis point improvement in gross margins within service centers from Q2 to Q3 and an 18 basis point improvement within supply chain services. The service center improvement was the result of an improvement in gross margins in Canada within our safety services business with a better product mix. The improvement within supply chain services was a result of more sales from higher margin customers. In terms of operating income, combined, all three business segments declined 165 basis points in year-over-year business segment operating income margins versus Q3 of 2019, and 13 basis points compared to Q2. Total DXP adjusted operating income increased 74 basis points versus Q2 of 2020 to 7.6 million. Our SG&A for the quarter declined $9.2 million from Q2, with further reductions anticipated as we adjust to the current level of sales demand in our various business segments. Since Q1, we have reduced SG&A $19.3 million, which reflects our ability to quickly reduce SG&A levels and aggressively attack discretionary spending. We remain mindful that the contraction associated with the coronavirus will pass, and from a resource and capability perspective, we want to be in a position to respond to our customer needs as we believe those who are in a position to respond today and tomorrow will gain the most market share. We are starting to see this within our service center segment, and we are selectively positioning ourselves to grow and take market share where appropriate and reinvest in the business. Turning to EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA was 12.4%. $5 million in Q3 versus $28.2 million in Q3 of 2019 and $12.6 million in Q2. Adjusted EBITDA margins were 5.7% versus 8.6% in Q3 of 2019. Sequentially, we improved adjusted EBITDA margins 68 basis points. In terms of our EPS, our adjusted net income of Q3 2020 was $2.9 million. Our adjusted earnings per diluted share for Q3 2020 was 16 cents per share versus 12 cents per share in Q2 and 71 cents per share in Q3 of 2019. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow, in terms of working capital, our working capital was $161.7 million at the end of the quarter. This amounted to 15.1% of our last 12-month sales and a $30.6 million reduction from Q2 and an $81.8 million reduction since Q1. This reflects the decline within our project-related business, which is a double-edged sword when it comes to working capital uses, but this quarter does drive us to the point where we are in line with our historical averages. Improvements in working capital have been driven by improved collections, which we've mentioned during the second quarter, with our average accounts receivable days experiencing an eight day reduction from Q1 to Q2 and moving slightly up by four days, but still down almost six days from recent averages. In terms of cash, we had 97.3 million in cash on the balance sheet at September 30th. This is an increase of 18.6 million compared to Q2 and 43.1 million since Q4 and reflects the payments on our term loan B. Cash provided by operations was $30.5 million. We will continue to highlight the strong cash flow model we have and the benefits when paired with the appropriate capital structure and working capital management. For the quarter, we produced $29.1 million in free cash flow. In terms of CapEx, CapEx in the third quarter was $1.4 million or 0.6% of third quarter sales. Compared to the third quarter of 2019, CapEx dollars are down $4.3 million or 75.3%. As a reminder, CapEx during the quarter reflects our ability to control capital investment and the minimal maintenance needs of our business. Return on invested capital, or ROIC, at the end of the third quarter was 17%. At September 30, our fixed charge coverage ratio was 2.6 to 1, and our secured leverage ratio was 2.8 to 1. Total debt outstanding at September 30 was 217.5 million. which reflects, again, the $10 million in optional prepayments made during the third quarter. In terms of liquidity, as of this call, we remain undrawn on our ABL and have over $228.6 million in liquidity consisting of the $97.3 million in cash and $114.3 million in ABL availability. Similar to after Q2, we anticipate making an optional $5 million to $10 million prepayment on our term loan B to further strengthen our balance sheet. David's comments cover the fact that we anticipate closing one to two acquisitions at year end. These transactions will continue to diversify DXP from an end market perspective, as well as further strengthen our capabilities in key geographic regions and product offerings. We are looking forward to eventually bringing on new DXP people who will make the DXP team stronger, expand our end market mix, and support further performance and growth. In summary, our priority from a balance sheet perspective remains focused on maximizing our financial strength and flexibility without sacrificing long-term growth, our market opportunities, and positions us to be opportunistic when any growth opportunities arise. Collectively, we are moving forward safely and positioning DXP to win today and tomorrow. I will now turn the call over for questions.
Operator
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound or hash key. Please stand by. We compile the Q&A roster. And there are no questions at this time. I turn the call back over to Kent E. Thank you, Christine.
Kent Knee
To our listeners today, we understood that there could be a possibility of not having equity analysts on the call to ask questions. Recently, one of our equity analysts took another job opportunity, and his firm had to halt coverage in response. Joe, congratulations on your new job, and we wish you the best of luck, and we appreciate all the support over the years. Another firm decided to discontinue coverage on DXP for a variety of reasons, and while we think this is miscalculated, we look forward to telling our evolving story from an end market and growth perspective. We are excited to have Tommy Maul from Stevens pick us up, but unfortunately, he could not be on this call today and notify us in advance of the call. As we reset and move forward from here, we think there's no better opportunity than now to cover DXP as we continue to execute on our organic and acquisition-driven growth that we mentioned during this call. Additionally, to our employees and shareholders, change is never an event, but a process, and we are equally as committed to the process of growing the different end markets we have discussed, both internally and externally, while continuing to serve the oil and gas markets. With that said, I'll turn the call over to David for some concluding thoughts.
Kent Knee Christine
Thanks, Kent. Yeah, my thoughts are just that, you know, I would like to really thank our DX people, you know, it's really a tough environment. Nobody wants to catch the COVID. And so we all need to go to work and try to take care of the customers the best we can. And so I really appreciate everybody and their efforts to do so. You know, I'm traveling a bit. I know salesmen are out doing what they need to be doing, et cetera. And so I think that's great and fantastic. At the same time, I think, You know, we're fortunate to have all the electronic devices and capabilities to work at home for those that can, and we're trying to be safe, which I think is paramount and probably is our number one concern is to keep everybody safe. And so I thank everybody for that. I thank our... show holders for supporting us. And, you know, we're trying to do the best we can here. It's not, you know, we've kind of been fortunate in a lot of ways that we're an essential business and that we're moving forward and doing a lot of really good things and making some pretty neat progress. As everybody knows and can see, the biggest culprit is IPS, and that's strictly the first thing that somebody's going to cut is going to be their capital budget. And so we're having some wins there, and they're just normally not of the same size. They're small wins, and so – and they're still profitable wins, so we're okay there. It's just it is what it is, and we're down in that area pretty significantly. I think with that, again, I'll thank everybody for our call today, and we appreciate everybody's efforts. So have a great day.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
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