THRM
#Good morning, Mike, and good morning, everyone.
Thank you for joining us for our call.
We want to start off this call with well wishes for our friends and colleagues who are living in our Vietnamese market area.
There was a large typhoon came through last night and was disruptive to the community.
Our operations lost power for a couple of hours and our facility received minor damage to a roof structure but everyone seems to be safe and we are giving all of our well wishes for all the residents of the area, our people and their families as well as of all the other residents as well.
The second quarter for us was a good, solid quarter.
It was not a fantastic quarter but it was a good quarter.
We saw lots of good things occurring and we are very pleased and encouraged by these good news.
The lead for our story is our new acquisition; Cincinnati Sub Zero is performing very well.
We are very impressed with the products, the markets that we are attacking, the management team and the leadership there.
This is a very good sign for us.
It gives us entrance into the medical market which we have been studying for quite some time.
It also gives us an entrance into the industrial heating and cooling environmental test chambers which is a good solid business which we are very excited about as well.
The acquisition of Cincinnati Sub Zero provides us a clearer path to being able to satisfy our previous work being done on our Navy contract and a subsequent contract that we now have for the Air Force for similar types of products.
So all in all, that has been a very, very good situation for us and we are very pleased.
Many of our products are responding exactly as we had hoped.
We are seeing continued strong growth from our heated steering wheel businesses.
It is up over 20%.
The heated ventilated business is doing very well as it is being introduced into the moderate and mid range vehicle lines, being well accepted across the board and several of our businesses are doing extremely well.
The electronics business continues to make progress in its launch preparation as does our battery thermal management business.
We did see softness in the growth rate of our climate control seat business and that is attributable to a couple of programs that have been shifted out, moved away from its initial launch dates that were anticipated to be early this year.
This was discussed in our last quarter results call and it has continued into the second quarter.
We also have seen very impactful results due to the oil and gas industry constriction with our global power business.
The oil businesses has seen a tremendous amount of push out on their order rates, their businesses are much more capital driven and the oil and gas industry issues have now gotten down to us and their business continues to be pushed back into next year.
We are not receiving cancellations at the moment but we are receiving push outs and those push outs are going to impact our revenue and have impacted our revenue in a soft way.
We are going to continue pushing and talking to new customers about new products.
We've got lots of exciting things coming but we are going to today do as we normally do.
We are going to have <UNK> explain in his normal, clear and concise way, all of the numbers and the factors of the business and then we will open the floor for discussions.
<UNK>.
Good morning, everyone.
Thanks for joining us today.
I just want to mention that our earnings for the 2016 second quarter were $0.50 a share on a fully diluted basis.
This included one-time transaction expenses and purchase accounting adjustments associated with the CSV acquisition.
Without these expenses, our diluted earnings per share would have been $0.59.
This represents an increase of $0.06 or 11% over the second quarter of 2015.
The improvement came from our continued product revenue growth including the new sales from CSZ and favorable margin performance offset by higher operating expenses.
As mentioned, we acquired CSZ on April 1, so we had a full quarter of results with the new company during this year's second quarter.
CSZ's reported revenue of $17 million and operating income of $1.6 million and adjusted EBITDA of $2.3 million during the quarter before the impact of purchase accounting adjustments, those purchase accounting impacts included additional depreciation and amortization of intangible assets totaling $320,000 and a one-time additional cost associated with a fair market value adjustment for inventory on an acquisition base of $4 million.
That is a one-time adjustment that we won't see again in a future period.
Those are all added back with these amounts that I'm stating for the earnings and EBITDA.
This quarter our gross margin was 32.4% after adjusting for the one-time purchase accounting for inventory adjustments for CSZ that I just mentioned.
This amount was 1.6% higher than prior year amount of 30.8% mainly due to the higher gross margin at CSZ and some other improvements.
Our operating expenses were $49.1 million during the second quarter.
This was $10.1 million higher than the prior year period.
About half of this increase was attributable to the new operating expenses of CSZ since the acquisition.
These totaled $5.6 million.
Our main increase represents additional resources, primary additional employees in engineering and development positions which are supporting the many new business initiatives we are working on at the Company.
These include the battery thermal management which <UNK> mentioned.
This will launch in about a year from now.
The new electronics business award that we are now working on developing further and our new battery management initiative and quite a few others that we are working on at various stages.
Our first-quarter adjusted EBITDA was $35.5 million.
Again when adding back the one-time purchase accounting adjustment for inventory associated with CSZ, this was $1.6 million or 5% higher than that of the prior year.
Just real quick on the balance sheet, we continue to be ---+ have a very strong balance sheet.
We had cash totaling $132 million at the end of the quarter.
We had borrowed the funds required to acquire CSZ which totaled $75 million during the first quarter but have since repaid approximately $30 million out of our cash reserve for this revolver borrowing that we did.
Our available liquidity from both cash reserves and our revolving line of credit capacity totaled about $260 million at the end of the quarter.
So again, we have lots of liquidity to run the business.
<UNK>, those are my initial comments.
I will turn it back to you.
All right, thanks, <UNK>.
Good job as usual.
Operator, I think we are ready to open the phones for questions from the field.
I would say really that is about what we see in terms of the directional growth.
We are as we said in our press release, we are indicating that we expect full-year growth for 2016 to be at the low end of our guidance at around 10% and I would say that roughly speaking <UNK> will correct me here very quickly as soon as I say this, but I think you will roughly see about 5% of that from the CSZ acquisition, three quarters of that businesses' operation during this year will fall under our P&L and you would see about 5% impact on our total revenue from that.
<UNK>, is that correct.
That is correct.
Well the growth rate in the auto business is kind of episodic so what we predicted, what we actually commented on in the first quarter where we saw some programs that didn't release and were actually deferred for a year, that impact carries over for the full-year but we won't see be impact from this rather happy programs until sometime early next year.
So we aren't going to see a resurgence of 15% and 20% growth rate I don't believe but we will see continued strength in the marketplace.
We have an interesting thing coming for us in the third quarter, we had a historic quarter of revenue for our global power thermal electric group.
The business in that one particular quarter, it was an accident of scheduling but it was a tremendous amount of volume that went out so the third-quarter comps are very difficult for us to match up with global power now falling on harder times.
But in general, the core business we see, we do see some strengthening in the base business.
So we are fairly confident right now that the 10% looks solid for the full-year based upon what we see in terms of releases for the third and early releases for the fourth quarter.
Certainly, <UNK>.
For years we said that the heated and cooled seat, our premier premium seat was targeted for the luxury market place and that luxury marketplace while it is a very good market to be in, it is also one of the smaller segments of the market globally.
We have targeted the heated and cooled business for the luxury market and have been very successful in that arena.
We have also commented in the past and have said publicly that we believe that the market for heat/vent products is significantly larger than that, orders of magnitude larger than the heat/cool business.
We are beginning to see strong interest in that market now in the target market which is the midrange market.
There's two reasons for that being a critical combination.
The first is power.
The electrical power consumption of a thermal electric driven heated and cooled seat is significant and in the midrange vehicles, power is at a premium.
So many of the vehicles that are looking at adding a comfort feature for seat occupants in their cars are challenged being able to find the amount of power thermal electric needs.
There is also the cost impact of course.
In a midrange vehicle, a premium type of vehicle is something that is not in the target market for the demographic customer range.
So we have always expected the heat/vent business to be much larger than the heat/cool business but we also think it is going to be a very nice growth opportunity for us over the next five years.
So we do see continued strength in heat/vent and we see strength in heat/cool but we also believe that heat/vent will overtake heat/cool over the next few years in terms of contributing to our growth.
We also will see some conversion, there will be some people who added heat/cooled to their vehicle lines because simply there weren't any better choices for them to make and they still suffer from the same issues of power and price.
So we will see some of the people who had been buying heat/cool switch over to heat/vent and that will be happening in the future as well.
So I think you are going to continue to see good solid growth and strength out of the heat/cooled and heat/vent business which we refer to as the climate controlled seat business but the dynamics in the markets will shift a bit where heat/vent will overtake and eventually surpass dramatically the heat/cool business.
The margins for us on both of those two segments are very comparable and we are very happy with the opportunity to see kind of the new segment for us open up to be able to add to our original heat/cooled marketplace.
Sure.
Obviously the heat/cooled product has a couple of unique factors.
We have a group of technologies that we know better than anybody in the world, we know how to design, install, implement and manage a system with a thermoelectric cooler generator.
This is critical when you are trying to increase the time to comfort for seat occupants and this is a particularly handy thing when you are targeting the high-end consumer who is focused on creature comforts in the cabin.
If you are not looking for that or if you are not as concerned about time to comfort and you have more time for the HVAC system in the car to aid in the seat occupant comfort, then you can use the heat/vent system and that is what we are really referring to is the be biggest differentiation here is the time to comfort factor.
So when we designed all of the heat/cooled systems, we had to become experts at air distribution, at air movement devices, channeling throughout seats, how to manage these systems themselves for noise, for vibration, how to learn how to install them and we have essentially had about a 15-year head start on anybody else in the marketplace.
It is more susceptible to competition in the marketplace.
Several of our customers in fact have attempted to design their own systems, most notably some of the European, German luxury carmakers have their own designs of heat/vent systems but in our view, these are inappropriately placed in many of the high-end German luxury vehicles.
And we see that as a big opportunity for our heat/cooled systems.
That is another big area of potential growth for us.
Many of these German luxury carmakers set the standard for luxury worldwide.
Offering a heat/vent system in a very, very high-end German luxury car where the global customer is very focused on creature comforts and technology is we believe an opportunity for Gentherm to be able to introduce our product line.
On the heat/vent side, we know how to do it better than anybody in the world.
Not only know how to do it, we are actually very good, we are the largest supplier in the world.
So our strengths there are a real advantage.
We also have some techniques that we have been able to patent and be able to prevent people from copying what we do.
We have successfully enforced these patents in the marketplace and I think all of our competitors are very aware of our keen interest to protect our intellectual property and our ideas.
So I would say that in general it is more susceptible to competition and the best way to fight that is to be the best in the business, have the best design product at the most competitive prices and to most importantly be able to deliver to your customer standards and the automotive industry has the highest quality and service standards in the world.
So we believe we are uniquely qualified and uniquely positioned and have a very unique product line in the heat/vent systems.
You are going to have to pay an extra quarter, you got a lot of questions out of your one question.
I think it is a little bit of excitement but I think it is actually good execution for the local team.
They have done a great job there, a good team.
They've got great leadership and they've got great products.
What we are going to bring to their business opportunity is more scope.
We are going to be able to go after larger international markets.
We are going to be able to go after new verticals for their core technologies and we are certainly going to be able to focus on the medical side of the world for them as well.
Our excitement about our progress with the Navy and now the Air Force contract for patient warming systems are going to be really, really big drivers for them in the future.
Being a part of a larger company, they have more scope now, they have more financial resources available to them.
Our initial project whenever we look at a new acquisition is getting to know the markets, getting to know the management team, getting to know what their strategies are and trying to find ways that we can help.
With CSZ, we found an excellent management team in place.
They have good leadership, they have a very good strategy, a little capital will be helpful for them and our international scope, being able to introduce them to locations and markets and customers in Europe and in Asia I think are going to be very, very helpful in the long run.
But even with that said, we see very good response from their customers and their markets coming up in the future quarters.
Unlike the auto business, their business and the global power business has a longer lead time.
These are custom devices in many cases and so when we look forward into the booked orders, we see very, very strong results and we are very excited about our new partners at Cincinnati Sub Zero.
All right.
Don't forget that quarter.
Well, we are at our core, we are a technology company and technology requires you to be innovative and be creative and think about the problems in a different way and that requires technical talent to be able to do this.
So we do not see a flattening out, we see lots of new opportunities coming for us.
Some of the base businesses that we have engaged in today as an example, the electronics business, we are going to continue to build capacities and capabilities there hopefully forever.
These are interesting products, they are interesting challenges that this team is trying to attack and it requires a full plethora of good skilled people to be able to come in and help us design, develop and implement these new technologies.
Our strategy in the electronics business as an example, was to build a core team and then with that core team establish manufacturing capability.
Once we had manufacturing capability online and running, then expand the team to be able to go after outside business beyond our own business which was roughly $100 million worth of electronic controlling devices, something we understood very well and knew very well and we got all of those assets in place and now we have our first really significant outside contract.
It has been announced, it has been discussed and it is something that we as a company see as the perfect example and opportunity.
Now we have that first contract and we can take that technology to many other customers, all of that requires additional staff, additional team, additional capacity.
So as businesses grow, you invest in those businesses.
These businesses are valuable to us.
The margins are healthy, the growth rates are strong and the opportunity for us to incorporate a full what we would call a system-level product as opposed to a component supplier is very high if you have these types of capabilities.
The same situation holds true in our battery businesses.
We initially sought to find ways to cool batteries operating in the automotive industry in the field and we were given the challenge by a couple of very good, solid significant customers.
We have worked on that challenge and came up with a very unique and innovative design to be able to satisfy not only a cooling requirement but 0also a very complex packaging requirement and always of course in the auto business, we are challenged by cost.
So we were able to come up with a great idea and that led us into broader applications, additional customers for these types of technologies and as we were into that, many of these customers are asking for additional solid suppliers who understand electrical system management and have asked us to look at electronics, some of the management systems that are required to coordinate and manage the charge and discharge of the battery cycles inside the car.
So that is almost exactly the perfect picture of what we would like to do.
We have taken our skills in heating and cooling and we have converted those and we have added this, multiplied those by having the capacity to build electronics including high-power electronics and management systems for battery systems and that is leading us deeper into the energy management system.
So all of those things require additional talent.
In some cases new talent and as new challenges arise from our entree into a segment.
So this is not something that we see we are going to flatten out and cut off additional investment in R&D.
In fact I am pretty excited about spending more money in R&D because that means more opportunities are coming our way.
Certainly.
There is all types of ways to cool things.
The traditional method is a compressed gas system where you push coolant through a very complex network of systems from the engine cabin all the way back to where batteries are stored.
These are expensive, they are expensive not only in terms of cost but also the complexity, the design of your vehicle and the additional feature that has to be added to keep these devices cool.
The beauty of thermal electrics which is our unique differentiator is that it is a self-contained and can be isolated from the rest of the HVAC system of the car and can be targeted and packaged directly with the battery packs wherever they are in the vehicle.
The system itself is actually very, very low profile and very slim and can fit inside usually an existing battery pack without a major redesign of a vehicle or a tear up of the vehicle which is very costly for a carmaker.
This is the biggest thing.
A lot of people including us by the way, we have design systems that simply use air and in some applications air is sufficient.
Certain battery types as an example a simple lead acid battery that is inside of the engine compartment of a vehicle in very hot ambient operating conditions simply blowing air over the battery or through the enclosure for the battery is sufficient to keep damage from occurring.
In other types of batteries, there are many types of batteries that are highly sensitive to temperature particularly to heat.
This is the core of the problem that we have been able to resolve.
If you have any type of lithium types batteries, these things don't like to ever be above 50 degrees seat.
So if you have a system where you can protect that battery pack from seeing 50 degree temperatures, then you have reduced the warranty cost and increased the service life of the battery pack and these things are quite expensive.
An example of a European 48 volt pack for a typical car in the European market sells for around EUR600 to EUR700 per piece.
That is a significant investment on the OEM and on the consumer's part when they buy a vehicle with stop start or a mild hybrid type vehicle.
So this package that we have using thermal electrics is a very, very unique feature and that sets us apart from the average company.
Yes, I think they actually were.
I can't, no.
I don't know it.
I'm not being coy, I don't know what the numbers are.
It is a very dynamic environment when you are launching a vehicle and some vehicles get launched or in many cases we are being added to a vehicle, that is probably more the case here where we are being added to an existing vehicle and the decision to do that can be made literally at the last minute if they decide that they don't want to go.
The decision to go is a very complex decision, it takes years of development and effort and testing and investment frankly in that so getting ready to go is very difficult.
To decide to defer or delay is actually ---+ can be made at the last minute.
It is not unheard of in the auto industry to decide that other factors in the vehicle, we were never the case here where we were the driving factor behind that but other factors in the vehicle may drive the decision to try to reduce the complexity of a midyear change or a model launch.
No, we have no control over it.
I think so.
We have been targeting that low 30s has been our objective for five years and we believe we have gotten our operations and our business model tuned to about that range.
So we are pleased with how the gross margins have turned out and we obviously always want to have better margins and we are focusing on programs to try to improve that in the future but for right now we are right on target with where we wanted to be with gross margins.
I think I would add to that, we have various margins on different products in different times and so we operate in a range plus or minus 1%, 1.5%.
We are probably at the upper end of that range right there might be lower quarters or there might be better quarters but in that range.
That is a good point, gross margin is driven by product mix.
Yes, their business is driven by basically a capital investment project so when we see their business, it is not like a regular recurring restocking business.
People implement programs, the pipelines are being built, they are being serviced to maintain when they are run and being run hard.
When they are not being run hard or they are not being built, there is no demand for the product so what we are seeing is kind of the new type of business kind of fall off and what we are left with is the service and the lingering pieces of the old projects that are coming in.
So no, we don't expect the second half of this year to pick up and we won't expect to see big activities or huge changes until oil and gas recovers.
And by the way, we are most directly focused on the gas pipeline industry.
We are not so strong in the oilfield business.
We are much stronger in gas and gas is continuing to hold up pretty well in terms of demand worldwide and will certainly be the petroleum-based products back to the market much more rapidly.
But like with some of our other businesses, this market was, our segment of the market was very slow.
We trailed the front end of the downturn in oil and gas but we will probably be pretty quick to come back as soon as the market strengthens and we start seeing demand again, the market will come back and they will require and push our factories.
So we are taking advantage of this down time in prepping our operations and getting our team ready and beginning to examine new markets on a global basis to be able to be ready for that upturn when it comes.
We will have some dribs and drabs of revenue as these things start to grow but when we are referring to a launch in 2017, the full volume will start at one of our programs in 2017 and then the second program will follow in 2018.
So there will be actually be some small revenues here and there as the customers buy early stage production runs but it won't be anything significant until 2017 and 2018.
<UNK>, would you like to comment on that.
It hasn't changed, it has always been sort of getting started in 2017 as the program starts to come on in the latter half of the year but then it starts to ramp up because one of the programs has several vehicles to it and they come online over a period of time, a couple of years.
We are very focused on achieving our corporate goal of growing 10% to 15% per year and we believe that we have the underpinnings for that to continue in 2017 and actually maybe even accelerate in 2018 and 2019.
So generally speaking I think we are still pretty good with our corporate objective.
(multiple speakers) The expenses for CSZ which are obviously ongoing but there's no one-time things that go away in the operating expenses.
So the answer is yes.
Thank you very much, Jessie.
We would like to thank everyone for joining us today.
We have had a very good year so far.
We have been able to successfully expand our operations and our support in a little bit of a slowdown and some of the increasing demand for our business.
We have been able to open new facilities in Vietnam which is a beautiful new factory, lots of good people in there working, helping us satisfy current and future demand in our Asian market places.
We just last week were in Europe and we went and saw the grand opening of our Macedonian facility, another beautiful state-of-the-art factory staffed with world-class technology and a tremendous team of people and a new staff of we have 300 new associates there all completing their training and getting themselves ready to help us satisfy the future growth in the European market and that will also be the manufacturing site for our first products in the battery thermal management businesses and all of these things are on schedule and performing to expectations.
In fact, they are exceeding expectations not only of ourselves but also of our customers.
We will be opening a new Mexican facility here in North America to help satisfy the future demands of our North America business.
And so this growth, this expansion is very, very good and puts us at the forefront of all the automotive industry and being able to satisfy these demands.
In addition to that, we are making great progress in moving into our strategic initiatives.
We have found great partners in the medical product lines that are going to help us bring to production and bring to the marketplaces both government, military and the general medical industry some of our heating and heating and cooling products for the medical markets.
We got a bonus in that we also got into the industrial chamber business which is going to provide another new market for us on a global basis and another engine of growth.
We got into batteries by knowing how to cool batteries and that has led us into an additional operational activity for the electronics that control batteries.
And as we look at that, there is lots of opportunities in the energy management systems and so we made an acquisition of a group of people and technologies that would help expand our ability to understand how battery systems need to be managed and designed and that is going to provide tremendous opportunity for us as a future growth driver and a new place to expand our knowledge base.
And just the core electronics technology, we bring an innovator's approach to a business that in many areas is commoditized but we have been able to find very unique segments in the electronics world that we think will be tremendous growth for us and a good opportunity for us for a long time in the future.
We are very happy with the business, we are very happy with the conditions.
We continue to struggle with market conditions where they exist.
We continue to win and we have a very strong balance sheet and we have all the capacities necessary to continue operations as we have seen them in the past.
And we also are adding to that additional pieces that we see necessary for us to be able to achieve our long-term growth objectives of 10% to 15% revenue growth per year with a small bit of profit at the end of every day.
So we thank you all for joining and we ask you to join us again in 90 days.
Thank you, operator.
