Manitowoc Company, Inc. (The)

Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Manitowoc Company fourth quarter 2020 earnings call. Today's call is being recorded, and at this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Ian Warner, Vice President, Marketing and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Manitowoc conference call to review the company's fourth quarter 2020 financial performance and business update as outlined in last evening's press release. Participating on the call are and Dave Antonek, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Today's webcast includes a slide presentation, which can be found in the investor relations section of our website under events and presentations. We will reserve time for questions and answers after our prepared remarks. I would like to ask that you limit your questions to one and a follow-up and return to the queue to ensure everyone has an opportunity to ask their questions. Please turn to slide two. Please note our safe harbor statement in the material provided for this call. During today's call, forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 are made based on the company's current assessment of its markets and other factors that affect its business. However, actual results could differ materially from any implied or actual projections due to one or more of the factors among others described in the company's latest SEC filings. The Manitowoc company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether the result of new information, future events, or other circumstances. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Aaron.

Thank you, Ion. Good morning, everyone. Please turn to slide three. To start, I would like to thank the Manitowoc team for a job well done. 2020 was an extremely challenging year. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we identified three key priorities. One, ensure the health and safety of our team. Two, maintain the strength of our balance sheets. And three, position the company for long-term growth. I'm very proud of how the team managed through these unprecedented times and how well we executed on these three priorities. First, with regards to safety, we continue to see low incidence of COVID cases throughout our operations. In addition, we achieved the lowest recordable injury rate in the history of the company. The recordable rate was 1.34. Secondly, We ended the year with a strong balance sheet. We have $120 million of cash and over $400 million of liquidity. And thirdly, we strengthened our foundation for future growth. In the face of the pandemic, we continued to develop the future leaders of our organization. During the year, approximately 200 frontline supervisors completed a 12-month leadership program that covered safety, leadership skills, and lean. We also kicked off a mentoring program for our key female leaders, which has already resulted in a few promotions. Our lean journey continued in 2020, with almost 900 entries in our global Manitowoc Way Lessons Learned competition. There were many deserving submissions, but our Wilhelmshaven, Germany facility took home the prize. The team is in the middle of a multi-year initiative to improve production flow on the campus. During 2020, the team developed a robotic measuring device that proved to be a major breakthrough in our boom assembly process and cleared the path for us to make further progress on several other elements of this initiative. In addition, this year we rolled out the Manitowoc Way CEO Award to recognize a team member who exemplified not just lean thinking, but lean action. I would like to recognize Saleem Ahmad, test field supervisor in Willemshaven, Celine self-engineered a system to convert manual boom cable drum alignment on the test field to an electronic process during assembly. Thank you and congratulations, Celine. This type of behavior embodies our values and culture within the Manitowoc Way business system. Turning to the financials, our performance during the fourth quarter exceeded our expectations. Taking a closer look, it's really a tale of two stories. Our profitability for the fourth quarter was significantly better than our forecast, primarily due to a favorable product mix. We had higher than anticipated book and ship demand for our tower cranes in Europe. This also had the added benefit of higher factory absorption in those related sites. However, while our orders and backlog exceeded our forecast, they were heavily influenced by a couple sizable crawler orders and favorable exchange rates. In terms of our balance sheet, we reached our second half target to reduce inventory by $80 million on a currency neutral basis. With that, I'll pass it to Dave to provide more color on the financial results, and after which time I'll conclude with some comments on our outlook. Thanks, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. Let's move to slide four. Our fourth quarter orders totaled $509 million, an increase of 8% compared to $472 million of orders last year. On a currency neutral basis, Q4 orders were up $22 million, or 5%. As Aaron previously mentioned, the increase in orders was primarily driven by a couple of large crawler orders in the U.S. Our 2020 ending backlog of $543 million was up 14% over the prior year and up 10% on a currency neutral basis. The increase in backlog was mainly due to the increased crawler crane orders and the timing of shipments in Q4. Net sales in the fourth quarter of $430 million were in line with our expectations and decreased $33 million or 7% from a year ago. A decline in the America segment was partly offset by stronger results in the URAF and MEAP segments. Net sales were favorably impacted by approximately 4% from changes in foreign currency exchange rates. Our adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $34 million, an increase of approximately 11% year over year. A favorable product mix, along with reduced discretionary spending, allowed us to exceed the prior year and our expectations for the quarter. As a percentage of sales, adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 7.9%, an improvement of 120 basis points over the prior year. During the fourth quarter, we incurred approximately $1 million of restructuring expenses, predominantly related to severance costs in India and Europe. Our gap diluted earnings per share in the quarter was $0.05. On an adjusted basis, diluted earnings per share declined 16 cents from the prior year to 19 cents per diluted share. Higher income tax expense due to our jurisdictional mix and the impact from net foreign currency losses were the main contributors to the year-over-year decrease in adjusted diluted earnings per share, partly offset by improved operating income. Moving to liquidity, we generated $36 million of cash from operating activities in the quarter. On a currency-neutral basis, we achieved our inventory reduction target of $80 million in the second half of the year. Most of this improvement occurred in Q4, which was the main source of our cash flow generation in the quarter. Year over year, our cash flow from operating activities declined due to the timing of collections on accounts receivable. We ended the year with a cash balance of $129 million, a decline of approximately $70 million year over year. However, our total liquidity remained strong at $412 million, with no barrings outstanding on our ADL. Now we'll recap the financial results for the full year. Orders totaled roughly $1.5 billion, down $127 million, or 8% from the prior year. Foreign currency exchange rates benefited 2020 orders by approximately 1%. Lower orders in the Americas and Europe segments were partly offset by gains in the VF segment. Our net sales for the year totaled approximately $1.4 billion, a 21% decrease from 2019, and were positively impacted by $12 million, or 1%, due to favorable changes in foreign currency exchange rates. The year-over-year decrease was primarily attributable to entering the year with a lower shippable backlog, coupled with a reduction in demand related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our adjusted EBITDA declined $74 million, or 47% from the prior year, resulting in a 19% incremental margin on nearly $400 million of less revenue. This better-than-expected flow-through result is a testament to the efforts of our team members throughout the world during these unprecedented times. We were able to limit our discretionary spending while continuing to invest in our new product development and growth strategies. Congratulations to the team for a job well done. Our full year 2020 adjusted net loss was $12 million compared to net income of $67 million in 2019. Adjusted diluted net loss per share of 35 cents was impacted by approximately one cent from our first quarter share repurchases. As mentioned previously, we suspended our share repurchase program during Q1, and we do not anticipate repurchasing additional shares in 2021. Full-year cash flows from operating activities were a use of $35 million, primarily driven by the timing of accounts receivable collections and the net loss recorded in the year. As I previously mentioned, we ended the year with ample liquidity and a strong balance sheet. With that, I will now turn the call back to Aaron. Thank you, Dave. Let's please move to slide five. Turning our focus to 2021, I see this as a year of transition, one step forward, one step back. Overall, while we believe that we are beyond the economic trough brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, we expect the recovery to be choppy. The recently enacted stimulus packages by many countries and the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines are all favorable developments. However, there is still a long way to go to get back to normal, and unfortunately, some of these actions will have unintended consequences. First and foremost, while economic stimulus packages are essential to the recovery, fiscal spending has a tendency to create inflation, and we are already seeing this in steel pricing. Moreover, the heavy debt burden that this has created in the United States has resulted in a weaker dollar. Given the speed at which both these variables are changing, I am concerned that we will see a dislocation in the market, which will create a short-term cost challenge for us. Secondly, Manitowoc benefit from substantial cost containment actions during 2020 that will not repeat in 2021. Between our discretionary spending restrictions, bonus program costs, social plan benefits, and increases in insurance costs, we will easily see more than a $15 million cost headwind. Thirdly, with the increase in crawlers, our mix is shifting towards lower margin products, and we continue to suffer from low production levels at our German factories where we manufacture all-terrain cranes. Please move to slide six. We continue to invest in our future. We have earmarked $15 million of CapEx to further expand our European tower crane rental fleet in 2021. We continue to scale up our Chinese tower crane business that serves the Belgian road regions. We are accelerating our product development programs and our all-terrain product line, which we will showcase at BALMA in 2022. And we continue to pursue acquisitions. These growth initiatives require more investment than we've made over the last couple of years, but we are confident that these strategic initiatives will fuel our future growth as the crane industry rebounds. In closing, the current economic environment is extremely dynamic in terms of demand and costs, and therefore, we will not provide specific financial guidance for 2021. Directionally, we believe that our revenue will be up modestly, but there are some clear indicators that we will see margin pressure from cost headwinds and product mix while we are investing in future. 2021 will be a year of transition. With that, operator, please open the line for questions.