Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Hyster Yale 3rd Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference 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. Please be advised that today's content is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Ms. Christina Camacho, Investor Relations. Ma'am, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Welcome to our 2021 third quarter earnings call. I am Christina Kometko, and I am responsible for investor relations at High Street Yale. Joining me on today's call are Al Rankin, chairman and chief executive officer, Rajiv Prasad, president, and Ken Schilling, our senior rights president and chief financial officer. Yesterday evening, we published our third quarter 2021 results and filed our 10-Q, both of which are available on our website. Today's call is being recorded in webcast. The webcast will be on our website later this afternoon and available for approximately 12 months. Our remarks that follow, including answers to your questions, contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements made here today. These risks include, among others, matters that we have described in our earnings release issued last night and in our 10-Q and other filings with the SEC. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which may not be updated until our next quarterly earnings conference call, if at all. In a moment, I'll discuss our current quarter results. But first, let me turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Al Rankin, for some opening remarks. Al.

Thanks, Christine. Good morning, everyone. Results for the 2021 third quarter are, again, very mixed, and most importantly, at a much lower operating profit and net loss level than we had thought we'd be reporting. As suggested last quarter, lift truck market demand during the third quarter continued to grow over 2020 levels. But as expected, it decreased from the second quarter of 2021 as markets moderated. As a result of the year-over-year market growth and share gain, Hyster Yale bookings were strong and at high levels, which contributed to a new record lift truck backlog level, exceeding the historically high level achieved in the second quarter. Given these factors, the lift truck business has robust production plans in place and its plants are fully slotted for the remainder of the year and well into 2022. Last quarter, we indicated we expected significant losses for the third quarter at Hyster Yale Group as a result of anticipated continuing supply chain constraints, significantly rising material and logistics costs leading to margin contraction for trucks in the backlog, as well as our normal planned shutdowns. Further, the global supply chain and logistics constraints we saw in the second quarter indicated accelerated beyond what we were expecting, and their impact on Hyster Yale became significantly worse, similar to the impact on a number of other companies. This exacerbated our component shortage issues and had a severe impact on our ability to ship units. As a result, our third quarter shipments were only modestly higher than the second quarter and substantially lower than we expected, with the largest impact felt In our Americas division, where the ability to receive components needed to build certain trucks on schedule was poor. These factors at Heister Yale Group, coupled with unfavorable inventory and equipment adjustments at Nuvera due to reduced near-term sales prospects, led to substantial operating profit losses and to net losses for the consolidated company for the third quarter. As you would expect, given the impact of these supply chain and logistics problems, an expanded team is working diligently to obtain the components we need for production and to increase margins in our backlog and for new orders. Further, given the very high backlog, the opportunity for increased production and supply chain bottlenecks are resolved as high. After Chrisley reviews the financial results for the quarter, Rajiv will provide more detail on these supply chain challenges, as well as provide an update on our business operations and strategic projects. Ken will then discuss our financial outlook in this very difficult and dynamic environment. Christine?