Jost Werke SE

SWB:JST

Earnings Call Transcript

[Joachim Dürr]

Good morning, everybody, from Neu-Isenburg, and a warm welcome to our Q1 2021 investors conference call. I'll start with the highlights of Q1 2021 and can tell you that JOST had a very strong start into the new year. JOST has achieved new sales records of EUR 257 million. And our adjusted EBIT doubled to EUR 29.8 million and the adjusted EBIT margin rose 11.6% -- to 11.6%. One year ago, we could prove the flexibility on the way down when the volumes collapsed. Now, with the new increasing demand, our high operational flexibility allowed us to swiftly ramp up the capacity. We are benefiting from a lower cost base and from fixed cost degression effects, but we also see increasing headwinds from rising steel prices and logistic costs. Our net debt has reduced, and our leverage further improved to a leverage ratio of 1.76, which Christian will explain in detail later. And we can confirm our outlook for 2021. How have the markets performed in Q1 2021? And here, it kind of depends on who you ask. We have a lot of information from the market analysts, which show a rather low improvement of the market, but we also have announcements from our OEMs that go up to 23% improvement in Europe, for example. And it always depends on the individual OEM, depending on how his previous year was and how the current year is running, some have had downward trends in the previous year already in Q1, some only had them into -- in Q2. Others are profiting from the good markets right now and others have restrictions in semiconductors that did not allow them to fully produce this year. So that's why we see a very heterogeneous picture when we look at the OEMs worldwide. Overall, in Europe, the market is between 2% and 23%. So we would think like an average of 15% above previous year for trucks, around 12% to 10% for trailers and the tractor market is very strong with an increase of 23%. JOST has performed in Europe with 27% increase in our reported sales, so we could use our flexibility to outperform the market. In North America, Class 8 production went up between 1% and 5%. Some OEMs show a bit higher numbers. So it could be a little bit higher than that on average. The trader production between 0% and 5%. Also here, some OEMs are a little more optimistic. On tractors, we had a very strong market of plus 31%, and our reported sales of 23% overall in North America also show a very strong market performance. Asia Pacific Africa, the market compared to previous year, plus 91%, mainly driven by China and also a little bit India. And if you remember, in China, in Q1 2020, we had the pandemic already very strongly in place. And we had to shut down our facility, and it didn't even come back after the Chinese New Year until the mid of March. So that's why you see the big growth in the APA number, mainly driven by China. There, we have the highest operational flexibility. And this year, we could report a 94% improvement as compared to last year. Now let me hand over to Christian to explain to you the key financials.

[Christian Terlinde, CFO & Member of the Executive Board]

Yes. Thank you very much, Joachim. And also from my side, a very warm welcome to our Q1 conference call. Joachim mentioned it already. It was a very, very strong start into 2021, and the markets are really in almost all regions pointing to further growth in the year. So let's start with Europe. In Europe, JOST achieved a very strong growth in Q1, both in the transport and agriculture business line, with reported sales being up 26.6% to EUR 155 million. If we adjust this for FX and we actually take out the Ålö contribution in 2020, which was not accounted in 2020 because we acquired Ålö in Jan -- in February 2020, the organic growth was still at close to 17%, actually at 16.7%. The agricultural market grew faster than sales by 56%. The agriculture grew faster than transport due to the stronger underlying demand. Trucks and trailer demand accelerated further during Q1, showing a very positive trend. So also, our aftermarket in Europe remained on a fairly stable basis of over 28% of all sales. The -- if I turn to the result, the adjusted EBIT grew faster than sales, and it reached EUR 16.5 million at the end of Q1, and that is an improvement over prior year of 56%. Basically, you can hear now what -- or see now what we are -- we've been speaking about also during last year and the years before, we have a very high utilization rate in our plants in Europe as around the world. And that means, with our flexible operating business model and rather fixed SG&A costs, we are now capitalizing on this structure with the -- where we have a strong fixed cost aggression, and this is now very favorable for our overall business model. And bear in mind that Europe is the region which bears basically most of the overhead costs. So now we are finally seeing again an adjusted EBIT margin which is at 10.6%, now double-digit, and we are quite happy with this development. If I now turn to North America. North America has been a very, very positive development also in 2020, and now this continues into '21. We are seeing a reported growth of 23%. Organically, the growth is even 28%. And we can say that the agriculture business boosted sales significantly. If we adjust this for the foreign exchange headwinds of minus 11% so -- in 2020, the average exchange rate for the U.S. dollar compared to the euro was below EUR 1.10 and -- dollars. And now it's above EUR 1.20. So you can really see there was a very negative impact from foreign exchange rates. But if we take that into account and the Ålö contribution in January, you see that our organic growth in '21 was already 28% in North America. In transport, the market share gains, which we have seen in the years before, really contributed, also stabilizing our overall business with strong aftermarket, and the aftermarket performance was 26% of sales.If we now take a look at the results in North America, we are at EUR 4.1 million. That's an improvement of 26% over prior year. The margin improved slightly. And we are also here seeing the operating leverage effect where we are having higher sales, leading to fixed cost digression in North America. However, North America is -- at least in Q1 was probably the region which was most impacted by the already mentioned and -- for most of you, visible increases in steel prices as well as higher logistics costs. And the challenge was really to bring products from especially Asia and also Europe into North America, because the lack of transportation availability really played a big role in our results in North America in Q1. Now I would like to turn to Asia Pacific Africa. If you recall our situation one year ago, you may remember that we have and we still have it, we still -- we have our biggest production plant in that region, in China, in the city of Wuhan. And obviously, Wuhan was the epicenter and the origin of the coronavirus. So in Q1 2020, our plant was basically closed for the month of February and March of 2020. So our sales volumes were extremely low. And this is now the complete opposite, to be honest. You can see here an increase in sales, from EUR 24 million to EUR 47 million. That converts into a reported growth of 93.5% or organically 96%. And yes, of course, this is -- the 2 missing month of sales in China are playing the major role, but overall, the market has been booming in Asia Pacific, and China specifically, in basically Q2, Q3, Q4 of last year, and this growth continues in Q1 2021. So very, very positive development. Aftermarket portion is not as strong as in other regions, but bearing in mind how much OE sales we're having here. Aftermarket is still around 21%. If I now take a look at the results, you see that our adjusted EBIT improved by, it's hard to say, 3,000%. But of course, looking at the very low base of EUR 0.3 million last year, it's no surprise. I think it's more telling if we look at the EBIT margin, which improved from 1.1% to 17.5%. So on a very similar level that we had achieved also in Q4 of last year. Very nice development. And it's certainly very much backed by the situation in China, but -- and this is also promising, also, India is recovering nicely. We will need to see what will happen during Q2. As you know, the pandemic has significantly increased the cases of infected people in India. So we will need to see what will happen for the coming months. But other than that, while India was very, very weak in 2019 and '20, I think India is now on a recovery path, and we'll all keep our fingers crossed that this -- the pandemic outbreak, again, in India will not have such a negative impact as it may -- is could happen. So overall, very high utilization rates in the region. Favorable product mix. Also, a still very high proportion of heavy-duty couplings in China. And overall, we are seeing this development also in the Pacific region. So that is Australia, New Zealand, but also in South Africa. Negatively, to be mentioned again, obviously, the rising steel prices, which have a slightly dampening effect on our results. So let's turn to the group. So overall, a growth of 34.2%, organically, 27.4%. And we've now surpassed the EUR 250 million mark for the first time in our history in one quarter. Very, very happy to report that. Ålö, again, was consolidated only from February 2020 on. So one month of sales in -- sales and result of Ålö is missing in 2020. And we did -- that means, to compare to prior year, you see a slightly lower organic growth. Also bearing in mind that for the group, the foreign exchange headwinds amounted to minus 5%. The strong contribution, as I've laid out, certainly came from Asia Pacific, Africa, followed by Europe and then North America. Our overall aftermarket share was 26% last month -- last quarter. And this means our adjusted EBIT improved from EUR 14.7 million to EUR 29.8 million, so close to EUR 30 million in one quarter. Also there, I believe this is a record result for JOST. The adjusted EBIT margin improved significantly. We are way beyond the double-digit range. We're 11.6% in Q1. And very happy to report that. Again, the strong sales growth led to a very good deleveraging and better utilization of the company. The product mix was favorable. And the recovery in the APA region, especially compared to one year ago, really took place, and we're well on track. So that leads me now to the net income bridge, and trying to make it rather short, you see a very normal development. First time again that we achieved EUR 19 million in net income in this quarter. Then going back to an EBIT of -- a reported EBIT of EUR 21 million. Then you see our typical adjustments of the purchase price allocation, depreciation or amortization of EUR 7 million, A very small amount of further exception of EUR 1 million, leading to an adjusted EBIT of EUR 29 million. And then the breakdown to the adjusted net income, typical: finance result, EUR 1 million; pro forma tax rate of 30%. Brings us down to EUR 8 million, brings -- means EUR 8 million tax burden. And adjusted net income now at EUR 20 million, which is more or less in line with the actual net income, but much, much better than the adjusted net income one year ago, which amounted only to EUR 6 million. And actually, our reported net income in the last -- in the first quarter of 2020 was negative. The adjusted earnings per share increased from EUR 0.39 to EUR 1.35. Also, this is a significant improvement, we're quite proud of. So let's turn to the balance sheet a little bit. Our return on capital employed, finally back to normal levels of 14.2% in Q1. The equity ratio is close to the 30% mark, 29.7%. Also, that is something we're happy about. And our leverage, Joachim mentioned that already. We were fortunate to bring it below 2x at the end of last year. And now I can -- I'm happy to report that we brought it down even further to 1.76x at the end of March, while the net debt stayed rather flat at EUR 207 million. Cash flow and working capital development. Our cash conversion rate remained very high at 89.4%, and we are happy to report that our free cash flow is still positive. If you take a closer look into the reports that we send out for Q1, you will see that we have had -- we had to spend quite significant amounts of cash on working capital. Of course, the sales increase took its toll on cash because we're still collecting the receivables. Also, the challenges in the supply chain means that we had to increase our working capital also in terms of supplies. And therefore, our free cash flow is positive at EUR 1.6 million, but the cash conversion rate remains at 89%, so very good. CapEx, 1.5% of sales in the first quarter. This is somewhat normal. First quarter is typically rather a slower investment quarter. We're still on track to achieve the 2.5% that we targeted for this year, as we targeted every year. And our networking capital remains at the 20% range that we will -- I'm quite sure, we will bring it down below 20% at the end of the year. But typically, given such a strong sales development over the first 3 months, it's not surprising that the networking capital is rather high right now, but it's a good development to stay. So that basically concludes my portion. And I would like to hand it back over to Joachim to give you a few words on the outlook for the remainder of the year. Thank you very much.

[Joachim Dürr]

Thanks, Christian. And I was just informed that the participants on the webcast has suffered from a small technical problem. So to the benefit of those on the webcast, let me give you a quick summary of the highlights I presented at the very beginning, and some of them Christian already mentioned. We had a very strong start in the year 2021. The market that was strong in Q4 2020 carried on, and we could benefit from that. And JOST therefore achieved a new sales record for the group in one quarter of EUR 257 million. Our EBIT doubled to EUR 29.8 million and the adjusted EBIT margin rose to 11.6%. A year ago, we had to prove our flexibility on the way down when the volumes came down and the shutdowns in the different countries were initiated. Now with the increase coming back, we could benefit from our high operational flexibility that allowed us to swiftly ramp up our capacity. Benefiting from the lower cost base and the fixed cost digression effects, but also from increasing headwinds from rising steel prices and logistics costs, we could achieve this strong result. And we confirm our outlook for 2021, but I'll come to a bit more detail on that. So let's come to the market outlook. For 2021, we expect the -- in Europe the truck market to grow somewhere between 15% and 20%. We are seeing very strong call-offs from our OEM customers. But we also see some customers taking out production slots because of restrictions in semiconductor supplies and other supply chain issues. On trailers, we expect also 15% to 20% increase over the year, and tractors, a less pronounced, slight increase of 0% to 5%. In North America, we expect a much stronger -- we and the market analysts, on a much stronger increase of up to 40% on trucks, and the same on trailers, on agricultural tractors, from 10% to 15%, also a more pronounced increase than in Europe. Asia Pacific Africa is more of a complex picture. The truck demand is expected to decline slightly, mainly driven by China. China has the new legislation that is due for emissions, the China 6 legislation for trucks by mid of this year, and the expectation is that the truck demands will almost collapse after that. However, we do expect that the other countries in the region, India, Oceania, Africa, continue with an increase in volume. And on trailers, that effect will be less pronounced because trailers obviously are not part of the emission regulation, and therefore, we don't expect the same strong decline in China. What does it mean for JOST? We confirm our outlook for 2021. Maybe with a bit more positive spin than in the past. We expect sales to be up double-digit percent year-over-year. And we also expect the adjusted EBIT to follow, and maybe to follow even a little stronger than sales, in the double -- low double-digit percent development. So that's our adjusted EBIT margin will be higher than the previous year. And I can share with you that our internal ambition is that we also here achieve a double-digit number. Our planned CapEx will stay in the 2.5% range that we usually target. So let me summarize the most important information of the call. We've had a very successful start into 2021, with all regions and both business lines contributing significantly to the achieved record sales. Our high operational flexibility and our local-to-local approach allows us to talk with the logistic disruptions and the ramp-up and -- to ramp up our capacities swiftly. Therefore, we could significantly boost our profitability in all regions, but especially in Asia Pacific and Africa, resulting from higher utilization rates and a good product mix. We're focusing to push forward our product innovations in transport and to grow our agricultural business in Asia and in Latin America. And with that, JOST is well positioned to achieve our financial targets for 2021 and to continue our profitable growth story. Thank you very much for your interest. We are looking forward to your questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We'll now take our first question from Nicolai Kempf from Deutsche Bank.

[Nicolai Kempf, Research Analyst]

It's Nicolai Kempf here from Deutsche Bank. First, very well done on the first quarter, so congrats on that. My question would be on the capacity. Are you able to further increase your capacity? Or are you already fully booked out over the next months or until summer? And a second one, can you give a bit more color on the tight supply chain? I think the semiconductor is not your big issue. But what are the other issues in supply chain? And third question, we heard from some competitors that there's also a shortage of blue-collar workers in the U.S. Do you also see the same in the market?

[Joachim Dürr]

Yes. Thank you, Nicolai, for the questions and for the compliment. Thank you very much. Yes, capacity. We have very flexible capacity, and we usually say that up to 20% to 30% up and down is something that we can do on a very quick manner. And that's the level where we are right now. So we have more potential to increase our capacity, but that's then a little more time-consuming to adjust their capacity. But I can confirm that we are still in the volume that we can cope with. The -- our capacity in the total supply chain is not the limiting factor. Your question concerning supply chain, and I integrate that into that answer, is that the supply chain that our customers are having seems to be more complex, and that seems to be where the bottlenecks are. So we -- our capacity limitations are currently not limiting our OEM customers. Their limitations come from semiconductors. And sometimes, some other parts, we've seen some of the big OEMs in North America and also in Europe to take out production days and weeks partially. And therefore, even though that we are running at a very high capacity utilization, we are not a limiting factor. In our supply chain, we are not suffering from the semiconductors. Obviously, that's not the bottleneck for us. We are still managing very well our supply chain. So I can tell you that we don't have any constraints that limit us at this point in time. The most critical points are actually supply chains that we have in our agricultural business where we have a more complex supply chain. In there, it's the logistics capacity that is the biggest concern. So it's not so much suppliers. It's not our own plants. It's logistics capacity, but since we run in most regions, our local-for-local strategy, that we build and supply and purchase locally, we are not as much affected by that than maybe the average industry. Does that answer your question, Nicolai? Yes. Blue color workers of North America. Yes. Sorry. Indeed, that is a concern. It's more -- it's a concern in 2 ways: one, in capacity, and second, in costs. It's not limiting our capacity at this point in time. But I can tell you that the -- we have to increase somewhat the wages to bring people back, and that's a problem that the whole industry in North America has. There has even been legislation to cut down on social security to encourage people to go back to work because that seems to be an issue in some regions. So yes, we are aware of the issue, but it's currently not limiting our ability to deliver to our customers.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] As there are no further questions at this time, I would like to turn the call back for any additional or closing remarks.

[Joachim Dürr]

Okay. Thank you very much, everybody. I think we had a good Q1. And the outlook is that we will be able to continue into a very strong year. We need to be aware of the impact of the pandemic, also impact on supply chains. And we will use our flexibility to continue our growth story. So with that, thank you very much for your interest. If there's any further questions, you can always reach out to our Investor Relations, and we can answer additional questions that may come up after the call. Appreciate your interest. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

[Christian Terlinde, CFO & Member of the Executive Board]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. That will conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, ladies and gentlemen.