Barnes Group Inc. (NYSE:B) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

I think from an order perspective, as you know, that orders tend to be lumpy quarter to quarter. But from an overall standpoint, we’ve had a good start to orders for the year already, and we expect that to continue into the second half. We’re in the process of negotiating many large partnerships with OEMs as we continuously do and updating those and refreshing those. We expect to have that more of that to communicate over the balance of the year. So both on the orders side, as well as the revenue side, we expect strong trajectories in Aerospace based on our performance and based on the industry recovery. And I think that’s going to be not just an OEM effect, I think with the higher number of single airplanes flying and also the recovery of wide body and the international travel.

We also expect that we’re going to see the continued recovery on the wide body side, which is favorable to us also. So I think there’s a combination of effects that will drive the second half. And as you know, because we’re broadly linked into the industry and will be even more broadly linked following MBRO space acquisition, we actually feel really well balanced across customers, portfolios and geographies. We were confident of that second half recovery.

Myles Walton: Maybe just to ask it a different way, I just want to make sure I have the numbers right, that the first half was 10% growth. Second half, you have to be 30% growth. And I understand there’s slightly easier comps, but obviously it’s a big step function still in absolute terms in the second half that those are the right numbers that are right?

Thomas Hook: Let Julie answer the numbers question. But yes, that’s year from a comp standpoint is you’re correct.

Julie Streich: Yes, we continue to see the second half building over the first half when you look year-over-year. So last year, from a sales perspective, sales were relatively flat throughout the course of the year, and we’ve seen clearly the 10% bump in that first half and based on our order book and deliveries, we are comfortable with the capacity. A lot of it will be at our lender and our Singapore OEM facilities, and we’re — we have the backlog to get that out the door.

Myles Walton: Okay. And the converse sort of question is on the margin side, if you do that, why doesn’t that put more pressure on your margins in the second half of the year but the guidance obviously implies a pretty nice improvement in margins in the second half of the year?

Thomas Hook: I mean I’ll give you a top line answer and let Julie answer the numbers. It’s a combination of effects. There’s productivity efforts within across all of Aerospace and every single facility driving underlying productivity within the individual operational sites. But in combination of that, as you have initiatives that will be running on to renegotiate commercial terms of customer as well as the ramp output. And there’s a — there’s certainly to your point Myles a mix effect that happens across the product portfolio that we’ve seen in the second quarter. And we have these productivity offsets in commercial negotiations that on go in parallel with those things. So the projections we’ve given is our expectation the productivity and those commercial renegotiations in combination with the ramp that occurs and the net effect is as we know — we expect to see the mitigation against the mix effect based on those factors and a tailwind for us as we execute them.

And we do have confidence we’re executing the market as schedule.