Hillenbrand Inc

Greetings. Welcome to Hill and Brand's second quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings call. This time all participants are in listen only mode. The question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time I'll turn the conference over to Sam Minesburg, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Minesburg, you may now begin your presentation.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Helen Brand's earnings call for our second quarter of fiscal year 2024. I'm joined by our President and CEO, Kim Ryan, and our Senior Vice President and CFO, Bob Van Hembergen. I'd like to direct your attention to the supplemental slides posted on our IR website that will be referenced on today's call. Turning to slide three, a reminder that our comments may contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the security laws. These statements are not guaranteed with beach performance, and our actual results could differ materially. Also, during the course of this call, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP operating performance measures, including organic comparisons for our segments to exclude the impacts from acquisitions, divestitures, and foreign currency exchange rates. Also, we will be discussing our results on a continuing operations basis, which excludes the discontinued operations of Batesville, which we divested in February of last year. I encourage you to review the appendix and slide three of the presentation, as well as our 10Q, which can be found on our website, for a deeper discussion of non-GAAP information, forward-looking statements, and the risk factors that could impact our actual results. With that, I'm going to turn the call over to Kim.

Thank you, Sam, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us on today's call. We continue to operate in a challenging demand environment as global macroeconomic uncertainty continues to impact customer order decisions across many parts of our business. We'll discuss this further in our updated outlook for the remainder of 2024, but first I'll give a little more color on the dynamics we're seeing in our segments and the actions we're taking in response to the volume headwinds we're facing. Starting with the quarter, we had total revenue growth of 14%, driven by the acquisition of Schenck Processed Food and Performance Materials business, or FPM, and we delivered adjusted earnings per share of 76 cents, which was in line with our expectations. However, while order rates improved sequentially in both segments, they did not rebound to the levels we expected coming into the year. In our advanced process solutions segment, we continue to see strong aftermarket performance and solid demand from our Pauli Oleson customers, where the investment cycle has remained resilient and our technological capabilities, allowing for the highest output and quality, gives us a strong competitive advantage. However, this was offset by lower-than-expected orders for mid-sized capital projects in other end markets. Order pipelines remain robust, and utilization at our test facilities remains high. However, final customer decisions continue to be slower than expected, which is negatively impacting the segment's top line for the year. In response, we began implementing cost actions during the quarter, including targeted restructuring and strict limitations on hiring, travel, and other discretionary costs. I'm pleased with the urgency in which the teams have been implementing these actions, which continue to contribute to the 100 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin expansion that we saw in the quarter. While we anticipate some of these costs will come back, we'll be disciplined until we see orders returning to expected levels. Additionally, we continue to make good progress leveraging the Hillenbrand operating model to integrate FPM and Linksys. And we're pleased with the traction that we're getting on margin expansion in these businesses, which is tracking ahead of schedule. We have seen a few larger projects get delayed to later in the fiscal year or early fiscal 2025, which puts some pressure on near-term volumes. Nevertheless, we remain highly confident in the opportunities we see for these businesses to drive long-term growth and value for Hillenbrands. Turning to our molding technology segment, we're pleased to see orders improve over 10% sequentially, but we've yet to see a clear inflection point in the demand environment, as orders in the quarter were relatively consistent with what we experienced throughout last year. We remain cautiously optimistic that we've hit the trough, but do not expect a material recovery in fiscal 2024, which is reflected in our updated guidance that Bob will cover in more detail later in the call. Additionally, we continue to see pressure in our short cycle high margin hot runner products, causing MIX to be a headwind to our previously expected margin profile. As we announced last quarter, we've launched a restructuring program for the MTS segment. We've been working diligently on the execution of this program and increased its scope to include an additional facility consolidation, which we executed in March. This is reflected in the $25 million charge we took this quarter, which was higher than the $20 million charge we had previously announced. We also expect an increase in the annual run rate savings associated with the program to be approximately $20 million, up from our previous estimate of $15 million. We believe these actions are appropriate and necessary given the prolonged demand softness, and we're confident that we'll be well-positioned to return to higher levels of growth and profitability once demand recovers. Since completing the strategic acquisitions that enabled our transformation, debt reduction has been our number one priority in terms of capital allocation. Sustained order delays have continued to negatively impact our cash flow and put pressure on our fee leveraging timeline in the near term, but our priorities have not changed. We're confident that ongoing working capital optimization initiatives, together with the implemented cost controls, will drive stronger back half performance as we move forward. Across the enterprise, we've charged ourselves and our global teams to take the necessary actions to position the business for success. We remain energized by our portfolio transformation and believe the secular trends that underpin our key end markets will perform as anticipated over the long term, and that our enhanced technological capabilities, engineering expertise, and global reach will allow us to drive differentiated performance in these markets. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Bob to provide more detail on our financial performance and outlook.

Thanks, Kim, and good morning, everyone. Turning to our consolidated performance on slide five, we delivered revenue of $785 million, an increase of 14% compared to the prior year due to the acquisition of FPM. On an organic basis, revenues decreased 5% year-over-year as higher aftermarket revenue and pricing were more than offset by lower capital equipment volume, led by a decrease in MTS. Adjusted EBITDA of $123 million increased 13%, but decreased 7% organically, as pricing, cost containment actions, and product mix were more than offset by cost inflation and lower MTS volume. We delivered consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin of 15.6%, which was essentially flat to the prior year. We reported gap net income of $6 million, or 9 cents per share, down 24 cents from the prior year, as the impact of the FPM acquisition, lower tax expense, pricing, and cost containment were more than offset by an increase in restructuring costs, cost inflation, lower organic volume, and higher interest expense. Adjusted earnings per share of 76 cents increased 2 cents, or 3%. Our adjusted effective tax rate in the quarter was 28.1%, which is in line with our expectations. Our cash flow from operations was $3 million in the quarter, down approximately $47 million from the prior year, and below our expectations, primarily due to the timing of working capital requirements on large projects and lower customer advances. We continue to deploy the Hillenbrand operating model to drive working capital efficiency around trade receivables, payables, and inventory. where we saw an improvement as percentage of sales of over 350 basis points year-over-year, as well as sequential improvement. However, as a result of lower volumes and lower customer advances, we now expect our free cash flow for the full year to be in the range of $130 million to $150 million, versus our previous expectation of roughly $230 million. Now moving to segment performance, starting on APS on slide six, Revenue of $559 million increased 30% compared to the prior year, driven by FBM. Organic revenue was flat year-over-year, as higher aftermarket volume and pricing were offset by lower capital equipment volume, particularly in mid-sized systems. Adjusted EBITDA of $101 million increased 38% year-over-year and was up 7% organically, primarily driven by favorable price cost and cost containment. partially offset by lower capital equipment volume. We delivered adjusted EBITDA margin in the quarter of 18%, which was up 100 basis points over the prior year, primarily due to cost containment, favorable product mix, and progress on integration initiatives. Backlog of $1.9 billion increased 12% compared to the prior year, driven by FPM. On an organic basis, backlog decreased 5%. Sequentially, backlog was down 2%, as flat excluding foreign exchange. Now turning to MTF on slide seven, revenue of $226 million decreased 13% year over year, primarily driven by lower volume for injection molding equipment. While injection molding faced a tough comparable against the prior year, the revenue performance exceeded our expectations for the quarter, as the teams did a good job accelerating project execution from backlog. but this was largely offset by softer than expected performance in our hot runner product line, largely due to softer demand in North America. Adjusted EBITDA of $34 million decreased 29% due to lower volume and cost inflation, partially offset by cost containment. Adjusted EBITDA margin of 14.9% decreased 330 basis points compared to the prior year, largely driven by the impact of lower volumes on operating leverage and price cost pressure. In addition, we've identified isolated operating efficiencies in one of our hot runner facilities in North America. We've aggressively pursued cost actions during the quarter to help support back half profitability given these challenges. Backlog of $230 million decreased 23% compared to the prior year, but was essentially flat on a sequential basis. As Kim mentioned, orders improved sequentially, but did not fully recover the shortfall we experienced in Q1. We saw bright spots of demand for injection building equipment, particularly for automotive and packaging applications, but weakness in consumer goods and electronics weighed on our higher margin hot runner product line, particularly in North America, as I mentioned. Turning to slide eight, net debt at the end of the second quarter was $1.88 billion, and net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio was 3.5 times. As net debt reduction remains our number one priority, we're disappointed with the modest increase in our leverage, which was slightly above our expectations due to the weaker cash flow and orders. Given these conditions, it will be a challenge to achieve our deleveraged target of returning to within our net leverage guardrails of 1.7 to 2.7 times by a previously stated goal of second quarter fiscal 2025. We'll continue to aggressively pursue cost actions and working capital efficiencies to further reduce leverage, but we'll have to revisit the timeline for turning to our guardrails once we have more visibility into order patterns normalizing. We'll now wrap up with our advised outlook for the remainder of 2024. As mentioned, order patterns in the quarter remain below our original expectations. We've yet to see materials shift in underlying market conditions, And consequently, we are updating our outlook to reflect current demand trends. For full year 2024, we now expect total revenue for Hill & Brand of $3.2 billion to $3.3 billion, previously $3.3 to $3.4 billion. Adjusted EBITDA is now expected to be in the range of $512 to $536 million, previously $530 to $588 million. Adjusted EPS is now expected to be $3.30 to $3.50, previously $3.60 to $3.95. For EPS, the changes reflect lower volumes due to order timing and the impact of fixed cost leverage, partially offset by cost actions and accelerated margin performance within the recent acquisitions. In MPS, we're seeing unfavorable product mix, pricing pressure, and isolated operating inefficiencies within our hot runner product line, partially offset by roughly $8 million of in-year MTS restructuring benefits. We're seeing better performance in our injection molding product line compared to our original expectations, given some larger orders that came through in Q2. But as a reminder, this comes in at a lower relative margin. Our higher margin hot runner product line remains softer than expected, particularly in North America. And as I mentioned, we're experiencing operating inefficiencies in one of our hot learning facilities, which is putting additional pressure on margins. Through our restructuring and capacity optimization efforts, we're actively working to return to expected levels of efficiency, which we expect to start seeing in the fourth quarter. For Q3, we are targeting adjusted earnings per share in the range of 80 cents to 85 cents. reflecting moderately improved performance in both segments on a sequential basis. Please review slide 9 for additional guidance assumptions. In summary, we recognize the headwinds we're facing and we're taking actions to enable the business to navigate this challenging environment. We will remain vigilant and pursue additional actions as necessary. At the same time, remain excited about the opportunities for growth and margin expansion we see for the businesses over the long term. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Kevin.

Thanks, Bob. Before taking questions, I'll end our presentation this morning with a few final remarks. We acknowledge that orders continue to be softer and more cyclical throughout various parts of our business as headwinds have persisted beyond our initial expectations. As Bob discussed, our revised guidance range reflects the current market conditions and the expected trajectory of the businesses throughout the rest of the year. I have strong conviction that our internal initiatives and diligent execution will navigate us through the near term. and that our strong brands and process technologies remain best in class in their ability to solve our customers' most complex processing needs anywhere in the world. Finally, as we announced a few weeks ago, we'll be featuring a number of our brands at next week's Plastics Trade Show, NPE, in Orlando, Florida. As one of the largest plastics trade shows in the world, this is a great opportunity for us to engage with customers, and highlight the breadth of our capabilities and key innovations in supporting the critical elements of the plastics value chain, from pellet production to manufacturing products to recycling. We'll be a leading member of the education sessions featuring industry experts within our business, as well as hosting the annual Circular Plastics Challenge again this year in partnership with Net Impact and Coca-Cola, where teams from all around the world come together to promote innovation within the plastics industry focused on sustainability and the circular economy. With that, we'll now open the line for your questions.

Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press star 1 from your telephone keypad and a confirmation tone to indicate your line is at the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to withdraw your question from the queue. For participants that are using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, where we poll for questions. Once again, that is star one. Thank you. Thank you. And our first question today is from the line of Matt Somerville with DA Davidson. Please proceed with your questions.

Thanks. Just maybe you mentioned, can you talk a little bit about the quarter-on-quarter sequential order improvement you've seen across both segments? What markets and geographies are driving that? And what you've seen thus far in April, does that indicate at least some level of sustainability?

So the orders, well, first of all, good morning, Matt. Bob and I will both kind of ham and egg this question a bit. On the APS side, we saw orders in those larger projects. While those were some of the things we were waiting on, we did start seeing some of those break in the last quarter. What I would say to that is that we were pleased with obtaining more than what I would say is our fair share of those order decisions as they came to pass. So we were pleased with that. There are still, as you know, there is still a robust order pipeline on those large projects that is anticipated to come over the next several quarters. The place where we have continued to see some of the delays in decision-making is kind of those mid-size projects, whether that's compounding lines or whether that is some of the larger food lines that we've been bidding on. Some of those are even some of the ones that we are going to market with as a For instance, it's a consolidated portfolio in our systems offering for the first time as we're building our pipeline for that. Those are some of the places where we've seen a little bit of slowness. The quick cycle business, like the service business, has continued to see great performance, good strength on a global basis across all of the brands. recently announced that the service organization for the new food acquisition is also going to become a part of the service organization of APS, and so we're really looking forward to the traction that we'll gain there, having them be a part of the entire service structure of the business so that we can begin to focus our efforts there on the expansion that we've talked about from a synergy standpoint. On the MTS side, What we saw was a bit of recovery specifically in North America, in the automotive area, in the injection molding. And so we were pleased to see that. You know, that has been – they have been in a period over the last six or so quarters where they've been at this low. This is their highest order intake on the injection molding side of the business in seven quarters. So we were pleased with that. and hopefully we've seen the trough and are starting to come out of that a bit. On the hot runner side, we continue to see some softness, and that is primarily, you know, that is a China and North America market for us primarily. We have footprint in India. We have, you know, we service the European geographies. Those aren't the largest part of the market, though, so our market is kind of dictated by the, in the hot runner space is dictated by, primarily the China market and the U.S. market. We have a decently sized footprint in consumer goods, which is not an area that has recovered yet on the hot runner side. So we continue to monitor that on the hot runner side. But again, on the injection molding side, we've seen some nice pickups in some of the markets that are relevant for us and anticipate, at least as we talk to our businesses, the outlook continues to be I would say optimistic in those areas as they begin to see some uptick. Bob, anything else that I did not have? No, I think you covered everything.

So, as a follow-up, you mentioned... Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you, Kim. With respect to the commentary regarding the incremental price pressure you've seen in I'm curious, as you've gone back and realizing you acquired this in the late calendar 19, so I understand that, but as you've gone back and I'm sure studied past cycles, is that typical customer behavior in the latter stages of a downturn in that business? And then if you could also maybe delineate a little bit the takedown you had in the MTS EBITDA margin guide, can you maybe parse that out a little bit between how much of that is adverse moves in price-cost versus the inefficiency issues that I believe Bob touched on? Thank you.

Sure, yeah. So, you know, Matt, on your first question, you know, it is typical, you know, when there is a downturn that there's this pricing pressure. You know, it's a little bit different now versus the last cycle just because China, you know, isn't growing at the levels it was, you know, call it six or seven years ago. But it is typical to, you know, have pricing pressure. you know, during these cycles. You know, and as far as the margins, you know, really the pricing pressure is probably, we call it pricing is probably a third of the margin decline. Unfavorable mix from what we thought is probably a third as well. And then the manufacturing inefficiencies, probably a third. And again, you know, the restructuring we expect to, you know, clean that up. And so we'll get out of that in, you know, Q4, as I mentioned.

Got it.

Thank you, guys.

Great. Thanks, Matt.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question today, you may press star 1 from your telephone keypad. Our next questions are from the line of Daniel Moore with CJS Securities. Please proceed with your questions.

Thank you. Kim and Bob, appreciate the call and taking questions. Forgive me if this is a rehash of Matt's first question to some extent, but Just looking at the mid-size equipment projects in APS, it sounds like you're seeing delays. Are you seeing any order cancellations at this stage? And what are you hearing from your customers in terms of what they need to turn the investments to get back on? Is it lower interest rates? Is it geopolitical stability? What is it that's the key holdup?

Thanks. So what we're hearing on those mid-size projects One of the things that I think is going to be exciting around this is that we, you know, those midsize projects typically follow where we've had large pellet projects. So as capacity is coming online, then that capacity has to go somewhere. And typically these midsize projects are compounding lines and things like that. Now, in certain geographies there are, you know, China is an example, which has been a large investment area for us. That wasn't a big compounding footprint for us historically. However, what we are seeing that is encouraging from our point of view is that as these formulations and the requirements for these products, the output requirements are increasing, the quality requirements are increasing, and that moves towards what we do. There are some opportunities that we see in these markets where we've been putting a lot of capital investments in on the large projects, where we think a lot of these relationships will continue to foster themselves into new opportunities for us to get into that midsize project space because of the increasing complexity of demand. That's an exciting opportunity for us. From that point of view, I would say that we feel pretty bullish about some of the opportunities that will be coming down the road. What expectations are there? I think we have to continue to see a leveling out in consumer demand. I think we have to continue to make sure that these plants are coming online, the plants we've been working on for a number of years now in certain geographies as those come online. The investments for the next step of the process will break free and come online. Remember, the cycle times for those jobs are significantly shorter than the, call it, four years that you might see for one of those really large project investments between the time that the project is conceived and the time that the plant is commissioned. That's what we're looking at. In the meantime, we're continuing to build our service business with our large implementations and continue to focus on that on a global basis.

Dan, just to be specific to your question, we've had no cancellations on orders and no cancellations in our pipelines. Our pipelines are built on active discussions and those continue to grow. I think interest rates certainly is a factor and as those start to maybe decline, I think we'll get some of these unlocked.

That's helpful. Appreciate it. You know, just more color on the incremental restructuring efforts, where specifically the cost saves are coming from, and how do we think about kind of incremental margins when volume eventually starts to recover? Is there, you know, kind of a shorter or medium-term benefit in terms of the incrementals following the, you know, not just the incremental $5 million, but the overall restructuring program?

Yeah, so we did announce, obviously, in our last quarter call, we expected to take a charge of about $20 million in Q2. We did bring that up a bit to about $25 million, and then we then, therefore, increased our savings expectations from $15 million to now 20. Now, that's going to be about $8 million of benefit coming in 2024, with the full expected run rate to come in 2025. As far as APFs, you did see in our prepared remarks, we are taking some smaller targeted charges, particularly in North America, and that's really just to adjust for some of the near-term order pressure in some of those product lines that we highlighted, so the small and mid-term projects.

One thing, Dan, I know we've talked about this before, but I'll just kind of embrace this again. Remember when we started expanding significantly the order levels in APS, we began to develop partners. So we have a certain amount of that capacity that we execute inside and a certain amount of that capacity that we have developed partners outside the business. So if you look at the nearly doubling of that business over the last five or six years, the footprint of employees have not doubled in response to that. And what that does is it gives us a certain ability to flex when demand goes up or down. And what you've seen over the last quarter, the last couple of quarters we were flexing down and we were able to do that without a lot of incremental cost. Then, we will be able to flex back up as orders come in. For instance, we saw a number of orders come in in those large projects. Now, we're back at a point where we need that flex capacity that, for instance, we had taken offline over the couple of quarters before that. That took us a number of years to develop. I'll give a lot of credit to Orifardo and his team on the Comparian side. at anticipating this and developing those partners over a number of years. It's a muscle that we're working to build all over the company, but it's been a great tool for us now. We're using that right now as we're trying to get these new projects that have been signed in the last quarter up and running again while we've still got pieces of business that are waiting on a bit of the order pipeline flow through.

Yeah, and because of that flexibility, Dan, you know, if you're requesting incrementals and APS, you know, that's generally in that 35% to 40% range. And because of that flex, that's how we're able to maintain that flow through.

Got it. Last one for me. I'll jump back in queue. Obviously, as you called out, you know, free cash flow is softer than, you know, the revision in free cash flow, you know, certainly higher than the change in the EBITDA guide. Just kind of walk us through the biggest buckets impacting free cash this year, and how long would you anticipate it likely to take to get back to the more typical 90% to 100% conversion rate that you target? Thank you.

Yeah, so the reduction is probably half earnings and half advances related to timing of orders, Dan. Now, I'd say that's partially offset by the trade working capital improvement actions that we've been focused on. And so we continue to focus on the fundamentals around improving our trade AR, trade AP, and inventory. And so, as I mentioned, we did see some good improvement in those areas over the last year. And I'd expect to see continued trade working capital improvements as percent of sales here moving forward. And that's both on the acquisitions, but also even on the legacy businesses. And so as those orders, You know, as those orders, you know, finally get released, again, you know, we saw some of that, the large orders get released in Q2. And, you know, I think as we get into 25, I think we'll be back to that 90% to 100% range, you know, pending that order timeframe. But in the meantime, we're going to be focused on the fundamentals that we can control.

Thanks. I'll circle back when we follow up.

Great. Thanks, Dan.

Thank you. At this time, we've reached the end of the question and answer session, and I'll turn the call over to Kim Ryan for closing remarks.

Thanks again for joining us on the call today. We appreciate your ownership and your interest in Hill & Brand. We look forward to talking to you again in August when we will report our fiscal third quarter results and wish you all a great week and a great day.

Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day.