Conference Transcript - TWI 2026-06-10

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

All right. Well, good afternoon and welcome to day two of Oppenheimer's 21st Industrial Growth Conference. And thanks for your patience here while we get started. I'm Kristen Owen. I cover the ag and industrial group here at Oppenheimer. I'm pleased to be joined this morning or this afternoon by Paul Wright, Chief Executive Officer of Titan International. Paul, thank you so much for joining. I'm looking forward to the discussion today. I was wondering if we can maybe kick off the conversation here with a bit of a reintroduction. For those who are not familiar with Titan, or maybe just coming back to the story, can you give us just a brief overview of Titan? You know, what the key products are, your key markets, and key geographies to

Paul Wright, CEO

start? That was good. Well, Kristen, I appreciate it. We make the wheels, tires, and undercarriage that makes the equipment move, as depicted by a number of the hats you have in your background there. So we do that for pretty much all the large OEMs that you would know of around the world. We do that from a strong manufacturing base that covers all the primary geographies, especially where you see agriculture. So plants in Brazil, throughout North America, throughout Europe. And really what we pride ourselves on is, again, making those products that make equipment move, make it perform better, and really being that one-stop shop with our distribution and but really more importantly with our product portfolio and so our customers can turn to us to solve all their needs whether it be again in all those those those marketplaces those geographies that I mentioned but we also serve beyond ag and earth moving construction and consumer and we do that again around the world and we do that with the broadest product portfolio of really anybody in our space and so that's quick background on Titan we'll dive into

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

details from there. Definitely going to talk about some of the moving pieces and the geographies there. But first, I want to start with some of the internal changes that you guys have announced recently. David Martin, former CFO, he was recently appointed your Chief Transformation Officer. And then Tony Ely, he was your former accounting officer. He's now CFO. So maybe get a little bit of background, talk a little bit more about that change, and specifically how you envision

Paul Wright, CEO

David, in this new role? Yeah, it's great for a company like Titan at our size to be able to do something like that, where we have the depth of a team where we can promote Tony into the role of CFO, clearly ready to be in that position. And then also, as we look at where the world of AI is going, especially in the industrial landscape, we see tremendous amount of opportunities ahead of us to to use ai in a number of different ways and so as we were looking at the opportunities to do that having bandwidth becomes you you can you can have a great idea but if you can't execute on it so it became a natural fit with moving tony into the cfo and bringing david over to the chief transformation officer position not having to bring somebody in from the outside and be able to rely on david's experience really gives us a jump start and you know we're excited about where we're going. I think the challenge we have right now, there's almost limitless opportunities. So how do you narrow it down and don't spend all Tony's money too quickly on every opportunity out there? But we're excited about the path around. Have you identified some key areas where you do want him to focus? We have. And actually, David is getting queued up to present that to the board in June. And then we'll start bringing out some of that material into the investorscape here probably with q2 but uh there's there's the low-hanging fruit that's out there on the admin side and we're going to do that with contract reviews and and simple admin tasks but for us it's what can we do in the industrial side where it's not really just about efficiencies but also how you can improve quality reduce scrap there's really great tools that are out there if you think about in a lot of industrials especially for us where you're converting raw materials into a finish good. There's very complex processes that are doing tons of revolutions. And so your ability to capture that data and analyze that data and make real-time adjustments, the tools are coming online very quickly. And so we're seeing some of those tools are actually geared towards almost our space, not exactly what we do, but almost towards our space. And so what we want to gravitate towards is those quicker implementations. Everybody on this call has been involved with or heard about erp disasters and takes longer runs over over budget and you don't really get the benefits out of it and so really what david's been focused on this year is okay where do we where do we go plan that attack and how can we do it where again that implementation is a shorter duration and the efficiencies the improvements come through a lot quicker maybe we could talk

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

a little bit about the the commercial side you you mentioned in there your quick overview of the company and i think you you call this out quite a bit in your investor presentations this idea of Titan being a one-stop shop. Can you help me understand what does that mean to Titan? Why is that important to you as an organization? Why is that important to your customers? I guess maybe why should the folks on this call, the investors, how should they think about that one-stop shop

Paul Wright, CEO

value proposition? It's really critical to our value proposition. The part is people don't think about wheels and tires until you need to think about wheels and tires and and you know think about for all of our our personal vehicles the breadth of products needed to service most of the cars that are that were represented on this call here um you know you're talking about maybe 15 to 20 different sizes that could cover the entire landscape we don't have a single plant that produces less than 15 or 20 skews a day and so when you get into our our universe again agriculture earth movie construction consumer the the range of the products is a mess and and the and it's different sizes but it's also different applications and so what titan does if you look at a typical farm they have roughly about 400 different tires that that could be used on a farm and you know of those type makes about 95 percent of them and so we're talking about all the way down to the smallest service vehicles all the way to their largest tractor and combine and so we are the only company that does that we can we can handle turf we can go handle combine we can handle everything in the in between but in order to do that one you got to have the sizes but along with the sizes is a tremendous amount of tooling and obviously the equipment you know to build a combine wheel you need a 5 000 ton press but going a step further you need highly customized tooling that can make what is needed for that piece of equipment and so it gets often overlooked because again you don't think about wheels tires till you need to but when you do that's where i i reference titan being a one-stop shop we're the one company you can count on um if you're a if you're trying to run a piece of mower or you were trying to run a tractor we can take care of all that and then and then some and so that's we want people to think about their wheels and tires and and when they do that's where we can step up and it works to our advantage and it takes a tremendous amount of investment but it also takes a step beyond that it's the technical know-how and the connection to the end users that really separates titan from every everybody else that sort of economies of scope if i if i were to summarize that exactly exactly and it's hard to picture you know because again we just a tractor looks like a tractor out in the field and you just don't think of it in that type of depth but every different dimension of a wheel or tire or different application requires you know again that expertise and that production capability we bring to the table and not to say others don't do part of it, but we're the only one that can cover it all the way

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

from the smallest to the biggest. Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the more current events. It would not be an industrials conference if we didn't get to talk about tariffs. This seems to be the theme the last couple of years. So let's start to unpack that a bit. Titan has previously stated that they expected tariffs would be a net benefit to their business. Now, sort of a year into this dynamic tariff regime, give us an update. How have you seen that play out so far? And maybe on the competitive front, what has that reaction been?

Paul Wright, CEO

Yeah, I think parts of the tariffs have been a benefit. that clearly parts of the execution of the tariffs have really been difficult for most companies in the industrial landscape. And so that's what we've adapted to. So let me backtrack to 15 months ago when we started making the comments about tariffs being a net positive for Titan. Chaos is good for Titan. And it goes back to what we were just talking about, Kristen, that one-stop shop with our distribution and, more importantly, our product portfolio. that when there's chaos, customers can call on Titan to solve their needs. And we want that, and we thrive on that. And so when you start implementing tariffs, that is an environment that typically in the past Titan has done well. Chaos is good for us in that regard. Clearly, tariffs you can look at as protectionism as well. I think that layer is where it's been more complex, And I'm not going to comment on, you know, did we think tariffs were going to be good for protectionism or not? I will say this. We've gone to the International Trade Commission twice. We've won unanimously twice the rulings against imported products and imported tires, I should say, from India into the U.S. And what that signals is that it's not a level playing field. So where I am supportive of tariffs is also what we've already been very clear publicly, and we've seen the ITC rule in our favor, is this is not a level playing field. If you think it's a level playing field, then I got a lot of land that I can sell you somewhere, even though I don't own any land. And so we are seeing that play out with the regime where there's some additional rulings that have come out recently that are favorable to Titan that further illustrate the point. It's not a level playing field. And so that's where we continue to feel that tariffs, it's not necessarily the tariffs themselves. It's the viewpoint that tariffs represent an uneven playing field, which Titan fully believes and, again, has won those cases to support it. We believe an administration that is using tariffs to support an uneven playing field is a net positive for Titan. We still continue to believe that is a true statement. Now, obviously, the 12, 15 months in between the liberation day and now has been highly chaotic for everybody. And you can say there's some net positives, but there's also a lot of net negatives. And I think that's where, you know, Chris, if you look back at the agricultural market at the beginning of last year, there's some really positive indicators that were coming through in the forecast that have been pushed back. And so, again, big picture, we still believe in what the tariffs represent, which is an uneven playing field. And that's where we continue to see some, again, some rulings that have just come out recently that will continue to substantiate that and help Titan.

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

Yeah, I'm not going to let you off the hook on the cycle question, but I'm going to ask you just a little bit more about your own supply chain here then, because, you know, Titan has sort of taken this approach to supplementing your own manufacturing with some third party, with some JV, just sort of help us sort of shake that out, why that strategy has worked, how you're using those third parties to supplement.

Paul Wright, CEO

You know, going back to the common theme so far, if we have this product portfolio and we're here to meet the needs of our customers, we've got to be as effective as we possibly can. And in today's world, that requires bringing in joint venture partners, requires us having some plants overseas that we import into other countries, and it also requires using strategic partners in other cases. And so we view it as Titan is extremely good at taking care of our customers, and we will continue to evolve to make sure we can do that in the most effective manner. And that's where those other means of how we get our products to our customers have come into play. And it can get highly complicated if I kind of walk through all the different ways we do it, but some of these joint ventures are servicing our own plants as components. Some of our own low cost country plants service our other own plants as part of our internal supply chain. And then some of these partners and or our overseas plants are used for just direct distribution into, you know, primarily North America. And so it can be a complicated web. But again, that's what we like. We like complications. We like the fact that, you know, this is not a simple business where 20 SKUs can service the bulk of the market. You know, this is a highly complex space. And so we've evolved our supply chain quite extensively over the last really the last three years to be able to do that. It's difficult to see all that playing out because it's been somewhat challenged markets as this has been going on. But where we see Titan now is extremely well positioned for the future.

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

Well, so let's let's talk about those market challenges then. You know, agriculture, we've mentioned a few times here, but construction, consumer, all three sort of end markets, sort of going through their own cycles. What are you seeing when you're talking to your OEM partners or you're talking to your customers? Is there any hope that we may actually be at the trough here? And like, what would you need to see to feel confident that there was some inflection in any one of these end markets?

Paul Wright, CEO

definitely hope all right there is definitely hope it is but unfortunately the answer to that question gets more complex than you know it's right around the corner we can see it uh the hope comes from a lot of different reasons i mean it you know i think most people are familiar with it i mean it the farmers and their income is going to be tied to part of that hope now it goes beyond just the math of farmer income. It's the sentiment, it's the psychology of what drives that. I think we're looking at a situation where inventories have been properly balanced now. We're looking at a situation where equipment is aging. Farmer income has been, it's been difficult, but it hasn't been absolutely a disaster. And so if you look at it from that landscape, the negativity is different than some of the negativity of the past the balance sheets are strong man values are good government support is there now it can be a little bit tricky understanding how the government support plays in but just listen to scott best and talk he constantly referenced support for the farmer i think i think if you take that and you pull it all together it can be anything that helps move the sentiment i mean a lot of farmers a lot of dealers believe interest rates are too high so they hold up on purchases dealers don't want to hold the inventory uh you look at if the market turns because there's less inventory that's out there that sentiment's going to say i need inventory and so we're clearly been in an environment where inventory is is taboo well all of a sudden you know you could be getting an uptick in the market well that's accelerated by re-accelerating the need for more inventory what could drive that uh it could be a number of things i mean you look at the input costs have been high whether it's fertilizer fuel seeds i mean if you get a little bit of improvement on the supply demand equation farmer income with a little bit of government support in place also that sentiment flips i think we're in a position where because this downturn has been so long ag has been had a nice uptick in brazil last year hit a little bit of rough spots obviously this year but north america's kristen what are we in like month 40 now we're getting there i mean it's

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

pretty i don't know it feels like a lifetime to me paul it's a long time it's a long time i think

Paul Wright, CEO

because of that you just need a little bit of spark and things can get going and and you know i'll go back to what i mentioned earlier if you look at the forecast we were getting the beginning of 25 we were there was already this belief that ag was ready for an uptick then and we're starting to see that in the forecast. Obviously, Liberation Day tariffs have pushed a number of other factors that push that back. So I do believe it's a market that's ready to go. What we've seen in the meantime is forecasts are difficult. So to answer your question about visibility, it's hard to get visibility right now. And I feel like we're a company that does get good visibility because we manufacture a wheel with long lead times on the supply chain. It's difficult right now because there's not a lot of conviction to a forecast. a lot of variability some of it's up some of it's down and i think we're stuck in kind of this flattish world where we do see more drop-in orders because forecasts were off or inventory gets a little bit light but it's more driven either by a particular product or maybe even a certain region versus anything wholesale across the board where i could point to you these are a leading indicator of the market turning and so i think we're going to be in that environment that's where we are right now we'll see what happens when the war finishes we'll see what happens with kind of overall pricing within the supply chain and obviously commodities as well. But I don't think it's a bad position to be in. I think what we have done is positioned our company better to handle what's been going on, but also rely on what we've been good at in the past is when the markets are positive. Again, we have the capability to service our customers in ways that's more immense and better than anybody else in our space and we've got to be ready to turn it on. So what I've been saying to the board, what we've been saying to investors, when it's obviously instructing our team is if the market uptakes 20%, we got to be able to handle it. That's our expectation. And, and so will, will that happen? I do believe it will happen. Can I tell you when it's going to happen? I'd probably just be guessing on that.

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

We could have another conversation about that land you don't have. No. But okay. So we, so we've kind of, We've kind of got the lay of the land on ag. Any comments on, like, the construction or consumer side of the business?

Paul Wright, CEO

I mean, construction is, we are more European-focused, have a good presence in Brazil, you know, obviously some here in the U.S., but I think construction is in a good position. And it's the need for investment in infrastructure, the government spending. I think the projects that are ongoing and forecasted to continue puts construction in a pretty good space. you know the only thing i i would say is on my radar that we're watching carefully is the eu with all their problems um you know they got they got to stop autos from coming in they got to stop large equipment from getting to the eu you know so that's the only visibility right now that's a little tough i think the eu's waking up and putting some some foreign contents and local content, excuse me, in place for autos. And the same thing needs to happen on large equipment. I mean, I'm not against free trade. Don't get me wrong. I think there's a lot of benefits to it, obviously. But at the same time, it has to be fair trade. And I think the EU's got to step up. And I think if that happens, you know, we'll get more visibility into exactly where the European market's going for the future, which is a big part of our business. You know, consumers kind of it's got some good uplifts and it's got a little bouncing around on the bottom and some negatives it depends if you're talking about for us power sports or outdoor power equipment i think the one thing that we have been doing that's a net positive is we've been winning some oem contracts we've we've been innovating quite extensively the number of products we've introduced in the last year and a half in the specialty divisions more than what they introduced in the 10 years prior before Titan acquired Carlstar. So we believe with innovation, getting in front of some, you know, getting some nice wins with the OEMs, we're a little bit ahead of the marketplace. We talked on our call last week that we do see growth for the year. We're down just a touch in Q1, but see some growth coming for the rest of the year as we see some of these wins start to kick into gear.

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

It's actually a really good segue way, because you touched on sort of where you sit in these various end markets, pretty good mix of some of the larger OEM customers, some of the aftermarket sales. Maybe talk a little bit about those separate channels now, like who are some of the bigger customers and sort of what are you seeing in terms of the state of the OE versus the aftermarket channel? Yeah, it's a great question

Paul Wright, CEO

because we're all kind of waiting for maybe some consistency, that would be the best way to put it, where the aftermarket and the OEs and the different types of OEs align. So it does vary by customer, and it varies by region. We're seeing the aftermarket, especially as you get into the small ag, you get into the consumer division, be more consistent. There's a theme there. I mean, the products are being used, um, less susceptible, I think, to some of the noise with, um, gas prices as you get into consumer products. I mean, if you're a consumer lawn care provider, you're still got to use your equipment. And so we're, we're seeing more consistency there. Um, the, the big tough one for us has been large ag. You know, we have a tremendous wheel plant in the U.S. servicing large ag. It does do small ag as well, but just focusing on large ag. Our volumes of large ag are down. And so, for me, I'm waiting for that indicator from the OEMs that large ag is coming back. You know, I think the dealers have done a really good job managing the used. They took a lot of pain, kind of starting late 24 through 25. I'm hearing less from the dealers, the OEM dealers, that they're dealing with pain with use this year. So I think we're at a good point, more balanced point, not perfect, more balanced point with inventory. That's a very positive sign, but the volumes are still low. And so for Titan, large ag, especially in our real business, we're really unleashed some positive accretive margins because we are operating at a historically low level. And this is a business with good market share. And so, so I've got to watch large ag carefully. I think in Europe, ag has been more stable, but we, we've had some really nice wins over there on primarily our real business is a bigger part of our business over there. We've had some nice wins. And so I see some nice growth. We talked about that last week coming through in our European business. I think the park is good enough to support that growth, but it's our wins that are sort of accelerating that there. so there's a lot going on i could talk about brazil but i'll kind of stop you know brazil's brazil's up and down they're fighting elections so things get crazy i'd ask what's in your crystal

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

ball for brazil and it's it's kind of a tough one to call but um instead i i want to talk about some of these wins that you're getting um every time that i talk to you paul i'm always surprised at just how many configurations and tires there are um and uh you guys always seem to be coming out with something up in the pipeline. So maybe talk about what's driving some of the wins that you're seeing, what kind of growth opportunities you were excited about, and maybe talk a little bit about what's in that innovation pipeline.

Paul Wright, CEO

Yeah, maybe the wins I referenced do come from constantly having innovation and getting the confidence of our customers, but it's really coming from the risk mitigation piece. Again, going back to when the world gets chaotic, it helps tighten, And that's where we're seeing some of these wins come through is customers need more of a reliable supply chain and not to say they can't find one, but we definitely check the box as a more reliable supply chain for a number of different reasons with our manufacturing plants in our product portfolio. it helps us get those wins but then when you also can layer in the the innovation knowing that the end users of that equipment are going to be highly satisfied satisfied with the product that's how we get the wins and we do manage our business effectively um you know from an efficiency standpoint there are certain there's certain uh raw materials that are out of balance right now, depending on where you source from from, I'll stay away from the politics and keep that very simple. So the piece that gets us at times is not labor. It's really just, is there arbitrage in the raw materials? And where the raw materials are being sourced from, where certain geographies may have a competitive advantage. And so that's where, again, we got I look at how we can use our JV partners, how we use strategic sourcing. But even when we go through strategic sourcing, those are our designs. We take full responsibility of the quality. We stand behind it in the warranty. And we're responsible for the performance of that with the equipment that is going on. And so, you know, it becomes seamless to the customer. And so that's really how we get our wins. When you need risk mitigation, you need innovative products at high quality, you turn to Titan. and it's helping us gain those wins so then on the innovation front oh sorry um you know some of the cool things we've been doing is you know one of the ones we came out recently is is a it's vpo it's called variable pressure but it's actually you don't even need air so you can run a piece of turf equipment um with no air and and so you imagine if you're an operator uh what that does for you it takes away all risk all concerns you can put in air in there if you want to have a more comfortable ride but if you want to run it no air you will not damage that tire and so uh you know it's innovations like that we're really using we're excited that we we expanded our Goodyear relationship and agreement when we we acquired Carlstar and so using the Goodyear brand on this innovation this high quality innovation that's going to make equipment perform better it really helps us get in the marketplace quicker and so we're really excited about where we can start using the Goodyear brand on the consumer side, you know, on the agriculture side, I mean, one of the products we came out, you know, over the last few years, it's been highly successful. It's just an R14 where you can use it in all kinds of different applications. So if you're a dairy farmer dealing with different conditions or your municipality who needs to, to, to mow fields, do light construction work and take care of snow in the winter, we can now give you one set of tires. they'll do all that and so that's where we've become very strong in the what's called the small ag but it's really that utility area of agriculture um you know we we've innovated and and created products that have really put us in the position that we can take care of whatever that end user needs we have we have a really good solution for of course lsw chris i mean we we love lsw we we think it's it's got room to grow i mean we've talked about it a long time and it where i say it's got room to grow we got to get more to the mid-sized farmers it's been more geared towards the large farmers it's a large product and generally speaking but lsw works it's on all of our passenger vehicles um what it does is it obviously makes the equipment perform better from just the comfort level it will help improve your yields it's fuel efficient but what we've seen some recent data that came to us last year not not sanctioned or or done by titan by an independent party who runs a group of farms he came to us and said do you know how much our lsws are saving us every time you have to do the end row turn especially on a smaller plot of land they saw a really nice improvement in yields about 30% every time they turned it. So that's where now the economics for a small or mid-sized farm have now improved where the cost of getting LSW really pays for itself in a quick timeframe. And so while LSW is not a new innovation, we got to continue to innovate how we market and how we position LSW into the marketplace,

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

get in the hands of many people as possible. Yeah. I mean, you know, I can spend an entire call talking about LSW. So unfortunately, we don't have that time today, but I understand the enthusiasm there and some of the value to getting that into the midsize tractor market, just given the diversity of applications there. Sadly, we've got to shift gears a little bit, and I've got to ask you about things like capital allocation, because that's what we do in these conversations, right? So talk to me, Paul, capital allocation strategy, short-term, long-term, obviously dealing with the cycle dynamic short-term, but maybe help unpack how you've

Paul Wright, CEO

talked about your capital allocation strategy. I want to work down some debt. This is a tough time of the year where we do see our working capital increase. Now, as Tony articulated last week it's predominantly driven by accounts receivable it's tied to sales but it's also tied to we have some large oem customers that are pushing us in extending terms we don't have at this time a ton of leverage to push back from what we've been told a lot of that was driven by them waiting to get tariff refunds and the tariffs kind of drove them to take those actions against us but either way it's tied up in ar we do have a little bit of inventory build that goes on this time of year. But with that, as we generate cash flow, we do want to use that cash flow to pay down some of our revolving debt. And that's what we anticipate doing. You know, for us with CapEx, our CapEx is very similar to last year. We will continue to, we've talked a lot about innovation and product development. We will always invest in product development. But, you know, that's not the bulk of our CapEx. That's a small part of it, but the tooling that's required, we will do that. But the rest of our CapEx, there's a lot of maintenance in there, safety. We could trim it further if we needed to, if we wanted to really allocate our capital more towards paying down debt. But right now, we're looking at CapEx being right around the same as last year.

Kristen Owen, Analyst — Oppenheimer

Fantastic. Paul, we have to leave it there, but really appreciate the conversation. And thank you, everybody who joined.

Paul Wright, CEO

Appreciate it, Kristen. Enjoyed it. Everybody else enjoyed the call.