Hexcel Corporation (NYSE:HXL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Sheila Kahyaoglu: Great. And then maybe, Nick, one for you. In your prepared remarks, you mentioned investing in new programs years in advance of them coming to market. Can you talk about how that could manifest itself in your P&L?

Nick Stanage: Yes. So — boy, there’s so many areas and having just gone through our R&T review, I can tell you, from a performance standpoint, we have several initiatives related to our fibers and the efficiency of our lines and the mechanical performance and the throughput, which, as you know, we have many lines and we replicate that. So it translates into a big opportunity and a big boost for Hexcel. So our improvements, our initiatives are certainly performance based, but they’re also processing based. How do we help our customers process materials so that they can lay down materials faster, they can cure them faster, and ultimately drive to a lower life cycle cost and a better efficiency for them? So there’s not an area within our portfolio, whether you’re talking about fibers or resin systems or prepregs or infusion products or other new technologies that were not really ready to disclose yet are being worked aggressively with our customers.

And again, there’s a lot of pull for the improved performance, the improved throughput and the improved cost effectiveness.

Sheila Kahyaoglu: Thank you.

Operator: And it looks like we do have time for one more question this morning. We’ll take that now from Michael Ciarmoli at Truist.

Michael Ciarmoli: Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I don’t know, Nick or Patrick, but as we think about sort of the margins and the capacity additions, you’re not going to give guidance here for ’24. But is this excess overhead in terms of adding capacity and labor, is that going to be a drag in the ’24 as well? I mean presumably, if you — rates are increasing and you got to have more additions next year, I mean, do we have to look more out to ’25 or ’26 by the time you get to that kind of stated margin? I mean, it looks like, I guess, Streets got you at 15.5% margins next year. And just thinking about supply chain challenges and what we just saw here, just — should we expect a little bit of a headwind in the next year as well?

Patrick Winterlich: I think — I mean, as I said, I think to Myles earlier, I mean we’re still confident to target the mid-teens margins as we build our revenue. Now lining up as you’re alluding to our cost base with the topline and getting those two things in sync and you kind of tailor into that some of the inflationary pressures that we certainly saw this year around energy, which has certainly been a headwind and perhaps a little bit of labor above the norm, but I wouldn’t know to play the labor part. But we remain confident in the general outlook that we are going to get to those mid-teens margins. We are going to generate a lot of cash over the next two, three years, as Nick called out in his part of the script, is going to sort of allow a lot of capital deployment opportunities, which we would look to do as wisely and smartly as we can.

So we will manage quarter-by-quarter. You’re absolutely right. We’re not going to guide here to 2024, but we remain optimistic, very optimistic on the general outlook.

Michael Ciarmoli: Got it. Thanks, guys.

Operator: Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude the Hexcel third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. We’d like to thank you all so much for joining us today and wish you all a great remainder of your day. Goodbye.

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