11/11/2025

speaker
Conference Operator

Rob Wildebauer, please go ahead.

speaker
Rob Wildebauer
Head of Investor Relations

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining today. We always look forward to talking to our shareholders, updating you on our business, and answering questions. We also note that we have other stakeholders, including many of our employees on the call, and our remarks will be addressed to them as well as we disseminate our results and commentary to our network. With me this evening are Pat DiRamo, Martin Reyes' CEO, our President, Fred DiTosto, and our CFO, Peter Cerullis. Today, we will be discussing Martin Reyes' results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2025. I refer you to our usual disclaimer in our press release and our filed documents. On this call, I'll make a few short comments on the trade and tariff situation, geopolitics, and capital allocation at the end. Pat will outline some key highlights of the quarter and make some comments on the business and some industry issues. Fred will discuss operations. And then Peter will review some financial highlights. And then we'll do Q&A. And now, here's Pat.

speaker
Pat DiRamo
President & CEO

Good evening, everyone. We're pleased with our performance in the third quarter, both operationally and financially. Adjusted operating income margin was up year over year as we continued to drive operating improvements and negotiated commercial recoveries from our customers, largely for volume shortfalls on EV programs. We generated positive results, notwithstanding the current environment as it relates to tariffs and the production disruption from a cybersecurity attack at Jaguar Land Rover, a key customer of ours. Results would have been even better absent these issues. Good news, production at JLR has resumed and is ramping up, and we expect them to return to normal by Q1. On tariffs, We are at advanced stages in negotiating with our customers for relief. Ultimately, we expect to recover the vast majority of our tariff exposure. We anticipate these negotiations to be complete before the end of the year. We are having a good year as our Q3 year-to-date results show, as we continue to drive operating efficiency improvements on the shop floor, along with other cost savings, including our SG&A reduction programs. We expect operating margins to continue to improve year over year in 2026. Note that we have been impacted to a degree by supply chain disruptions from the Novellus Fire and Xperia semiconductor chip issue. This is reflected in our outlook. Peter will elaborate on our third quarter results in 2025 outlook shortly. Shifting gears, we expect more production to come to North America over the next few years via reshoring or friendshoring. Between the push to localize from the U.S. administration coupled with the USMCA, we believe that all three countries, Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, will benefit ultimately. As you know, North America accounts for more than three-quarters of our production sales, so we are spending a lot of time looking at our footprint, in the region and continuing to find ways to open more capacity through continued operational improvement and optimization of floor space in anticipation of work flowing into North America. Fred will also touch on this by discussing a recent acquisition we made in the U.S. We're doing a lot on the people side to prepare for and avoid labor shortages, particularly in the skilled areas, and we're ahead of the curve in this regard. At Martin Rea, we focus on internal development as well as internal promotions. We target 80% promotion from within and 20% from outside. One example of our unique approach is our semi-skill positions. This is a pre-apprentice program giving direct labor team members an opportunity to enhance their skills, freeing up time for higher skilled trades workers to focus on more advanced problem solving and plant improvements. This fosters promotion and advancement, as well as an avenue for women to enter the non-traditional roles. Women make up 50% of the workforce, yet less than 25% enter manufacturing. These efforts have been recognized by the Automotive Women's Alliance Foundation, who recently selected Martin Rea for its 2025 Change Champion Award. This award recognizes a company who has contributed significantly to the acceptance and advancement of women in the automotive industry. These efforts also extend to high school graduates. Something like 60% of high school graduates pursue higher education, such as university, as well as other programs. The remaining 40% are looking for a good job and tend to want opportunity for advancement as well. And we're providing an avenue for them to pursue it. This is just one of a number of labor-related strategies we employ. We're very proud of this activity, which feeds our strong culture at Martin Rea. Longer term, as more manufacturing moves to North America, we will continue to invest in our people while enhancing our productivity through initiatives including automation and machine learning. I'd like to end by thanking the Martin Rea team for their hard work and continued enthusiasm. With that, I'll turn it over to Fred.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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