Miller Industries, Inc.

Good day ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Miller Industries second quarter 2021 results conference call. Please note this event is being recorded and now at this time I would like to turn the call over to Brendan Dunlap at FTI Consulting. Please go ahead sir.

Thank you and good morning everyone. I would like to welcome you to the Miller Industries conference call. We are here to discuss the company's 2021 second quarter results which were released after the close of market yesterday. With us from the management team today are Bill Miller, Chairman of the Board, Will Miller, President and Co-CEO, Jeff Badgley, Co-CEO, Debbie Whitmire, Executive Vice President and CFO, and Frank Madonia, Executive Vice President, Secretary, and General Counsel. Today's call will begin with formal remarks from management, followed by a question and answer period. Please note in this morning's conference call, management may make forward-looking statements in accordance with the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. I'd like to call your attention to the risks related to these statements, which are more fully described in the company's annual report filed on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Jeff. Please go ahead, Jeff.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Our second quarter results are a testament to the underlying strength of our business, healthy industry demand, and our steadfast commitment to operational excellence. We are pleased to report that our business continues to trend towards pre-pandemic levels and overall industry dynamics continue to improve. More specifically, our second quarter sales increased 40.9% year over year, to $181.2 million, driven by strong customer demand. Gross profit for the second quarter increased 16.2% from the prior year period to $20.6 million, largely due to the rebound in top-line sales growth. Gross margin in the second quarter decreased approximately 240%. basis points largely due to increased raw material prices caused by escalating inflation and a shift in product mix. Of note, we recently announced another price increase to offset some of these inflationary pressures. However, we honor pricing on existing orders in our backlog, which results in some margin pressure in the near term. We have also experienced substantial increases in employee turnover and difficulties in hiring new workers for our skilled workforce, which has caused increased recruiting, training, and retention costs. Supply chain disruptions have also impacted the timing of arrival of certain raw materials and purchase component parts, including chassis, which negatively impacts our ability to complete the production of finished goods and timely ship our product at a pace necessary to match current demand levels. Such supply chain challenges and other inflationary pressures continue to influence our domestic markets, but we are leveraging all available resources to actively mitigate them. In our international business, demand trends continue to improve and our order rates and backlog remain healthy. However, constraints on global shipping routes are negatively impacting the timing of our export shipments. Our operations are beginning to see the benefits of our enterprise software upgrades completed in the first quarter, and we do not anticipate any significant disruptions to our business operations as we work to implement further system improvements across our network. Now I'll turn the call over to Debbie, who will review the second quarter financial results. Then I will provide some commentary about the current market environment and some closing remarks. Debbie?