ABC Technologies Holdings Inc.

Greetings and welcome to ABC Technologies Q3 Fiscal 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance during today's conference, please press star and zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Drukha Sivanantajara, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. With me on the call are ABC's President and Chief Executive Officer, Terry Campbell, and Scott Roggenbauer, Chief Financial Officer of ABC Technologies. This call is being webcast live on ABC Technologies' Investor Relations websites. The webcast will be available for replay for 12 months following this call. The content of today's call is the property of ABC Technologies. It cannot be reproduced or transcribed without prior written consent from the company. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today's call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties, that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. Any such statements should be considered in conjunction with and subject to cautionary statements in our earnings release for the last completed fiscal quarter and risk factors discussion in our filings with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities that can be accessed on the company's profile on CDAR. I would also invite everyone to review the non-IFRS measures and key indicators as well as the forward-looking statements of the company's filings for the last completed fiscal quarter and the risk factor section in the company's annual information form for the fiscal year of the company ended June 30, 2022. We assume no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements or information unless required by law. I also want to note that any third-party data concerning the market and economic data referenced In today's call is the intellectual property of such third parties and that the company makes no representation as to the accuracy and completeness of such market and economic data. I want to remind our investors that we are on a fiscal year that began July 1st, 2022. All references to Q3 fiscal 2023 are to the three months ended March 31st, 2023 and Q3 fiscal 22 are to our fiscal quarter ended March 31st, 2022. I also want to note that while ABC shares trade in Canadian dollars, the company reports its financials in U.S. dollars. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Terry Campbell.

Thank you, Taruka. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today for our third quarter earnings call. This quarter marks two very eventful years since our first earnings report as a public company after our initial public offering in February 2021. As an industry, we cycled through some incredible headwinds, including the worst of the global pandemic, followed by a semiconductor chip crisis and ongoing geopolitical issues affecting the global auto market. As a company, though, we've seen pivotal progress in our ownership and leadership structure, rolled out a global operating model, closed on three acquisitions, and completed two real estate sale and leaseback transactions. In fact, exactly a year after the closing of our DLH Bulls acquisition, and almost a year after our acquisition of Carl Edsel on March 1st of this year, ABC completed our previously announced acquisition of Windsor Mold Group Technologies for an upfront consideration of $165 million with additional potential earnouts related to profitability targets. The Windsor Mold Group Technologies team brings a wealth of experience, expertise, and valuable relationships to our business. We're excited to continue working through the integration with our new teammates to leverage the strengths of both organizations in order to drive new business opportunities and create value for our employees, customers, and investors as one ABC. Since closing, our team has been focused on integrating the respective Windsor Mold Group functional groups into ABC's global operating model focused on commercial, engineering, operations, and G&A functions. We have aligned the top-level Windsor Mold Group reporting structures to this model and defined the integrated organizations at an individual headcount level. As part of this integration, we're executing several IT projects in the areas of cybersecurity, network interconnections, and enterprise-wide HR tracking. Speaking more broadly to the collection of acquisitions I've just mentioned, including DLH Bulls and Carl Etzel, we continue to be pleased with how these assets complement our product offering, expand our technical expertise, and diversify our customer base. Our transformation team remains focused on driving value by curating and refining a portfolio of assets, products, and processes that will enable growth, bolster competitive advantage, and enhance financial performance. We also continue to rationalize our portfolio of assets with the exit of one of our North American JVs at the beginning of the quarter. We've also signed a definitive agreement to exit our China JV by selling our 50% stake to our JV partners. We also signed a definitive agreement to sell a large parcel of empty land in Mexico that was no longer strategically important, and we have more to come in the future. Next to our financial results for the quarter, which are beginning to show that our operational improvement initiatives and reorganization are beginning to bear fruit. Our revenue and adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter landed at $373 million and $44 million respectively, an 11.4% margin. This marks two quarters in a row registering double digit adjusted EBITDA margins, which has not occurred since Q4 fiscal 2021. Revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and margin were up significantly year-over-year, while revenue and EBITDA were up quarter-over-quarter as well, benefiting from a normalizing production environment and contributions from recent acquisitions, offset slightly by material cost increases and foreign currency impact of a strong peso. Supporting this quarter of stronger financial performance was the cause of improvement in our operations at the plant level. Volumes continue to remain strong in Canada, and our team here has done a fantastic job of converting sales to the bottom line, with their efforts augmented by some successful restructuring actions in the region. Moving on to the U.S., where we arrived at an inflection point under the guidance of our new plant management teams focusing on reduced labor, overhead, and premium freight costs. We are comforted not only by the quarter-over-quarter improvements from fiscal Q2 to fiscal Q3, but also the progressive month-over-month improvements intra-quarter that have continued into fiscal Q4. Speaking specifically to operational issues and labor cost reductions, as recently as October 2022, all of our American plants were running seven-day shifts. Fast forward to today, and you'll find both our Kentucky and Michigan plants running a normal five-day week and only running weekends when required by the customer. And in our Tennessee campus, we are similarly running five days at all but one plant, the last of which we expect to be operating at this level very soon. This will be the first time in several years that all of our U.S. plants will not be running overtime on a regular basis. These improvements not only allow us to eliminate elevated costs, which obviously benefits our business, but also indicates that we are better serving our customers while addressing crucial employee issues related to operator fatigue and turnover. And finally to Mexico, where the volume and conversion story remains compelling with meaningful sales pull through. With the acquisition of the Windsor Mold Group this quarter, we've inherited one well-run plant that's already a full production and another that's completing construction and will be ramped up by Q1 of fiscal 2024. We're also completing phase two of our own ABC plant in Ramos, which will mark a major milestone in Q4 as it launches its first major EV platform. Both new builds in Mexico will have a heavy EV presence, with the ABC plant focusing exclusively on GM electric vehicles, and Windsor Mold Group's lineup skewing heavily towards Ford's popular Mustang Mach-E. In terms of production in the current quarter, we launched 29 programs in fiscal Q3 2023, which included running boards on the Silverado EV and washer systems on the BT1XX EV. On the quoting front, we saw our awards for the quarter parallel slim quoting quarter for some of our key OEM customers, ending with $16 million in annual sales volume of net awards, including wins on several electric vehicles with GM, an HVAC IP system for the high-volume Toyota RAV4, and HVAC systems and ducts for the popular new Ford Bronco. Our acquisition of the Windsor Mill Group has brought with it opportunity to diversify and expand our customer platform base, especially at Toyota as well as Ford. With a number of quotes out in the marketplace, we are hopeful of successful resolution in the near term, which will help boost activity next quarter. With that, I would like to introduce to you our new CFO, Scott Roggenbauer. Scott joins us most recently from his role as CFO of Amesbury Truth, a North American hardware and sealing provider. But Scott also brings with him a wealth of automotive and mobility experience from prior roles with Johnson Controls, ZF Group, Harley-Davidson, and Haas F1 Racing. Welcome, Scott.