Manitowoc Company, Inc. (The)

Hello and welcome to the Manitowoc Company third quarter 2023 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again press star 1. I'll now turn the conference over to Ion Warner. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Manitowoc Conference Call to review the company's third quarter 2023 financial performance and business updates, as outlined in last evening's press release. Today, I'm joined by Aaron Ravenscroft, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Regan, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Our call 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. Let's move to slide two on our safe harbor statement and the material provided for this call. During today's call, forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Security 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 projection due to one or more of the factors among others described in the company's latest SEC file. The Manitowoc company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether the result of new information, future events, or other circumstances. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Eric.

Thank you, Ion, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to slide three. Overall, I was very pleased with our team's execution during the third quarter. It's typically the most challenging period of the year for our operations, and 2023 was no different. Although part shortages and vessel delays continued to plague us, sales for the quarter were $521 million, and our adjusted EBITDA was $33 million, or 6.4% of sales. Non-new machine sales increased 21% year-over-year to $155 million. Please turn to slide four. Manitowoc continues to transition from a product-driven company to a services-oriented business. I'd like to highlight a few wins during the third quarter that demonstrate the changing business model under our Cranes Plus 50 strategy. To start, we recently won an order from Maxim Crane Works, the largest crane rental house in North America, to rebuild 14 Manitowoc 2250 crawler cranes. The first two cranes arrived at our facilities in September. This multi-year project brings real value to this important customer by lengthening the productive life of their assets. The key to winning this work was the close collaboration between our MGX and Manitowoc aftermarket teams to align the cost and pricing of parts and labor for an acceptable end-to-end margin to meet the customer's expectations. This is an excellent example of the synergies we continue to realize from our acquisitions. A big thank you to our teams leading the project and to Maxim for their business. On the back of this win, we recently expanded our MGX footprint with a new branch in South Carolina. In addition to providing more capacity for remanufacturing work, this location will represent our POTON and National Crane boom truck product families. This new facility brings our combined MGX and Aspen footprint to 18 branch locations. Next, in Latin America, we opened a new facility in Lima, Peru. This branch will serve Peru's growing mining industry with local parts warehouse for faster delivery combined with a team of service technicians. Including this new facility, Manitowoc now has five locations throughout Latin America. Moving to the other side of the world, year to date, we've delivered 22 used tower cranes to Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Since the humanitarian crisis unfolded in Turkey after the February earthquake, Karina L. Rockby, Regional Sales Manager, has worked hard to support the expedited reconstruction efforts in the region. Karina has set a great example of cross-regional leadership, locating several used cranes from Asia to help meet the short lead time demands in Turkey. As the saying goes, when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. The crisis in Ukraine forced a complicated exit from our Russian business in 2022. We enjoyed a leading market position there for many years and had some very talented, long-tenured team members. At the time, we took a leap of faith and relocated several of our key team members from Russia to Dubai location. We didn't need the extra staff, but we wanted to retain as many people as possible. Sales Manager Sergei Neznenov was one of those team members. Since his move to Dubai, he has reinvigorated our business activity in several CIS countries in Georgia by executing our Cranes Plus 50 strategy and introducing used tower crane sales. Whether addressing lead time issues or finding the right crane for the project, our team in the Middle East has done a great job of using all of their resources to serve our customers. Well done, Karina and Sergei. Cranes Plus 50 is taking hold in every corner of Manitowoc. After 120 years as a product company, I'm extremely proud of how our team is making the transition to become a services-oriented business. Please turn to slide five. If Cranes for Safety is our engine for growth, the Manitowoc Way is our fuel. As I mentioned in recent quarters, demand for tower cranes is softening in Europe, while overall business in the Middle East is booming. At our Niella Italy factory, we manufacture self-erecting tower cranes and rough-terrain mobile cranes. During the third quarter, we expanded our rough terrain manufacturing footprint in the area to help us serve the growing Middle East market. We used lean techniques throughout this process and redeployed our operations team members to optimize the production of mobile cranes while mitigating the impacts of the tower crane market decline on our local workforce. Led by Diego Maraboto, the transformation was completed in August during the summer shutdown. I'd like to congratulate this group on great teamwork. Last month, during my visit to Willemshaven Germany facility, I had the opportunity to see how the team increased our capacity on the boom paint line by 70%. With a little capital, a little creativity, and some elbow grease, the team separated the return line to make shot blasts and paint two distinct lines. They improved the unloading of parts, renewed the control system, and implemented an ultra-solid paint formula for our gray telesylinders. A year ago, this was our number one bottleneck in the factory. Not anymore. Guten Arbeiten to the Wilhelmshaven team. Please move to slide six. Turning to my market update, the positive trend in the United States continued during the third quarter. A few key dealers placed initial orders for 2024 to guarantee their build slots. Rental rates are holding up and utilization remains high at crane rental houses. Finally, dealer inventories remain at sufficient levels to support the current retail pull through. Similar to last quarter, we remain cautious in the short term about the U.S. market. We still have a lot of cranes delivered to our dealers before year-end, which could lead to excess inventory in the channel if the economy pulls back. Nevertheless, we maintain a positive long-term outlook on the U.S. market. At this point, we're still waiting for the infrastructure and chip spills to come to fruition. Europe, however, remains a different story. As previously discussed, inflation and the subsequent increases in interest rates have significantly curbed activity in the residential construction market, which has negatively impacted tower crane demand. Power crane machine orders for the quarter were down 55% year-over-year. Please move to slide 7. As of August, housing permits were down 37% in France and 34% in Germany year-over-year. I recently visited several French dealers and customers, and their sentiment confirmed the market statistics. Utilization is down, rental rates have dropped, and everyone is waiting for the government to intervene. At the moment, rental math is upside down. It's tough for a rental house to justify growing their rental fleet when rental rates are declining and interest rates and crane prices have risen. The majority of the demand that we see is from customers that are proactively managing their long-term fleet renewal strategy. Many fleets, on average, are over 15 years old, and the owners cannot afford to let the fleets age much longer. I expect this environment to continue into 2024. Please move to slide 8. Fortunately, the European mobile crane business isn't as impacted by the soft residential construction market as tower cranes. Although there are plenty of headwinds in the mobile cranes market, the impact varies throughout Europe. Germany, the single largest all-terrain market in the EU, has slowed, and the Scandinavian countries are being adversely impacted by effects. In addition, France and Menelik showed their first signs of weakness in the quarter. Demand in the UK, Italy, and Iberia continue to hold up. As I stated last quarter, our efforts to improve quality, grow our service, and launch new products have helped grow our business. The upcoming launch of two new 4-axle all-terrain cranes will help us maintain our momentum. In the Middle East, in contrast to Europe, demand continues to grow at a rapid pace. Our orders increased 57% year-over-year during the quarter. Saudi Arabia's sweeping efforts to modernize have lifted the entire region. The Asia Pacific market remained mixed, but slow overall. China remains very soft, and the sentiment is starting to spread outside of the country. Moreover, the purchasing behaviors for cranes in the region are pretty similar to those in Europe. Generally speaking, tower cranes are clearly in a down cycle, while mobile cranes appear to be holding up. On the positive side, the Indian market continues to be strong. In South Korea, there has been some progress, mainly with mobile cranes. And the Samsung's next big project is moving forward, which is good news for the tower crane business. And finally, Australia remains a bright spot. With that, I'll turn the call over to Brian.

Thanks, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. Please move to slide nine. Let's start with orders. During the quarter, we had orders of $531 million, an increase of 13% from a year ago, exceeding our expectations. The year-over-year increase was driven by higher orders in our URF and MEAP segments. In the Americas segment, orders were slightly lower year-over-year. The increase in URAP was primarily driven by mobile crane orders, which more than offset the significant decline in tower orders. In MIAP, as expected, demand in Saudi continued to drive the order increase. Foreign currency favorably impacted orders by $14 million. Our September 30th backlog was flat sequentially at $1.28 billion and increased 9% year-over-year. The makeup of our backlog is consistent with the second quarter. It's predominantly in the Americas. Net sales in the third quarter were $521 million and increased 15% from a year ago. The year-over-year increase was driven by pricing in response to inflationary pressures, higher crane shipments, and higher non-new machine sales as a result of executing on our Cranes Plus 50 strategy. Non-new machine sales increased 21% year-over-year to $155 million. From a trailing 12-month perspective, non-new machine sales exceeded $600 million for the first time, reflecting great progress by the team on Cranes Plus 50. Net sales were favorably impacted by $15 million from changes in foreign currency exchange rates. SG&A expenses were $12 million higher year-over-year at $77 million, primarily due to higher employee-related costs. Foreign currency exchange rates contributed $2 million to the year-over-year increase. As a percentage of sales, SG&A expenses were 15%, relatively flat year-over-year. Our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $33 million, an increase of $9 million, or 39% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 6.4%, an increase of 110 basis points over the prior year. As a reminder, the third quarter is generally our slowest quarter due to the summer shutdowns in Europe. Flow through on the year-over-year incremental sales was 14%. This illustrates the impact of the slower cow crane business. Third quarter depreciation and amortization of $14 million decreased $1 million compared to the prior year. Our provision for income taxes in the quarter after adjusting for the favorable settlement of a tax matter was $3 million, or 29%, over our adjusted pre-tax income. As a reminder, we have tax valuation allowances established for certain countries, and therefore losses in those countries are not available to offset income tax expense in profitable jurisdictions. Our adjusted EPS in the quarter was 22 cents, an increase of 12 cents from the prior year. Please move to slide 10. Our networking capital increased year over year by $57 million or $51 million on a currency neutral basis. This increase is driven by inflation, supply chain and logistics constraints, and higher backlog in the Americas. As a percentage of trailing 12 month sales, networking capital is 22%, slightly favorable year over year. On our last call, we targeted a $75 million reduction to our inventory balance by the end of the year. During the quarter, we made some progress to this goal. We are still committed to achieving an additional $70 million of inventory reduction by the end of the year. Moving to cash flows, we generated $26 million of cash from operating activities in the quarter. Capital expenditures were $23 million, of which $15 million was for the rental fleet. As a result, our free cash flows in the quarter were $3 million. Due to the timing of receivables, we are likely to be at the low end of our free cash flow range, which is $30 to $50 million. We ended the quarter with a cash balance of $40 million, which was an increase of $14 million sequentially. Total outstanding borrowings under our ABL decreased $12 million, resulting in $70 million outstanding at quarter end. Other debt increased $24 million, bringing our total liquidity to $256 million. Due to the continued strong adjusted EBITDA, our net leverage ratio was 1.9 times at the end of the quarter, well under our target of three times. In October, our board of directors approved a $35 million share repurchase program, which will be primarily used to buy back our share creep, replacing the prior authorization. Please turn to slide 11. Given the strong performance in the quarter, we are updating our full year guidance as follows. Net sales $2.175 billion to $2.225 billion and adjusted EBITDA $160 million to $180 million. With that, I will now turn the call back to Aaron.

Thank you, Brian. Please turn to slide 12. Although we continue to manage the economic ripples created by the COVID crisis, Manitowoc has made great strides on its strategy throughout this period. We have a lot of work to do to close out 2023, but we're well positioned to deliver a strong performance for the year. As for 2024, it's still too early to provide any concrete guidance, but as I read the tariff cards today, our business in the U.S. should be supported by our strong backlog and increased aftermarket focus. Europe is going to be tough as we have very difficult comparisons in the first half. The Middle East continues to strengthen, although it's still a smaller part of our business, and Asia Pacific will be flattish at best. Overall, I believe that our 2024 results will be determined by A, the resilience of the U.S. economy in a contentious election year, and B, how quickly the EU governments react to address the escalating housing crisis. Long term, I remain optimistic that the crane renaissance is on the horizon. First and foremost, the majority of large rental fleets around the world are getting long on the tooth. Many of them are 15 years old on average. This simply isn't sustainable. For example, there's no doubt that a crawler crane can work 30 to 40 years, but most of those late years are spent on projects where the hourly demand is quite minimal, like a small bridge project in the middle of Wisconsin. These old cranes are not accepted on new stadium or semiconductor projects. Several drivers will contribute to the much-needed fleet refresh, including Saudi Vision 2030, major programs in Europe that are aimed at overhauling their energy strategy, such as offshore wind farms and nuclear power plants, and the U.S. infrastructure and chips bill. In addition, for electrification in the U.S. to succeed, production of electricity needs to increase by some threefold, with massive investments in distribution. Please move to slide 13. To reflect this view, combined with the learnings that we've taken from our recent acquisitions, we are updating our long-term aspirations. We are increasing our sales target from $2.5 billion to $3 billion. We expect the split between organic growth and acquisitions to be more or less equal. We are also raising our non-new machine sales target from $675 million to $1 billion. Although we cannot time them, we have assumed a few acquisitions. In terms of profitability, we are increasing our adjusted EBITDA margin target from 10% to 12%. If you recall, we weren't far off the 10% mark in 2019. And when we look out over the next five years, we expect to see the benefits of additional volume and improved mix as we grow our non-new machine sales. In closing, to borrow a line from Berkshire Hathaway's 1968 annual shareholders letter, our goal is to obtain a reasonably stable and substantial level of earnings power commensurate with the capital employed in the business. We've come a long way since 2016, and I'm looking forward to seeing what our team can achieve over the next several years. With that, operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you. If you have a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star one again. One moment, please, for your first question. Your first question comes from the line of Stanley Elliott of Stiefel. Your line is open.

Hey, good morning, everybody. Thank you all for the question. I guess for starters, it sounds like the Middle East business It sounded very positive, and I was curious if you're seeing any sort of an impact or any sort of discussion with kind of the war that's going on over there as it relates to your business.

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it, but we haven't seen it impact the business. I mean, Israel is a long way from Saudi, and the Saudis continue to execute their Saudi vision 2030. So from a project standpoint, everything's still very active. So I would say no impact.

And I guess I'll kind of switch to the aspirational target. So raising on the non-machine piece, that's a pretty good-sized jump. I mean, is it that the remanufacturing piece is going better? Is it better parts, better service, just more of an expanded footprint? I'd love to see kind of what some of the drivers are to get you from that $675 to a billion dollars.

Yeah, I mean, the core of it is always around getting more locations and getting more service techs, because that really is what drives the rest of the business. The other component of that is we have to continue to get better at the used business. I think we had a great year in terms of used this year. Given the fact that we've had so much increases in prices, that business has been hot. But there's still a lot more activity for us, like doing more trade-ins, coming out of Europe to move those used machines to the United States. There's a lot more activity like that that we need to need to get better at.

And there's no doubt that we'll need some acquisitions to get to that number as well.

And then lastly, for me, kind of as it relates to the updated guide at the fourth quarter, is there anything that we should be aware of on a year-by-year basis, you know, comp-wise? I mean, it would seem like that the business with the order rate and the non-machine sales would be tracking at least to the high end of the revenue guidance, if not if not better, and then, you know, the EBITDA piece has kind of been tracking quite well, too. So just curious, any color that we should be aware of on that?

Yeah, there's sort of three components when we look at it. First is the tower crane business. If you compare year over year, we're off $15 million from an EBITDA standpoint, the tower business. So that's a first big headwind for us. Of course, then we have mix, and we've been cautious around the vessel issues. A lot of them We've got going on vessels in the North Sea, and it's always hard to predict how late December is going to play out.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Jerry Revick of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Good morning, Jerry. Good morning, Jerry. Hey, this is Clay. I'm for Jerry. Quick question. I said, how have lead times trended for new orders? Has we seen some normalization in the supply chain? Are the lead times there still extended?

It just depends product to product, I would say. I mean, there's areas like the tower crane business where demand has softened up, where lead times are back to normal, but we still have some product lines that the lead times are pretty strong.

Thanks. And as a quick follow-up, can you give some just quick color on what you're seeing in the M&A pipeline? Sounds like that's a bigger portion of things to come in the future.

We're active and we have a full funnel, but you can never predict timing on deals, so I'd say it's no real change for us. We just keep working at it.

Thank you. And again, if you would like to ask a question, press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of MIG Dobry of Baird. Your line is open.

Morning, MIG. Yeah, good morning. Thanks, and congrats on a good quarter here. I want to go to Stanley's question from a moment ago on the guidance. I mean, I appreciate the fact that you have to have a little bit of room to maneuver, but, you know, $20 million range with just the fourth quarter left on EBITDA, I mean, you can drive a truck through that. So can you maybe help us put a finer point on this?

Yeah, I mean, I think, as you know, mix is a huge component for us. So, you know, $20 million, we narrowed it down. 10, you know, we raised the bottom end 10 million this quarter. So, yeah, I think we feel comfortable that that 20 million is a reasonable range on the 50 million of revenue spread based on the mixed changes. And as Aaron pointed out, you know, there's still a lot of uncertainty around vessels going into the fourth quarter. So, you know, that's contributing to some of the concern or guiding to the low end on our free cash flow numbers.

I mean, we essentially have no backlog in the power crane business. We just hand them out.

Yeah, and that contributes.

That's one of our highest margin businesses, especially when you consider the underutilization that's happening currently.

From a price-cost standpoint, or really all the other items that you guys have to manage on the cost side. How are you looking and what's been happening here through the year? Is that positive? Because I'm presuming it's positive. Price-cost gap starting to narrow. Is that a factor into Q4? Or is it just mixed?

Yeah, I would say that has no impact on the fourth quarter. My comment on cost price would be that it's generally normalized. And it's interesting because sort of the conversations have shifted. Now the conversations are more about the fact that this dollar is so strong and we have competitors coming from areas where they have weak currency like the yen. Of course, the tower crane business is still super competitive because demand is low. And aggressive Chinese competition in places like Middle East. So as I say, I think we're past that now for the most part. And we're back to having more normal conversations around how else do we get prices.

Your next question comes from the line of Tammy Zacharia of JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Morning, Tammy. Hi, Tammy.

Hi, good morning. This is Kyle on for Tammy. Thank you for taking our questions. So for our first question, can you provide a little bit more color on your backlog? And maybe if you could talk about how they're trending by region or by product.

Yeah, as we mentioned, the majority of our backlog is in the U.S., So that hasn't changed from last quarter.

And we don't give backlog by product by region.

Okay. Got it. Thank you. And then just a quick follow-up. What are the key areas where you continue to see the most cost inflation?

In terms of most cost inflation, I mean, labor is still a challenge and a concern, especially with some of the news you've seen in the United States.

So we see it through a lot of the fabricated parts where our suppliers are adding value, and labor plays into that.

So that's still probably the biggest piece.

I think the other thing I'd add is that a lot of folks look at the normal steel pricing on Bloomberg and say, hey, it's way down. The biggest challenge that we have is a lot of our steel is really high-end, high-strength steel that comes from a couple specialty suppliers in Europe, and right now they've got a lot of demand because of everyone building military equipment. So we have not seen those prices go down the way you've seen, quote-unquote, flat steel go down.

Thank you. We have a follow-up question from the line of Mick Dobry of Baird. Your line is open.

Well, I got to say, you guys are very tight on enforcing the one question and one follow-up rule. So I got back in the queue because I had a couple more. Thanks for that. So I... Given the way you're talking about the fourth quarter guide and the implied margin, right? And, you know, I appreciate the fact that the tower crane's backlog is extremely low, as you said. What's the implication here for margin in the front half of 24, right? Because the comparisons, it would strike me as being relatively difficult versus 2023.

Yeah, I think that's a very fair comment. I mean, that's our concern about 24 is that the comps in the first half related to towers, and then how does the U.S. hold up? How does it play out? Yeah, how does it play out? Where do we end the year with our deal inventory? And it's in particular on the all-terrain side.

But, yeah, that's exactly our concern here.

Okay, well, I appreciate that, but I mean, is the fourth quarter implied margin sort of indicative of the kind of run rate that we should be thinking for the front half of 24 if mix remains similar?

No, I don't think that's fair. And I'd also add, you know, we're right in the middle of the budget process, so it's not possible for us to really give you a solid answer that you're looking for, I think.

Okay. then i guess my final question um is on you know kind of a general question on pricing um you already touched a little bit on what's happening from an fx standpoint that that's something that we've been wondering about quite a bit given the weakness in the end as you look at model year 2024 cranes is there some sort of color that you can provide as to how you see pricing thank you in every year we're

a normal year we're going after a couple points in pricing and i don't think this should be different i do think though when you look at where the yen is that i don't know if it's 150 or 151 today and that's a major advantage for our competition so you know it's a tough fight and the euro is bounced around as well so you know we do buy from ourselves from from our plants in europe to the us but um we're

So I think we've got competitors, though, that are shipping product that they're building in Europe that we build in the US.

So it's the euro as well as the yen that's playing into that.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now turn the call over to Ian Warner for closing remarks.

Thank you. Before we conclude today's call, please note that a replay of our third quarter 2023 conference call will be available later this morning by accessing the investor relations section of our website at Maniflock.com. Thank you everyone for joining us today and for your continuing interest in the Maniflock company. We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.