Ampco-Pittsburgh Corporation

Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen. This is the conference operator. The Amco Pittsburgh Corporation call will begin momentarily, and we ask that you please continue to hold. Again, today's conference will begin momentarily. Please continue to hold. Thank you. Good day and welcome to the AmpCo Pittsburgh Corporation third quarter 2020 earnings results conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star within two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would like now to turn the conference over to Melanie Sprousen, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Matt, and good morning to everyone joining us on today's third quarter 2020 conference call. I'm joined by Brett McBrayer, our Chief Executive Officer, and Mike McCauley, Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer. Also joining us on the call today are Sam Lyons, President of Union Electric Steel Corporation, and Terry Kenney, President of Aaron Liquid Systems Corporation. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that participants on this call may make statements or comments that are forward-looking and may include financial projections or other statements of the corporation's plans, objectives, expectations, or intentions. These matters involve certain risks and uncertainties, many of which are outside of the corporation's control. Corporation's actual results may differ significantly from those projected or suggested in any forward-looking statement due to a variety of factors, including those discussed in the corporation's most recently filed 10-K and subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any obligation to update or otherwise release publicly any revision to our forward-looking statement. A replay of this call will be posted on our website later today. To access the earnings release or the webcast replay, please consult the investors section of our website at amcopgh.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Brett McBrayer, AMCO Pittsburgh CEO. Brett?

Thank you, Melanie. Good morning and welcome to our call. I'm proud of our team and the work they've accomplished over the past quarter as each of our businesses continue to execute on our strategic initiatives. Their work is even more impressive when you take into account the challenging obstacles each of our businesses have faced with the global pandemic. As I've stated previously, the health and safety of our employees are at the forefront of everything we're doing. The onset of COVID-19 has introduced a new risk into our businesses, and we're taking extraordinary steps to safeguard the wellbeing of our employees and their families, our customers and suppliers, and those in the communities where we operate. We continue to make positive improvements toward our goal of an injury-free workplace as we achieved our lowest lost workday rate for the year in the third quarter. As we did in the second quarter this year, we initiated plant shutdowns and furloughs to meet the reduced customer demand experienced in the forged and cast engineered product segments. Our air and liquid processing segment also completed outages during the quarter to perform proactive maintenance. We remain relentless in our efforts to improve our efficiency and cost structure to further grow our business. Our team members continue to identify and attack new opportunities to accelerate our progress. I want to thank all of our employees for their outstanding work during this challenging period. We report a positive earnings per share of $0.07 per diluted share for the third quarter, despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on in-market demand. As a result of our equity offering completed during the third quarter, we raised $19.3 million in gross proceeds, allowing us to improve our balance sheet and begin our capital improvements to further consolidate our manufacturing footprint. I want to again thank our shareholders for your support. Our debt to capital ratio halved from December 31, 2019, and our total debt was reduced by 54%, or $38.3 million. Our strengthened balance sheet and significant liquidity and operating leverage has Amco Pittsburgh well positioned to respond to a recovery in our end markets. I'd now like Terry Kinney, President of Air and Liquid Systems, and Sam Lyon, President of Union Electric Steel, to share the improvements in their segment's performance.

Terry. Thank you, Brett. As we have mentioned before, the health and safety of our employees remains a major focus. I would like to recognize the employees at the Erofin Division and at Buffalo Pumps Division for having zero OSHA recordable injuries during the third quarter. Thank you for your efforts. Unfortunately, we had four OSHA recordable injuries at our Buffalo Air Handling Division in the third quarter. I am pleased that all four employees returned to work immediately after receiving minor medical treatment. As always, we conducted detailed investigations of these accidents and have put in place procedures and process changes to reduce the possibility of these injuries occurring in the future. The air and liquid processing segment's third quarter sales were below the prior year. However, operating income approximated that of the prior year as a result of a favorable product mix and successful process improvement efforts at all three divisions. On a year-to-date basis, sales for this segment are 2.6% below prior year, while income from operations are 4.3% ahead of 2019. Orders received for the third quarter were strong for custom air handling equipment and specialty centrifugal pumps, while orders for custom heat exchangers were negatively impacted by the effect of COVID-19 on commercial and industrial building utilization. The backlog is good for Buffalo air handling and Buffalo pumps, with some softness experienced in the Arofin division. We continue to concentrate our efforts on improving our efficiency in all aspects of our businesses while providing quality products to our customers. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our dedicated employees for their hard work during these trying times.

Thank you, Terry. I will now turn the call over to Sam Lyon. Sam? Good morning.

Our focus has remained consistent for the last two quarters. First, I would like to recognize our Slovenia, our Valparaiso, Indiana operations for achieving zero lost time accidents year to date. Our overall recordable rate ticked up in the third quarter, but remains lower than 2019. Our number one focus will always be the wellbeing of our team members. We continue to be highly focused on our liquidity and have had great success here, which Mike McCauley will cover in more detail shortly. We have challenged our teams and reduced our inventory to levels not seen in many years. Our weekly team meetings review our inventory positions, receivables, and payables. They personally sit on biweekly calls with each sales associate to review past due receivables and drive actions for collection. We've improved in this area year to date by over $12 million. We also deferred capital spending by over $7 million without jeopardizing performance through improved proactive maintenance and by shifting production to our most efficient and reliable equipment. These actions have resulted in strong cash flow for the business. Our operations continue to run on a reduced schedule with the ability to be flexible when demand increases. Government programs in the UK and Sweden have been aimed at keeping people employed so that when demand returns, production can be ramped up easily with little training. In the US, we adjust our work schedule to align with demand by taking out whole weeks of production rather than reducing staff and operating a lower daily output. Our Slovenian plant is currently running on a four-day schedule. This operating philosophy allows us to rapidly flex our production and costs with demand. Looking ahead, we anticipate an additional two weeks of shutdown in our U.S. plants in Q4 when compared to the prior quarter. Our 2020 cost reduction plans for Sweden are complete, and we are tackling our plans for 2021. Our number one focus in the U.S. plants continues to be on equipment reliability. The team has delivered over $2 million in savings and reduced maintenance spend when compared to the prior year. We have improved our proactive maintenance from about 50% in 2019 to over 75% in Q3 of 2020. This improvement is also apparent in our reduced operating costs as the outages are planned and manpower can be scheduled accordingly. Switching to sales, I would like to highlight a few key successes. We won and will be shipping the initial provisioning for the new steel dynamics sent in Texas cold mill in Q4. We're proud to be a part of this state of the art complex. We've secured orders for the first time with Big River Steel. We've also just received multiple orders into the oil and gas market, which will ship in Q1. The first orders we have seen in several quarters. Even though we are seeing signs of recovery from our customers, Due to the lead time of our products, these improvements will not be realized in our volume until the second half of 2021. I'd like to close by thanking the entire Union Electric global team for their hard work and dedication through these difficult and uncertain times.

Thank you, Sam. At this time, Mike McCauley, our Chief Financial Officer, will share more detail regarding our financial performance for the quarter. Mike.

Thank you, Brad, and good morning to everyone on the call today. I'd like to focus my comments on the current quarter's results today. Commentary on near-to-date results is available in our earnings press release issued yesterday, as well as in our Form 10-Q just filed. As Brett indicated, the two main themes this quarter are sustained positive net income, despite the magnitude of the sales contraction we experienced related to the pandemic. and the completion of our successful equity offering, which significantly improved our balance sheet and enhanced our overall liquidity position. We thank our shareholders for their participation. With EPS of 7 cents per share for the third quarter of 2020, AMCO Pittsburgh continued to remain profitable on a net basis for the fourth consecutive quarter and sequentially higher than Q2 2020 EPS, despite the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our end markets. AMCO's net sales from continuing operations for the third quarter of 2020 were $75.7 million. This compares the net sales from continuing operations for the third quarter of 2019 of $90.9 million. Net sales in the forged and cast engineered product segment of $54.5 million for the third quarter of 2020 declined approximately 19% compared to prior year, principally attributable to a lower volume of shipments due to customer deferral of deliveries in the flat-rolled steel and aluminum markets, primarily in response to the global pandemic, along with reduced demand for other forged engineered products due principally to depressed conditions in the oil and gas industry. Net sales for the air and liquid processing segment for the third quarter of 2020 of $21.2 million decreased marginally compared to the prior year. Gross profit as a percentage of net sales was 21.4% for the third quarter of 2020 versus 16.9% for the third quarter of 2019. The improvement is primarily attributable to the forged and cast engineered product segment which is benefiting principally from a lower cost structure due to the restructuring initiatives which have been completed and implemented, and lower raw material costs. This improvement was partly offset by the impacts of lower shipment volumes and net unabsorbed costs from the temporary idling of capacity caused by the pandemic. For the air and liquid processing segment, gross profit was comparable between the periods. Selling and administrative expenses of $11.4 million for the third quarter of 2020 declined $0.9 million compared to prior year. The decline was primarily driven by lower sales commission's expense and the benefits from restructuring initiatives implemented. Appreciation and amortization expense of $4.5 million for the third quarter of 2020 was flat compared with the third quarter of 2019. The corporation recorded income from continuing operations for the quarter of $0.2 million, which compared favorably to the $1.3 million loss from continuing operations in the prior year quarter. Prior year quarter included approximately $0.7 million in excess carrying costs of the Evan Moore Pennsylvania Castrol facility divested in 2019 and restructuring related costs of approximately $0.6 million. Additionally, although the current year quarter benefited from lower raw material costs and reduced SG&A expense, these impacts were approximately offset by the pandemic-driven effects of the lower shipment volumes and net unfavorable absorption due to plant downtime in the forest and cast engineered product segment. Other income expense net improved for the third quarter of 2020 compared to prior year. primarily due to the timing of dividend income in the current year quarter from one of the corporation's Chinese joint ventures. At the bottom line, the corporation reported net income attributable to Amco Pittsburgh of $1 million, or 7 cents per diluted share, for the third quarter of 2020, compared to a net loss of $5.1 million, or 40 cents per diluted share, for the third quarter of 2019, which included a net loss from discontinued operations, of 27 cents per diluted share. Here are some highlights regarding business segment results. In the forged and cast engineered product segment, Q3 2020 net sales of $54.5 million declined approximately 19% versus prior year due to lower volume of shipments of mill rolls, both forged and cast, as a result of customer deferral of orders in response to the pandemic. and as I indicated, reduced demand for other forged engineered products. Pricing and product mix were relatively comparable quarter to quarter. Operating results for the forged and cast engineered product segment improved significantly for the third quarter of 2020 when compared to prior year. While the segment was adversely impacted by the lower volume of shipments during the quarter, the current year quarter benefited from a lower cost structure attributable to restructuring efforts lower raw material costs, and some lower commissions expense associated with the reduced volume of forged engineered product sales. In the air and liquid processing segment, net sales of $21.2 million in the third quarter of 2020 were marginally below the comparable prior year period, with slightly lower sales in each of the three businesses. The air and liquid processing segment's operating income for the third quarter of 2020 was comparable to prior year. Next, here are a few balance sheet and cash-related items. Accounts receivable of $56.1 million at September 30, 2020 decreased by $25.7 million compared to December 31, 2019, primarily attributable to lower sales from the market contraction we have experienced and improved collections. Receivables decreased $6.8 million compared to June 30, 2020, due to lower sales in the current quarter. Inventories of $78.4 million at September 30, 2020, decreased by $3.9 million compared to December 31, 2019, but increased slightly compared to June 30, 2020. Accounts payable of $28.8 million at September 30, 2020, decreased by $4.4 million compared to December 31, 2019, but increased slightly compared to June 30, 2020, consistent with a modest inventory growth. Capital expenditures for the third quarter of 2020 were $2.7 million and are $6 million year-to-date, primarily for the FortuneCast engineered product segment. Cash and cash equivalents for continuing operations of $18.3 million at September 30, 2020 increased $11.3 million compared to the December 31, 2019 balance and increased $2.4 million compared to the June 30, 2020 balance. Drawings on the AMCO revolving credit facility were zero at September 30, 2020. which is down by $34.3 million compared to the balance at December 31, 2019. The elimination of revolver borrowings reflects improved operating results and lower investment in trade working capital through the year, as well as the initial usage of the net proceeds from the equity offering. Total debt at September 30, 2020 of $32.6 million decreased $38.3 million, or 54%, from December 31, 2019, and decreased $19.7 million, or approximately 38%, from June 30, 2020. During Q3, we retired a $4.1 million industrial revenue bond and paid off the remaining borrowings on the credit facility. At September 30th, 2020, in addition to the cash balance, the corporation also has remaining availability on the revolver of approximately $56 million, which is an improvement of approximately $29 million compared to availability at December 31st, 2019. I will now turn the call back over to Brett for some closing remarks. Brett.

Thank you, Mike. I am extremely proud of our employees and how they in the face of very difficult obstacles, delivered positive results for the third quarter. We will continue to take aggressive steps to further improve our profitability. I'm excited about AMCO Pittsburgh's future. Thank you. We'll now take your questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please limit your inquiries to one question and one follow-up to ensure everyone may have an opportunity to ask a question. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Justin Bergner with G Research. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Brad. Good morning, Mike.

Good morning, Justin.

Two questions. What are your expectations for CapEx in 2020 on a more normalized basis?

Hi, Justin. It's Mike. We are running a bit lower than usual. We would normally spend in a typical year or if we look back to our business plan for 2020, something in the range of $12 million, most of which would be sustaining CapEx. But as Sam indicated, and maybe he's got some thoughts, but as Sam indicated, we've been really focused on cash flow and we've been finding ways to operate equipment and kind of channel production to the most efficient equipment and thereby kind of reducing our needs. So we've been very creative, you know, up through now, especially through the period in which prior to the conclusion of the equity offering. But, you know, as we move forward, we have more flexibility now.

Great. That's helpful. And I'm sorry, I don't know if

I was going to add, Justin, that obviously, you know, we talked about this in our equity raise. You know, a very key step for us that we're focused on and in the process of is the continued consolidation of our manufacturing footprint here in the U.S. And with that, you know, we've initiated some activities to move us further down the path. We're looking at exactly how that spin will play out right now. But that's something we are keenly focused on and excited about.

Okay, great. That actually answered my second question, your additional comment there. So thanks for taking my question.

Our next question comes from David Wright with Henry Investment Trust. Please go ahead.

Yeah, sorry. Good morning. I have to commend the corporation, the way you've turned the balance sheet around and the debt-to-equity ratio improvement and the increase in availability, it really helps the foundation for the next steps, so good job there. Thank you. Do you have any comments on how the proposed combination of Cleveland Cliffs and ArcelorMittal's North American Steel operations, what impact, if any, that has on your role business?

Yeah, David, this is Sam. We don't think it will have any impact. I mean, we have very good relationships with the purchasing group at ArcelorMittal as well as AK Steel, which, as you know, Cleveland Clips bought AK Steel prior. So we don't really see – we haven't seen anything, nor do we really expect to see any impact, positive or negative.

Okay. And staying on that vein, the backlog's down on order deferrals and – lack of booking of new orders because of the pandemic. Some steel lines have been shut down, some new capacities being built. Is it possible for you to characterize how much of the backlog shortfall is from sort of, you know, just COVID timing things versus, you know, potentially, you know, permanently lost business?

It's a majority of its timing, and I hate to use the word uncertainty, but uncertainty. As a matter of fact, we're going to get the orders from two of our largest, well, our two largest customers in the United States for Q2 and Q3 of next year this week, which normally we would have had the entire next year understood. But they're holding orders until the very last minute. What is happening, though, is that – The automotive businesses in the US are running at over 90% of pre-COVID. In Europe, they're running at that same or higher, so there's been extremely strong rebound. And barring a second total shutdown in Europe or the US, we're hearing favorable things to the order book versus what we have in our plan for next year. We're seeing more upside than downside, depending on what happens with the virus.

Okay, and that kind of rolls into my next question, which is, obviously, the roll business is long lead time. We've had quite an increase in HRC prices since the beginning of the quarter. Weekly capacity utilization for steel production goes up a little bit each week. Is there any correlation? You mentioned you've got next year's orders coming in next week. Is there any correlation between kind of short-term what's happening in this market, you know, coming back from where it was, and its impact on you getting more orders in? Have you seen more business this quarter as a result of that, more bookings?

Not more bookings, but more favorable comments from the purchasing community that, you know, they will need. We're seeing some short-term, fast-order items that we would not normally have seen. And I'd say the biggest difference when you look at the beginning of next year, the larger roles, the backup roles, the more capital intensive roles, those orders are down while the work roles are up. So that can only go on for so long, though, because you have to have a backup role to actually run the mill. There's been a deferral or a push out of the higher capital intensive items, but we're seeing a rebound in the actual working role items.

Let me squeeze one more in here. One of the objectives of the capital raise was to try to get one or two new pieces of equipment, and some of those, I guess, have long lead times, but is there any update on what you might be doing with that, having completed the capital raise?

We're doing a kind of a capital study looking at what we would buy and where we would actually place it. But, you know, we're working with machine builders and looking at lead times. And so we haven't placed an order yet, but we're going down that path.

Okay. Thanks very much. Thanks, David.

Our next question comes from Brian Powers with Crawford United. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Hi, Brad. Hi, Mike. back to capital expenditures the current research on the company indicates that capex spending will run at about 15 million dollars per year over the next five years I just wanted to get some color on whether that whether that is is correct and how that money will be spent if it's in your current businesses and I've got a quick follow-up yeah Brian yeah thank you

I think, yeah, you're looking back at historical CapEx, and I think part of that is we strip off the focus that we have on some use of the equity-raised proceeds to make some very specific machine tool acquisitions and just look at kind of a sustaining level of CapEx. Yeah, you're right. 12, 15, it bounced around, but maybe average 15. We did kind of have in our business plan something like 12 for this year before we knew about COVID. So we're in that ballpark. So, yeah, you're right about that. But as Brett indicated, we did have an ambition to not only handle our sustaining CapEx needs, but also to focus on additional investments to kind of modernize and and add new multi-purpose machine tools, which would be an extra layer going forward looking on top of that. And then, depending on the course of that, that would then alleviate some of the sustaining CapEx requirements beneath it.

Okay, that's helpful, because I was looking at the equity research that looks like going up to $15 million going forward as opposed to looking backwards. So if that's somewhere between, say, $60 million to $75 million over the next five years, any color on where that will be spent and whether it will limit the company's ability to make acquisitions?

This is Brett. The majority of the capital is going to be focused towards the Forge and Cassinger Products Group, although we have some clearly defined opportunities in the air and liquid systems group that we're going to go after. So, you know, again, the majority will be in the forge and cast engineer products. You know, just back to the sustained capital piece and just something I wanted to reiterate that really kind of changes the – creates a new normal for Amco Pittsburgh is that through the work the team has done on significant improvements from an efficiency and productivity standpoint, We have now parked machines that we heavily relied on in the past to manufacture our goods and products. And so we were able to focus on the higher efficiency machines and running those better than we have before in the past. And that's really changed our needs from a capital perspective. And so we're reinventing what baseline looks like as we speak. And the team continues to push and make positive progress on continuing to change that equation for us. So the goal is to run only what you need to run to be successful. And then we have the opportunity for backup machines now that are sitting idle that we can pull back into service as necessary. But a tremendous amount of focus is on the modernization, the consolidation, take that next big leap from a cost structure perspective to allow us to grow at a much more rapid pace.

That's helpful. I guess then the last piece of it is with that level of cash going to ongoing capital expenditures, if there's room in the plans for any future acquisitions.

The opportunities right now we see within our current asset base are so great that we're heavily focused on pursuing those at this point in time. In the future, potentially, we will look at opportunities, but there is so much opportunity that still exists in this business, and we believe we've not even come close to maximizing what we can do with our current asset base.

Thank you very much for taking my questions.

As a reminder, if you have a question, please press star then one to be joined into the queue. Our next question comes from Marco Rodriguez with StoneGate Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. Brett, I was wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit more with what you can on the plans for, again, certainly back around the capital raise and the expectations of the manufacturing footprint, making it a little bit more effective, and then equipment purchases. Can you perhaps just put down a finer tooth on when some of these timing issues will come to fruition or where you're expecting these things to kind of come through? And were there any other, if you could refresh our memories, any other specific projects or initiatives that you expect to kind of accelerate from the restructuring aspects from the capital raise itself.

Can you repeat the last part of that question again?

Yeah, other initiatives, if you can remind us from the capital raise, aside from obviously the new equipment and the shrinking of the manufacturing footprint, what are those sort of initiatives are you expecting to kind of implement here in the next 12 months or 18 months to try to accelerate that? your restructuring efforts and improve profitability.

Sure. So the question and part of the reason why we've not pulled the trigger on the final orders for multi-purpose machines to facilitate the consolidation is the lead times are not acceptable right now. And so, as Sam talked about, we're looking at some different iterations of capital investment to allow us to accelerate faster. So these negotiations with the machine manufacturers are a critical part of determining the timing. We've targeted a three-year time period to achieve the consolidation, but again, it's going to be dependent on what these machine builders are going to be able to do to support that timeline. In terms of other initiatives, obviously beyond the continuous work we're doing, Marco, on improving the current assets we have in place, figuring out different and new ways to run the business. One of the examples Sam talked about is our inventory levels shrinking to a level we've not had before in the past. We're able to now accelerate flow time through our businesses, able to capture shorter sales that we wouldn't be able to capture before just because of the time it takes for our products to move through our process. Taking out equipment and steps in the operations has allowed us to develop a product that's just as good, if not better, but actually goes through the plant much quicker. The other piece of that is is around the FEP side of the business. We mentioned before that we want to grow that side, the open die forging opportunities. We've engaged with some new customers and are excited about orders that are coming in now. And we have some more opportunities in that open die forging segment that are going to be important for us moving forward. And then in the air and liquid systems business, we continue to see some opportunities in that market to, you know, as we are restructuring our costs in that segment to be able to grow and be able to win projects that otherwise we might not have been able to win just because of our current, our past cost position. So those are some of the, I guess, ones that are up front right now.

Understood. And can you help us understand the lead time issues right now, just in terms of what is normal? And then you mentioned that they are pretty extended right now. Can you kind of give us an idea as far as what those look like?

Yeah, this is Sam. I mean, these custom machines, there's a lot of engineering up front, and that's really the actual constraint, and then the machine building on top of that. So, I mean, they're out two, two and a half years for delivery of a custom machine.

And that's the extended lead time, or that's the normal lead time?

That's the extended lead time. And when we were initially looking at this, we were thinking more 18 to 24 months, so probably almost a year longer than what we had originally looked at.

Got it. And then in terms of your Forge backlog, obviously understand the headwinds of COVID and its impact on your particular customers and their inventory levels. But I was wondering if you could perhaps give us a sense here again what the inventory of roles might look like at your customers. And I understand there's some timing issues you mentioned on the call that you're expecting some orders coming here from the two largest customers. But if you could also give us a sense what your expectation of backlog might look like at the end of this fiscal if you think that you see growth versus at least Q3 and then maybe Q1 of this fiscal year. Any sort of color on that would be helpful.

Well, these obviously are forward-looking comments because I don't know, but I would expect it to be higher. They don't like to buy rules if they're trying to conserve money because it's an expensive item. So while they were shut down for two months, the automotive kind of people, while they were shut down, They're not consuming any rules and then they come back at a lower utilization rate. But if you've listened to steel dynamics or new core, they're running in excess of 85%. So even though the U S is down in the seventies percent, uh, any male guys are running at a much higher utilization and, uh, they're seeing higher demand than what they expected. And that's true of, uh, the European, um, our larger European customers as well. is that they're saying, you know, if things continue, then we should be ready for more as opposed to less orders.

Thanks, Mark. I just appreciate your time.

Thanks, Mark. This concludes our question and answer session, which will also conclude today's conference call. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may disconnect.