The Eastern Company

Good morning. Welcome to the third quarter fiscal year 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode and the floor will be open for your questions and comments following the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Chris Moulton, Head of Corporate Development. Sir, the floor is yours.

Good morning and thank you everyone for joining us. Speaking today will be Eastern's President and CEO, Gus Flack, and our CFO, John Sullivan. After that, we'll open the call for questions. Please note that some of the information we'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements about the company's future financial performance and business prospects, including, without limitation, statements regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, and business outlook. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or trends to differ significantly from those projected in these forward-looking statements. For more information regarding these risks and uncertainties, please refer to risk factors discussed in our Form 10-Q filed yesterday. In addition, during today's call, we'll discuss non-GAAP financial measures that we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Eastern's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. With that, I'll turn the call over to Gus for opening remarks.

Thanks, Chris. And good morning to those of you who have joined us on the phone and also those participating via the web. We released Eastern's third quarter 2021 results on our earnings press release and form 10Q, which we filed yesterday. Our third quarter results reflect strengthening financial performance across each of our three core businesses. We're proud of the tremendous commitment, agility, and creativity from everyone at Eastern, given the extra effort required to achieve these outstanding results while operating in an unusually complex supply chain environment. Eastern is clearly a stronger and more focused company today as a result of the changes that we've made to our portfolio over the last year. Changes that include the consolidation of Everhart and ILC, which materially reduces our fixed costs and provides a sound platform for growth and innovation, as well as the addition of Haylink, a strategic bolt-on business to Big Three Precision that expands our offering to core customers. and, of course, the divestitures of Canadian commercial vehicles, Sesame Mexicana, and most recently, Greenville Industries. In the third quarter, our performance was driven by continued strong sales and clear improvement in gross margins. Sales from continuing operations were up 15% compared to the third quarter of 2020 and 4% over the second quarter of this year. Although demand was strong, our sales weren't impacted by the supply chain issues which dampened some of our customers' production levels. Big three precision, our returnable transfer packaging business, was a significant contributor to sales growth in the third quarter, primarily as a result of the ramp-up of planned new vehicle and truck model launches in 2022 and 2023, including a wide range of electric vehicles. According to IHS Market Research Organization, Automotive OEMs will launch 55 new vehicle models in 2022 and 63 new vehicle models in 2023. That compares to just 42 new vehicle models in 2020 and 34 new vehicle models in 2021, when numerous new product launches were postponed as a result of the COVID pandemic and the subsequent supply chain constraints. In the third quarter, sales at our Eberhardt and Bellvac businesses also continue to strengthen due to robust demand across a broad range of commercial vehicle and industrial markets, as well as our new product launches. In the third quarter, we ramped up our shipments of a new Class 8 mirror program, and we expect demand for this program to remain strong. According to FDR, U.S. Class 8 truck deliveries will reach 274,000 units this year before jumping to 335,000 next year and 360,000 in 2023. There was already tremendous pent-up demand for trucks coming out of the economic restart. But with the current supply chain environment, there's even more pent-up demand. And we believe that this is going to keep OEM build rates elevated into 2023 and maybe into 2024. The industry will clearly be in catch-up mode for a while. which we expect will benefit sales at both Everhard and Velvac. We also expect that new products will benefit Everhard. Last week, Everhard launched several new electromechanical products at the annual SEMA show in Las Vegas, including our new electronic rotary latch that lets customers electrify access security with a power-efficient design using both Bluetooth and wired activation. We now offer a comprehensive portfolio of electromechanical products for a broad range of applications. Our ability to bring more innovative products to market is the direct result of the combination of Everhart and IllinorLock into one industry leader. In the third quarter, our margins improved as a result of many of the actions that we took to mitigate the impact of cost increases, and these actions are starting to take effect. Specifically, third quarter gross margins improved by 100 basis points over the second quarter as we successfully passed on increases in the cost of raw materials and shipping to our customers. Encouragingly, during the quarter, we began to see a slowdown in the rate of price increases of hot-rolled steel and certain resins, and in fact, we've seen some declines. While we believe that these trends bode well for continued margin recovery, some raw material costs and shipping rates remain at historically high levels. We're also pleased with the divestiture of Greenwald, part of our ongoing work to streamline our portfolio businesses. The Greenville team was part of Eastern for over 20 years and we're grateful for their contributions during this time and all the hard work that they put in this year to get this transaction done. We wish the Greenville team much success as they continue to run their business under new ownership. As you might recall, in August this year, we announced our intent to divest our non-core businesses. and we began reporting these businesses as discontinued operations. We are very pleased to complete this transaction within three months of our announcement. And with the sale of Canadian Commercial Vehicles, Sesame Mexicana, which we completed last year, this transaction further strengthens our focus on our three core businesses, helping us to build scale, accelerate growth, and strengthen operating margins. As we mentioned in our press release, we plan to allocate the majority of the proceeds from the sale to debt reduction and share repurchases. We're putting a new 10b-5-2 plan in place under which we'll be able to repurchase shares in accordance with the share repurchase program adopted in 2018. With those comments, I'll turn it over to John to go over the details of our financial results. Thank you, Gus.