Nn Inc Q1 FY2024 Earnings Call

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I'm Stephen Poe, Investor Relations contact for NN Inc. and I'd like to thank you for attending today's business update. Last evening, we issued a press release announcing our financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2024, as well as a supplemental presentation, which has been posted on the Investor Relations section of our website. If anyone needs a copy of the press release or the supplemental presentation, you may contact Alpha IR group at ttnbralpha-ir.com. Our presenters on this call will be Harold Bevis, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mike Felcher, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Tim French, our Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, will also join us for the Q&A portion of the call. Please turn to Slide 2, where you'll find our forward-looking statements and disclosure information. Before we begin, I'd ask that you take note of the cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements contained in today's press release, supplemental presentation and when filed in the Risk Factors section in the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2024. The same language applies to comments made on today's conference call, including the Q&A session as well as the live webcast. Our presentation today will contain forward-looking statements regarding sales, margins, inflation, supply chain constraints, foreign exchange rates, cash flow, tax rates, acquisitions and divestitures, synergies, cash and cost savings, future operating results, performance of our worldwide markets, general economic conditions and economic conditions in the industrial sector, the impacts of pandemics and other public health crises and military conflicts on the company's financial condition and other topics. These statements should be used with caution and are subject to various risks and uncertainties, many of which are outside of the company's control. The presentation also includes certain non-GAAP measures as defined by SEC rules. A reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures is contained in the tables in the final section of the press release and the supplemental presentation. Please turn to Slide 3. And I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Harold Bevis.

Thank you, Stephen, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to Page 4 in our earnings deck. NN had a successful first quarter, highlighted by growth in our core plants and continued execution of our business transformation strategy, which was underlined by a number of observable operational improvements that are underperforming locations. We also continued our commercial momentum winning new business in the quarter at a very strong pace, capturing more than $17 million of new awards, which we estimate to be about 3x market growth rates. Our transformation is fully underway, and we're now entering our second year. And I can say for the team that's here, time flies when you're having this much fun, and we are indeed pleased with our results over the last year, and we're looking forward to highlighting some of them today and then taking questions at the end. First, I'm happy to report that Q1 2024 was the third consecutive quarter of exceeding our upward goals and expectations for adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow and new business wins. We have been driving our trailing 12-month EBITDA up. We believe this is a function of natural company strengths, a stronger team made up of both homegrown leaders and outside professionals, a strong set of improvement initiatives and being accountable to outcomes to each other. First and foremost, we've been delivering strong operational improvements. Some of you might wonder what does that mean? Operational improvements, pretty big terms. But for us, it means rightsizing our headcount, negotiating with nondirected suppliers, leveraging our global procurement power, upgrading plant managers where needed, combining SG&A roles where possible and having an organized plan at every plant to take out costs. Additionally, in certain areas, we've had to negotiate and engage with customers on basic economics. Another term for this is continuous improvement, or CI, and we're committed to increasing our margin and profit rates on an ongoing basis, and it's working. To be sure, it is sustainable and becomes a layer of goodness that we built upon. We have to change our culture in many areas, and that's working also. Sometimes winning and becoming successful is just plain hard work, and we're all about that. As we have noted in the past a year ago, the company had 7 unprofitable plants that were causing a big impact to our bottom line and our cash flows. Our aggressive actions over the last year at these plants have shown clear and immediate results with 3 plants returning to profitability already and the remaining 4 making dramatic improvements. The goal is for this group to become profitable by year-end 2024, this year. The commercial team has also been very successful over the last year, and we have secured growth at 3x the market growth rate by our estimations. This will enable us to layer in new growth and contribute to our adjusted EBITDA totals in future quarters. Before turning to our first quarter financial results, I'm happy to announce that we are reaffirming our free cash flow new business win outlooks for the year, while also tightening our outlook for net sales and adjusted EBITDA. We expect to deliver full year bottom line growth along with continued strong growth in new business wins, and Mike will cover this in more detail in his section. Please turn to Page 5 in your deck. NN delivered solid first quarter results with net sales of $121.2 million and adjusted EBITDA of $11.3 million. Year-over-year net sales volumes were mostly flat after some one-time movements. But adjusted EBITDA grew strongly through the actions that I just walked through. It was our third quarter of year-over-year growth in adjusted EBITDA and our trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA of $46.3 million is up 20% compared to the trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA of a year ago, or about $7.7 million of improvement. Our adjusted EBITDA margin is now 9.3% and is up significantly compared to last year as the turnaround of troubled plants and broader operating cost reductions continued to improve our bottom line. Before turning the call over to Mike, I'd like to recognize our global NN team. In a period of significant change for the company, a lot of it instigated by me, our employees and colleagues are performing at an outstanding level on on-time delivery, quality and safety. We're reorienting and injecting best practices in our company as we go along and changing our culture. NN's sales pipeline is as large and healthy as it's ever been, and we continue to aim to win new business with both new and existing customers globally. With that, I'll turn the conversation over to Mike, who will walk through our financial performance in a more detailed manner.

Thanks, Harold, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 6, where we will detail our results for the first quarter. Net sales for the quarter of $121.2 million were down 4.6% compared to last year's first quarter. For the period, we had roughly flat sales volumes due to a rationalization of volume of approximately $4 million from underperforming plants, mostly offset by $3 million of sales growth at healthy plants. From a pricing standpoint, our prior year results included $3 million of end-of-life premium pricing associated with the closure of the Irvine plant. Looking to profitability. Our operating loss of $4.8 million improved by $2.3 million compared to the $7.1 million operating loss in last year's first quarter. On an adjusted basis, our first quarter adjusted operating loss was $0.7 million, which was slightly higher than the adjusted operating loss of $0.4 million seen in the prior year. As Harold referenced earlier, adjusted EBITDA results of $11.3 million grew by $3.2 million or 39% versus last year's $8.1 million result. Our consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin results expanded by 290 basis points to 9.3% versus last year's first quarter. This improvement in our profitability on a lower revenue base relative to last year speaks to our early success in improving our base business performance. As we continue through 2024, our focus on attacking all underperforming areas of the business will continue to anchor our priorities as part of our multiyear transformation effort. In particular, we expect to see a more pronounced pull-through of the impacts from our operational improvement initiatives and total cost productivity programs. With those results accreting more thoroughly to our profitability figures as many of these only began benefiting us in the second half of 2023. As we have stated in the past, we remain committed to capturing an additional $10 million in adjusted EBITDA improvement once all our actions are completed. Turning to our segment results, starting on Slide 7. In our Power Solutions segment, where our business is largely stamp products, our sales decreased 1.7% year-over-year to $48.2 million, down $0.9 million from the $49.1 million of sales in last year's first quarter. While we are experiencing strong demand in our business from U.S. customers focused on electrical grid, this demand strength was partially offset by volume rationalization as part of the Taunton and Irvine facility closures from last year. Despite the lower sales volume, the positive impacts from facility closures and cost reduction actions have driven solid results as seen for our improved adjusted EBITDA. Our quarterly adjusted EBITDA of $7.8 million improved by $1 million compared to the $6.8 million delivered in last year's first quarter. We believe it is a testament to our refocused efforts and commitment to our strategic transformation plans, both operationally and commercially, as the business delivered higher adjusted EBITDA and expanded margins by 290 basis points year-over-year. As we begin to layer in stronger sales figures from new business wins, we expect to continue expanding our profitability as we capture improved fixed cost absorption through operating leverage, combined with the commitment to our cost and productivity programs that Harold walked through earlier on the call. Operationally, our focus remains on expanding our Connect and Protect business, improving underperforming plants, continuing to rightsize the cost structure, contemporizing our engineering and processes and ultimately executing on a healthy and strong growth pipeline across growing key end markets. Turning to Slide 8 in our Mobile Solutions segment, which covers our machine products business, sales decreased 6.4% versus the prior year's first quarter decline by $4.9 million to $73.1 million for the period. The decrease was primarily driven by rationalization of underperforming business and the impact of some mix shift in our retained business. In line with the trend we have seen across the company, our profitability in the Mobile Solutions segment grew versus last year's first quarter as the segment's adjusted EBITDA result of $8.6 million increased by $3 million compared to the $5.6 million in the first quarter of '23. This markedly improved adjusted EBITDA performance was driven in part by stronger profits from our China joint venture, which continues to show market strength and attractive growth. Additionally, operating performance improvements within our underperforming plants reflect the early impact of our cost and productivity programs, which continue to gain momentum. Now turning to Slide 9, you can see a summary of our free cash flow, capital expenditures and net debt and resulting leverage. We are committed to maintaining positive free cash flow and will therefore take a measured approach on capital investments required for our new business wins. This includes utilizing equipment financing opportunities as we did in the first quarter where we executed a $4.9 million equipment sale leaseback transaction. With that, I will turn the call back to Harold to discuss some of our additional developments before wrapping our prepared remarks.

Thank you. Please turn to Slide 10. Our structural and process improvements have been accretive to our bottom line since the initiation of our global continuous improvement program last year. And our trailing 12-month EBITDA is now up to $46 million, and it's up almost 20%, as I mentioned, since the first quarter last year, and it's improved for 4 quarters in a row. Additionally, as a result of targeted cost reductions, better operational planning and headcount rationalization, our EBITDA per headcount is up 42%. I just wanted to share a look into the operational improvement program that we have underway, led by our Chief Operating Officer, Tim French, who is on the phone later for questions. We've progressively been working down our headcount over time. And you can see that we've been taking down our headcount while increasing our EBITDA, therefore, driving up our productivity. We're going to continue this balanced focus on growing earnings through growth as well as cost cut initiatives. It's helping us make improvements in our free cash flow generation also by having quite a bit of people off the payroll. This remains an important focus going forward. This story is not over. We're underway with optimizing here. A lot of it is focused on our underperforming plants, and it will lead to an improvement in our overall capital structure. We believe that we'll be able to put a period of financial stress behind us if we haven't already as we evolve our capital structure to be more reflective of our current performance, continued impact on implementing our transition strategy. This is one quarter at a time, one improvement at a time, sequential improvement, staying accountable, taking proactive actions and improving base productivity. Highlighted on Page 11, if you just turn the page, I'd like to flip and talk about our commercial program. Our organic growth program has been performing very well, and we're encouraged by our early success and ongoing success. Accelerating the growth of new business wins is another key to our transformation plan. After having won a record $63 million of new business awards during calendar year '23, we delivered another $17 million of new awards in the first quarter this year, making a total of $80 million in a short amount of time. We're on pace to deliver a similar amount this year, 55% to 70%. We put in a range there because it's really hard to tell when you're going to close on things in your pipeline. But we're on pace now for the midpoint of our guidance range here, as you can see from the results, which would mean $120 million to $135 million of new business won over 8 quarters. Our key growth areas continue to be the China automotive markets, which are flourishing with indigenous and export opportunities. The U.S. electric location and grid technologies, where we specifically are on the grid edge and selected vehicle programs in the markets of North America, South America and Europe. We're continuing to be selective in the medical markets. We're mindful of the amount of CapEx we've attached to growth plans. Tim French is the steward of our CapEx budget. We've walked away from some opportunities that were just too CapEx intense for us. So we continue to leverage our installed base on an ongoing basis. This batch of growth is much more capital effective and efficient than prior experiences for our company, and we're leveraging our installed capacity very well. If you turn to Page 12, we'd like to reaffirm our free cash flow and new business win outlooks, while slightly tightening our net sales and adjusted EBITDA guidance ranges. For the full year, just to repeat it here, we're expecting net sales in the range of 45 to 55 million, up slightly from prior year to the midpoint; adjusted EBITDA in the range of 48% to 54%, up over 20% at the midpoint; free cash flow in the range of $10 to $15 million, up again slightly at the midpoint compared to improved free cash flow generation of last year; and new business wins in the range of 55% to 70%. Our guidance continues to reflect steady end market demand despite some observed weakness in North American industrial markets relative to 2023. Specific to NN, we expect to continue executing our aggressive growth program, ultimately driving free cash flow and profitability across several new markets and customer platforms. With that, I'd like to thank you for listening, and I'll turn the call back over to the operator for questions.

And the first question will come from Joe Gomes with NOBLE Capital.

So you mentioned on the 7 facilities that 3 are back to profitability now and you're hoping to get the other 4 by year-end. And I think previously, you talked about there was $100 million of revenue associated with that was unprofitable. How much of that $100 million of revenue would you say is now returned to profitability?

It's about half of it, Joe. We're underway with a goal by the end of the year for that group to cross the line and make money for us on the way to making 5%. We intend to go from losing over 10% to making plus 5%, which is slightly below our average. But those plants specifically have some of our older assets and then some special purpose assets. So we set realistic goals for now. But right now, we're kind of clearing waivers on about half of the revenue, Joe.

And then you touched on it a little bit. I just want to maybe give us a little more color on some of the medical efforts in the Connect and Protect. Is there anything specific you can point out, maybe contract wins or size of some of the stuff that you're bidding in those markets?

Yes. There are a couple of constraints that we look at with regards to saying yes to some of the growth awards when we get down to the final line. We've walked away from a couple of big opportunities to be honest, that were extremely capital intense. When we say capital intense for us, it means it's more than $1 of capital for dollar of sales. We're way below that right now because we've been careful about leveraging the company's assets and adding into adjacent markets where if you say you need 4 machine centers to complete a product. We have a capacity on 2 and need to debottleneck too. Some of the opportunities in medical because we weren't in it for 3 years. If you say there are 4 machine centers needed, we don't have any of them. We've been careful about those opportunities, whether they're in medical or other adjacent markets. We're stretching our growth CapEx. So I would say the overriding metric for us is largely financial. We've been stretching the CapEx across some of these. We'll eventually get to the point where we have a little more firepower. But with the capital structure we have at the moment and the required step down on our covenants, we would need to be frugal on capital spending, and we are. Tim French is on the phone. Tim's looked forward 12 quarters into our cash CapEx requirements. And Tim, I know you've looked at the details more than me here; do you want to add anything?

I'd just echo what you said, Harold, that we're being very efficient in how we're spending capital on new business wins. As you suggested, it's significantly below $1 for $1 of revenue. So we're really focusing on utilizing idle assets or underutilized assets today, and it's proving to be very effective in how we're gaining new business.

If you were to utilize them at your normal utilization rate, what kind of additional revenue could you generate just from the existing assets and open capacity?

A lot of the assets that we have are older vintage and capable of making certain products, but not able to handle tolerances on certain others. For instance, we have a decent amount of equipment in our automotive engine parts areas. We make a lot of parts for high-end engines, especially diesel. On paper, it looks like they ought to be able to make medical products. But when you get down to the tolerance needed, they can't hold the spec. So they become what we call special purpose assets. If you look at our balance sheet, we have over $400 million worth of machines. Generally speaking, we're running one shift. If you say that the growth programs are running $0.50 to $1 of growth, that's potentially a lot of open capacity. But it's somewhat misleading because the capacity is only capable of supporting certain types of growth initiatives. On a growth basis, we're really focused on accretive growth versus just filling up machines. A lot of it remains idle. We're thinking through what our rooftop footprint should look like. Especially it turns back to the underperforming plan areas where they're mainly in volume, which are light on volume because they make mainly commodity products. If I had to give you a number, I'd say it's between $50 million and $100 million that's realistic on paper. You could come up with a much higher number by going through the math I just laid out there, but it's around $50 million to $100 million.

Your last quarter, you had talked about potential more equipment sale leaseback transactions. Just wondering what the status of those are.

Yes, we did, as I noted in the comments, $4.9 million in Q1. We're evaluating doing a little bit more this year. It's going to tie into our CapEx projections. Our viewpoint is we want to maintain positive free cash flow in the range we provided, and we'll look to supplement CapEx spend with either equipment sale leasebacks or financing.

I'll just start with the changes you made to your guidance wasn't much, but I'm curious as to what were any underlying assumptions you might have changed either positive or negative to maybe your revenue assumption in the year ahead?

It wasn't a big change. We pulled down the top line on revenue a little bit, at the high end of the range, left the bottom the same. We're all over 4 months into the year. We just had a better feel for where we see the year coming in from a revenue standpoint. I don't think anything overall changed in viewpoint other than just where we've been seeing the volume and how we see the rest of the year shaping up. On the EBITDA side, we just pulled the bottom end up a little bit and tightened that, based on being 1/3 of the way through the year and having a little bit more confidence in where we see that coming in for the full year.

So there's no specific end market that you think is growing more slowly than previously?

Only one. Our exposure to the U.S. residential construction market, John, we have a specific mix exposure. We make shafts for HVAC compressors. Because of our machinery and the heritage of that business, our mix is towards the low end side of those products. With the high interest rates and what's happening with housing starts, we expected it to be soft. It's just a little softer than we thought. We haven't lost position. If you look at housing from the NAHB or any of the housing forecasters, there's expected to be relief when the Fed gets after rates. Right now, rates are higher for longer, and so we're staying softer for longer. Our customers in that area continue to give us flat and then it's going to turn out, flat and then it's going to turn up, but it just keeps being flat. So we're calling it flat for right now, John.

And as far as rationalized volume is concerned, I assume that means that you're exiting the businesses; where do you stand in that process? And how much additionally will be rationalized and how does it flow through the year?

Right now, I think you're talking about our outlook. We're still evaluating customer economics at one of our main underperforming plants. We're considering a potential consolidation of rooftops, which when you do that makes the specific areas easier to analyze. We don't have a concrete plan today. We're just evaluating what's next for the facilities. We've reduced a lot of the excess headcount that was just standing around in those operations. We're going to get them to slightly profitable without closures needed and no attacking customer contracts needed. That's not good enough. We're already laddering our improvement program into 2025 at this point. Our goal is to continue sequential improvement in our trailing 12-month EBITDA. When we're looking forward, we know we're going to have to attack about $20 million to $30 million of business that doesn't make sense yet in terms of the cost to make the products and what we get for a price. We've 80/20ed it, but we still have about $20 million to go.

No, Harold, I think you've hit the number. We are looking at them in detail, and I think there is some more to go. I think you've captured the quantity perfectly.

That $20 million to $30 million is not part of the $100 million you expect to actually turnaround in profitability?

No, it is.

Can you give us an update of where you stand in that process and your thoughts about where you expect to be at year-end?

The last year has been characterized by Tim and I coming in and working with the team that was here embracing our realities, making decisions and moving forward. I'd say we're through that. Phase 2 is supplementing our in-place homegrown management with professional management, professional leaders who can take us to the next level. We're starting that now. For the plants where we've tried to improve them, we've sheltered them while still being dilute. We haven't spent any money on rationalization since we've been here. That’s next. I'd say we're about 30% to 40% along.

I think we're right in that 40% range. As you mentioned, we're looking at bringing in professional managers to help with the next phase. The next phase tends to be a little more difficult than what we've done so far when you look at footprint rationalization and consolidation. So 40% is a good percent for me in terms of where we are today versus where we hope to be.

Can you update me on the interest expense cost, what was the cost of debt during the end of the first quarter?

Our Q is on file, and I know you have a lot of things to read all at once. Interest expense for Q1 was $5.4 million.

What was the rate on that?

The majority of that would be the term loan, which is currently at 14.3%.

Just following up on the new business award activity. How would you characterize the margin profile of that? I assume it's profitable, but how does that fit into where you're trying to get to?

There are some prisms onto that answer. Largely, we're trying to leverage the capacity we have. Except for the plants that are negative, our costs are covered and generating margin at the plant level. We set IRR goals on the new business, which are reviewed by Tim and me, and it's accretive as a group. We're being disciplined about that. We use contemporary tools to house all of our pipeline activity as well as our won business. We're capital efficient. The show is still ongoing, filling in future periods. I'm not ready yet to discuss exactly how accretive it is, but I'll take that as an action item for the next call.

What are you seeing in terms of activity in the grid and electrical activities? How do you see the growth looking in that area?

We have two main product lines. One is the traditional circuit breakers and distribution, and the other is grid edge devices for control of grids. In the case of grid edge devices or smart meters and similar products, they're used in electrical and water. If you look at the public filings by our customers, they're growing in both water utility control and electrical utility control. Their customers are utilities, cities and municipalities, and water districts. The grid edge devices, which we're associated with, are seeing steady growth, and we have a good mix there. On electrical distribution and control, it's a little different because we're tied into residential, which relates to the same dynamics. We've had some decent new wins. Although the base business is slightly soft, we're able to make that with powdered metal, and we have a sizable backlog. Overall, it's growing a little bit and has backlogs over a couple of years.

Did you state what the pipeline is currently?

It's grown a little bit. We're closing in on around $550 million.

Is there a related metric of how much of that is somewhat returning off?

The average time from securing an award nomination is about 18 months. Generally speaking, we're a Tier 2 provider to a Tier 1 making a subsystem going through their internal development. A vast majority of our new wind profile is at 18 months from award to peak annual sales. The takeaway is in production that we have looked forward and kind of know the outlook. Our goal is to do much higher growth than market growth. Our market is growing 3% to 5%, but we’re winning around 13% to 15%.

What is the anticipated spend that you need to invest to achieve this goal?

We're working within our overall idea of spending around $20 million on CapEx. We're not letting go of that constraint. Right now, it's focused on rationalization and investment in equipment so it can compete and be repurposed to do something else.

We're putting that analysis together now. I wouldn't want to quote a number for the capital required as we're just finalizing that. But it will require capital.

The $10 million is embedded in our '24 outlook relative to '23.

Thanks for joining us today and for the excellent questions. Our transformation continues to take shape operationally, commercially, and culturally. While there's more to be done, we believe that we're going to continue to execute and deliver profitable growth for all our shareholders. We look forward to sharing our successes with you in future quarters. Thank you, and have a good day.

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