Eagle Materials Inc

Good day, everyone, and welcome to EGLE Materials' second quarter of fiscal 2022 earnings conference call. This call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to EGLE's president and chief executive officer, Mr. Michael Hack. Mr. Hack, please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to EGLE Materials' conference call for our second quarter for fiscal 2022. This is Michael Hack. Joining me today are Craig Kessler, our Chief Financial Officer, and Bob Stewart, Executive Vice President of Strategy, Corporate Development, and Communications. We are glad you could be with us today. There will be a slide presentation made in connection with this call. To access it, please go to eaglematerials.com and click on the link to the webcast. While you're accessing the slides, please note that the first slide covers our cautionary disclosure regarding forward-looking statements made during this call. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to differ from those discussed during the call. For further information, please refer to this disclosure, which is also included at the end of our press release. Let me start my comments today by stating that this was another very good quarter for EGLE materials. From a market perspective, we are a well-positioned U.S. Heartland cementitious materials producer, and we are a national scale U.S. Gypsum wallboard producer. From the people perspective, we have a talented team that understands their markets and makes great decisions. Simply put, this is a very good time to be in each of our businesses. This is not just due to current conditions, but because the outlook for both businesses looks favorable. I'll spend some time today on the macro backdrop as it provides some context to our favorable outlook. COVID vaccination hesitancy, lingering supply chain issues, and federal budget uncertainties have weighed on economic momentum. Offsetting these issues are job growth and consumer spending. In 2021, we're seeing some of the strongest job creation in U.S. history, and strong consumer spending growth. Supply side headwinds are likely to pose less of a challenge in 2022, allowing for healthy industrial production growth as a monumental backlog of orders are gradually cleared. Housing construction, which is an important driver for both of our businesses, and especially for Wallboard, continues to enjoy strong demand. With healthy household balance sheets, low interest rates, and relative affordability by historical standards, we see good headroom for continued trend growth. In this regard, it should be noted that housing activity is especially strong in the southern U.S. This is important for EGLE, as this is where most of our plants reside, and this region represents more housing starts than all other regions in the U.S. combined over this past year. There is a positive knock-on effect from robust housing demand for repair and remodeling, which we expect will continue to grow at a mid to high single-digit pace through 2022. In cement, the key wildcard remains infrastructure spend. Most of the funding today comes from the states. The states in our footprint generally have healthy balance sheets driven by increased receipts from property and sales taxes. The national discussion has focused on federal infrastructure spend. Federal infrastructure funding will happen someday and is certainly necessary. When it does happen, it will intensify the supply dynamics of cement. Commercial construction activity looks promising for pickup, and again, regional strength and leading indicators favor the Midwest and the South, aligned with our U.S. heartland footprint. It is also worth noting that the U.S. shift towards renewables is very constructive for EGLE. Wind farm construction is concrete intensive. If you look at the map of planned wind projects in advanced development or projects under construction, it aligns well with our cement plants. Cement imports will be increasingly required this cycle to meet demand as strong market conditions are leading to very high effective rates of capacity utilization in domestic plants. These imports will come at a cost in both their higher intensity carbon footprint and in price, as the Baltic Dry Index is up 135% from a year ago and is at a 10-year high. Now let me speak to volume, pricing, and cost trends for each of our two businesses. First, let's discuss volume. Fortunately, we still have some capacity headroom and wallboard. However, the recent supply chain disruptions experienced by home builders is no doubt delaying the construction of some homes and pushing the demand out to the right. Once these log jams clear, we expect to be even busier. Our high cement utilization has been well chronicled. We are virtually sold out and operating full tilt. We are working closely with customers to meet their needs. As demand increases, there are limits to how much more volume growth we can squeeze out of our cement system, unless, of course, we could expand our system through acquisitions. Quality U.S. cement plants that meet our strategic criteria are admittedly hard to come by, and we are patient investors, which is why a balanced approach to share repurchases when quality assets are not available makes so much sense for a company like Eagle. You can see in this quarter, we purchased approximately $185 million of Eagle stock. We know our assets and know their value. To reduce our carbon intensity at the cementitious product level and to service our customers with additional volume, it is our ambition to ramp up our limestone cement product offerings. Over time, this has the potential of literally creating another cement plant worth of product for sale for us. fully implemented across our system. Some aspects in realizing this ambition are not within our control, such as DOT approvals, but we are seeing good progress here and are encouraged. Over the next three years we expect to move the needle meaningfully on this initiative. Moving on to pricing, cement prices have not yet recovered as much as most of other building materials in this cycle. we have announced double-digit cement price increases effective January 1 across the majority of our network. As for wallboard, pricing is most strongly driven by demand and demand has been strong as evidenced by our 33% year-on-year increase in wallboard prices. I suspect it may raise the question in some people's minds as to whether we are nearing the peak for this cycle. If our demand outlook is correct, I think we are not. Now to costs. There has been a lot of discussion about cost headwinds, in many cases exaggerated by supply chain disruption. Let me put this in perspective for EGLE. We own and control virtually all of our raw material. In some sense, one might say we already purchased the raw material with our investments and reserves decades ago, and by doing so have mitigated a supply chain issue concerning raw material. Energy inputs are important. We often get asked about hedging. We are currently hedged for approximately 50% of our natural gas needs through the remainder of our fiscal year at slightly under $4 per million, which should help us manage our cost swings. Natural gas is the primary fuel used in our wallboard business. The spike in OCC costs this summer were material this last quarter, but as we've said many times, pricing mechanisms and our sales contracts allow us to pass on higher OCC prices, albeit on a lag of one to two quarters. Outbound freight and wallboard is also important, and we saw a 14% increase in freight costs this quarter. However, the good news is that freight costs seem to have plateaued during the summer. Let me close my remarks with an update we are proud to share as it aligns with our environmental and social disclosure report we published on our website. It is a recent, noteworthy development on one of our long-term initiatives that has to do with carbon capture. We were notified on October 7th that Chart Industries, a technology development leader in this area, has received a significant funding award from the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct an engineering scale test to advance point source carbon capture with the specific mandate to conduct this research at our Sugar Creek cement plant. Chart Industries' chirogenic carbon capture technology was recognized by researchers at MIT and Exxon as the most cost-competitive among highly effective carbon capture systems. Our role in this endeavor is to provide technical support and operational data during the development and execution of the project. I want to emphasize that even with successful outcome, there are many other gates and hurdles to ultimate adoption, including transport and storage. But this is an important and significant step on the path to net carbon zero future. And with that, let me now turn it over to Craig for the financial results.

Thank you, Michael. Second quarter revenue was a record $510 million, an increase of 14% from the prior year. The increase reflects higher sales prices and sales volume across each business unit. Second quarter diluted earnings per share from continuum operations was $2.46, a 14% increase from the prior year. And adjusting for our refinancing actions during the quarter, adjusted EPS was $2.73, a 26% improvement. Turning now to our segment performance. This next slide shows the results in our heavy materials sector, which includes our cement and concrete and aggregate segments. Revenue in the sector increased 5%, driven by the increase in cement sales prices and sales volume. The price increases ranged from $6 to $8 per ton and were effective in most markets in early April. Operating earnings increased 13%, reflecting higher cement prices and sales volume, as well as reduced maintenance costs. Consistent with the comments we made in the first quarter, and because we shifted all of our planned cement maintenance outages to the first quarter, our second quarter maintenance costs were about $4 million less than what they were in the prior year. Moving to the light materials sector on the next slide, revenue in our light materials sector increased 28%, reflecting higher wallboard sales volume and prices. Operating earnings in the sector increased 39% to $67 million, reflecting higher net sales prices, which helped offset higher input costs, namely recycled fiber costs and energy. Looking now at our cash flow, which remains strong, During the first six months of the year, operating cash flow was $262 million. The 27% year-on-year decrease reflects the receipt of our IRS refund and other tax benefits in the prior year. Capital spending declined to $27 million. And as Michael mentioned, we restarted our share repurchase program and our quarterly cash dividend this year and returned $259 million to shareholders during the first half of the year. We repurchased approximately 1.7 million shares, or 4% of our outstanding. At the end of the quarter, 5.6 million shares were available for repurchase under the current authorization. Finally, a look at our capital structure. Eagle maintains a strong balance sheet, access to liquidity, and a well-structured debt maturity profile. During this quarter, we completed the refinancing of our capital structure which included issuing $750 million of 10-year senior notes with an interest rate of 2.5%. We extended our bank credit facility five years, paid off our bank term loan, and retired our 2,026 senior notes. Thank you for attending today's call. We'll now move to the question and answer session. Josh?