JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. (NYSE:JELD) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. (NYSE:JELD) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 7, 2023

Operator: Thank you for standing by and welcome to the JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I would now like to welcome James Armstrong, Vice President of Investor Relations to begin the call. James, over to you.

James Armstrong: Thank you and good morning. We issued our third quarter 2023 earnings release last night and posted a slide presentation to the Investor Relations portion of our website, which can be found at investor.jeld-wen.com. We will be referencing this presentation during our call. Today, I’m joined by Bill Christensen, Chief Executive Officer; and Julie Albrecht, Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn it over to Bill, I would like to remind everyone that during this call, we will make certain statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our earnings release and provided in our Forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC.

JELD-WEN does not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements, including the guidance we are providing with respect to certain expectations for future results. Additionally, during today’s call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable financial measures calculated under GAAP can be found in our earnings release and in the appendix to our earnings presentation. With that, I would like to now turn the call over to Bill.

Bill Christensen: Thank you, James and thank you everyone for joining our call today. I’m pleased to report that our third quarter results were better than we expected marking the third quarter in a row that we have executed well against our short-term goals to strengthen the foundation of JELD-WEN. I want to thank the entire JELD-WEN team for their continued hard work especially as we operate in a challenging business environment and progress on our performance improvement activities. Today, I will first provide a brief overview of our third quarter results before turning it over to Julie to discuss the financial results in more detail. I will then highlight our transformation journey and share some of what you can expect from us going forward.

I’ll begin with our third quarter highlights on Slide 4. While sales were in line with our expectations, earnings were above our forecast, primarily due to continued solid price/cost results. We also continue to generate strong cash flows driven by earnings and working capital improvements. I’m also pleased that we are delivering on our commitment to simplify the business and better balance our cost structure. We completed the divestiture of our Australasia business early in the third quarter and repaid $450 million of long-term debt with the proceeds. In addition, we continue to remove fixed cost from our business, including certain site closures in North America that I’ll discuss more on the next slide. We are also actively planning actions to further improve our performance and unlock significant value for JELD-WEN shareholders, which I’ll talk about later in my remarks.

Turning to Slide 5. As part of our ongoing activities to strengthen our foundation, we continue to reduce our fixed costs with the closure or announced closure of three facilities. First, we completed the closure of our Atlanta Doors facility during the third quarter. As we discussed earlier this year, we anticipate approximately $11 million per year in EBITDA savings as a result of this site closure. Next, we are in the process of closing our international Wood Products, or IWP business in Tijuana in Mexico. This facility primarily makes specialty exterior wood doors and as consumer preferences continue to move towards fiberglass, this operation has become non-core to our business. Although the savings are relatively small at approximately $2 million a year, it is a further simplification.

Finally, we announced the closure of the Vista California Vinyl Windows manufacturing facility, which was underutilized and had a high operating cost. We expect to save approximately $8 million a year by moving the production to other facilities within our network and therefore, better utilizing existing capacity. We continue to see opportunities for further simplification of our footprint, which I look forward to speaking about in the future as we execute our plans. I’ll now turn it over to Julie, to go through our third quarter financial performance in more detail.

Julie Albrecht: Thanks Bill. Turning to Slide 7, you see our consolidated results for the third quarter of 2023. Our third quarter revenue was approximately $1.1 billion, down 5.5% from a year ago. Driven by a reduction in our core revenue due to market-driven volume reductions, partially offset by slightly higher pricing. Our adjusted EBITDA was approximately $106 million in the quarter, leading to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 9.8%. This strong year-over-year margin improvement of 150 basis points despite lower volumes, reflects our solid execution of productivity actions in areas such as site closures, headcount reductions, freight management savings, and sourcing optimization. As you see on Slide 8, our third quarter revenue decline was driven by lower volume mix of 10% and which was partially offset by 3% of price realization.

This higher pricing mostly relates to our price increases in the second half of last year to offset cost inflation. I’ll provide additional comments about our North America and Europe volume trends shortly. And also, you’ll find a revenue walk, including segment details for the third quarter and the first nine months of this year in the appendix of our earnings presentation. On Slide 9, you see that our adjusted EBITDA increased by approximately $11 million year-over-year. We generated solid profitability contributions from favorable price/cost and improved productivity, which were partially offset by the impact from lower volume mix. Related to price/cost, we are focused on pricing discipline as we continue to see inflation in our overall costs.

While inflation is lower in certain areas, we see cost pressures in areas such as labor and insurance. Additionally, we are on track to achieve approximately $100 million in cost savings this year. In the third quarter, we realized approximately $30 million of these savings that are reflected on our EBITDA bridge in productivity and SG&A. Our run rate is increasing due to the timing of actions that started earlier this year. Now, moving to our segment results on Slide 10. In the third quarter, our North America segment generated $790 million in sales, down approximately 5% from year ago levels. This was driven by a core revenue decline of 5%, due to lower volume mix of 7%, with a positive impact from price realization of 2%. North America had adjusted EBITDA of $100 million down 5% year-over-year, while margins remained stable at 12.6%.

Despite the market-driven demand weakness, our North America team is delivering solid earnings results as well as strong cash flow. A key driver to the region’s cash flow is a focus on inventory reduction which was a result of more rigorous and standardized inventory management practices. Across our North America region, the team continues to focus on identifying and executing actions to improve both operating efficiency and our working capital metrics. Europe generated $287 million in revenue and $24 million in adjusted EBITDA. Core revenues decreased by 11% in the quarter, driven by lower volume mix of 17%, which was partially offset by higher price realization of 6%. Adjusted EBITDA was 35% higher year-over-year, leading to a strong 260 basis points of margin improvement to 8.5%.

This improvement was due to positive price/cost results and solid productivity gains. Similar to North America, our Europe team is focused on delivering solid earnings and cash flows despite the ongoing volume challenges, and this focus will continue into 2024. Now, turning to the market outlook on Slide 11 and starting with North America. We are expecting a better full year for North America than we presented on our second quarter earnings call. We now expect North America volumes to be down high single digits due to slight improvements in both single-family home construction and R&R activity versus our previous expectations. In the US, higher interest rates continue to impact single-family housing starts and permits, but given the lower availability of existing homes for sale and homebuilder incentives, our outlook has improved with new home construction declining 10% to 15% year-over-year compared to our previous outlook for a 15% to 20% decline.

For our repair and remodel markets, we now anticipate full year volumes to be down in the mid-single-digit range versus the mid- to high single-digit range previously expected. After a slow start to the third quarter, we saw a pickup in our R&R activity and believe that inventories are at critically low levels throughout the channel. In Europe, we continue to anticipate that demand will be down by low double-digits as the market weakens due to the region’s ongoing macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges. Our European volume mix was down by 14% in the first nine months of this year, and we expect a fourth quarter volume mix decline similar to what we experienced in the third quarter. On the residential side, we see broad-based declines of 15% to 40% in new residential construction starts depending on the country and in some specific markets, residential construction demand is down by as much as 80%.

In addition, repair and remodel activity remains under pressure due to the continued soft macroeconomic environment. In the commercial construction market in Europe, volumes are expected to be stable in the near-term, but are beginning to show signs of declining in 2024 as the market works through backlogs and new projects are being delayed. On Slide 12, we provide our updated full year 2023 outlook for revenue and adjusted EBITDA. While we remain cautious in these continued uncertain operating conditions, we are confident in our ability to deliver our forecast and are tightening the ranges of our revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance. Further, we are raising the midpoint of our adjusted EBITDA guidance due to our solid third quarter results and our unchanged outlook for the fourth quarter.

We now expect full year 2023 revenues to be between $4.25 billion and $4.35 billion and full year adjusted EBITDA to be between $365 million and $375 million. Specific to our outlook for this year’s core revenue, our first nine-month core revenues were down by 2% versus the prior year as carryforward price increases mostly offset lower volume mix. In the fourth quarter, we expect a low double-digit decline in our core revenues due to reduced volumes combined with limited year-over-year price increases. All of this combines to support our updated full year outlook for core revenues being down 4% to 6%. Now, turning to Slide 13, you can see how our results in the first nine months of this year, combined with our outlook for the fourth quarter to support our updated full year guidance.

As I’ve described in my comments this morning, our third quarter global price/cost benefits were better than our expectations, and we continue to successfully execute our planned cost reduction initiatives. In the fourth quarter, our outlook is in line with our prior expectations, as we expect to continue delivering on our cost savings actions which mitigate the impact of lower year-over-year volumes. We remain focused on generating strong cash flows to invest in ourselves and further strengthen our balance sheet. Our year-to-date third quarter operating cash flow was $273 million, which is a $346 million improvement over the same period last year. The primary driver to this significant increase in cash flow is improved working capital management with all components of working capital contributing to the strong improvement.

We continue to see opportunities for reduced working capital as we focus on implementing best practices across our business. We are pleased to have achieved our near-term goal of net leverage below three times and have updated our medium-term target to be between two and two and a half times. I’ll now turn it back to Bill to discuss our plans for improving JELD-WEN’s financial performance.

Bill Christensen: Thanks Julie. Before I comment on our transformation journey, I want to take a second to address the goals that JELD-WEN established in 2021. Slide 15 shows the 2025 targets JELD-WEN presented at our 2021 Investor Day. Unfortunately, instead of steadily driving results towards the goals, our performance deteriorated. It is true that macroeconomic conditions have been tough since then. However, the company did not have the foundation in place to achieve these goals. As a result, we are formally withdrawing the company’s long-term targets that were communicated in 2021. As I’ll speak to in a moment, we are focused on delivering in the short-term and setting ourselves up for success with an increased focus on accountability.

Moving to Slide 16, our approach has not changed from what I’ve shared in previous earnings calls. In the short-term, we need to continue to strengthen the foundation of our business. We are making progress reducing our footprint and our operating costs by implementing basic programs such as managed transportation. However, we have a lot more to do before we can declare success and have a strong foundation to build from. We’re also beginning to prepare for the long term and are in the process of developing plans to deliver and sustain increased profitability. We are assessing opportunities to grow in each of our lines of business and want to only invest where we see potential and the right to win. This process will take time and thoughtful analysis, but we have plenty of opportunity to work with.

Turning to Slide 17, you’ll see the three phases of our transformation journey. While we are actively executing the first phase of fix the foundation, we began Phase 2 earlier this year with a comprehensive end-to-end analysis of the potential in the business including both our culture as well as our financial performance. I’ll talk more about these first two phases in the next several slides. On Slide 18, and as we’ve mentioned on today’s call, you see some of the actions we have taken to fix the foundation. We’ve already simplified our structure, selling the Australasia business in the third quarter. With the proceeds from that sale, we repaid long-term debt and reduced our net leverage below our three times near-term target. We have made significant working capital reductions, especially reducing network inventory levels and we have already taken significant steps to adjust our cost base.

Our commitment to deliver $100 million of cost savings in 2023 is on track, including, as I described earlier, the closure or announced closure of three facilities this year. As we develop the next phase of our journey, we’ve been focused on improving our culture and gathering ideas to meaningfully grow our profitability. These ideas were then put through a disciplined review process to evaluate their feasibility, cost and expected returns, both in terms of return on invested capital and organizational execution capabilities. I’m extremely pleased and optimistic about the results of this process, and I look forward to sharing more about the potential impact next quarter as we look into 2024. For now, it’s safe to say that the potential improvement to the business is substantial, and we are now sequencing a clear road map of the projects.

Turning to Slide 19. In previous earnings calls, I’ve shared my three focus areas: people, performance and strategy. Our transformation journey is now focused on the first two areas; to be able to drive the performance we want, and investors deserve, our culture needs to adapt and change. We have organized a cross-functional culture and capabilities work stream that is focused on improving trust and measuring, then improving JELD-WEN’s organizational health. This includes building the necessary capabilities and focusing on the behaviors required to reach and sustain our full potential. This team is actively addressing ways to increase accountability and performance through appropriate rewards and incentives, building manager skills, and improving safety and communication across the organization.

As we work on our culture, we’re also driving performance improvements through both growth and cost initiatives. Our growth plans don’t include plans to swing for the fences, but instead are focused on the basics such as upgrading our go-to-market processes and using training to increase our sales force effectiveness. We’re also focusing on improving our pricing capabilities as we anticipate further inflation. Most of our near-term performance efforts are on cost reductions, both accelerating and expanding on themes we already have in focus. We are rightsizing and consolidating our manufacturing network, investing in automation, and utilizing our scale to streamline sourcing among many other smaller initiatives across the organization. As one example, last week, our Board of Directors and senior leadership team visited our doors manufacturing site in Garland, Texas, where we saw firsthand the opportunities we have in areas such as automation and inventory management.

Additionally, as we indicated previously, to drive these permanent cost reductions, we’ll be investing more on ourselves as we execute on our solid pipeline of high ROIC projects. Turning to Slide 20, I look forward to sharing more on our transformation journey going forward. In our next earnings call, which will be in mid-February, we are committed to giving more color on market conditions, our 2024 guidance as well as our internal investments and action plans. We will also provide a near-term scorecard of our expectations as well as mild markers to measure our progress. We are excited about the opportunities to improve and sustain results, and I’m confident that JELD-WEN can deliver significantly improved profitability metrics. In the near-term, we expect our 2024 actions to more than overcome anticipated macroeconomic headwinds.

We appreciate your continued interest in JELD-WEN and I’ll now turn it over to James to move into Q&A.

James Armstrong: Thanks Bill. Operator, we’re now ready to begin the Q&A.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Phil Ng with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Phil Ng: Hey guys. Congrats on the really strong performance this year in a tough demand backdrop. The team’s obviously executing quite well.

Bill Christensen: Thanks Phil. Good morning.

Phil Ng: I guess, first off, from a demand standpoint in North America and Europe, are you seeing any stabilization since I think in North America, in particular, I think your high single-digit volume to clients. Imply maybe declines could accelerate in the fourth quarter. It doesn’t seem like the case, but it helpful to kind of give us some color on North America and perhaps looking out to 2024, any early read, many of your building products peers have talked about maybe flat to down R&R market and maybe growth in housing, but just kind of help us unpack what that means for JELD-WEN?

Bill Christensen: Yes, thanks Phil. So, we are seeing the market stabilize at these, I’d say, low run rate level. So, no surprises for us in Q3 if you remember, we had improved a bit our expectations on R&R from kind of high single, down to mid-single down. That’s what we’re seeing. Similarly, in Europe, it remains soft. The headwinds are there. it’s too early for us to guide on 2024. What we’re basically saying is the current market reality. We expect that to continue from a volume decline standpoint as we roll into Q4. So, no surprises, but also clearly no strong signals of significant rebounds and we’re going to share more color when we talk in February on our Q4 results, but also our views on 2024.

Phil Ng: Got you. That’s helpful Bill. Sorry, go ahead Julie.

Julie Albrecht: Yes, I was just going to add, North America last year in Q4, we did have a pretty strong backlog that we were working through. And so that did help last year’s fourth quarter volume-wise in North America. So, this year, we don’t have that same backlog working through. And so there is a little bit more of a year-over-year headwind volume-wise, just from that dynamic.

Phil Ng: Okay, super. And once again, Bill, you’re probably going to tell me you’re going to give us a little more color in February. But the $100 million of cost savings you guys have achieved so far in a really tough demand backdrop is truly impressive in my opinion. From a baseball analogy, help us kind of contextualize where you are with this journey. You gave us like Phase 1, Phase 2. In terms of this $100 million build in cost savings, what inning are you and when we kind of look out to next year, can you kind of build off this? Because I think that tailwind is accelerating in the back half and looking out to next year, once again, demand still for visibility still seems pretty challenging. Do you have enough levers to kind of offset perhaps another weaker year from a demand standpoint where you can actually grow EBITDA next year?

Bill Christensen: Yes. So, let me start with the second question, Phil. So, clearly, there’s ample opportunity, and that’s what we’re saying today is that we do feel confident that the number of projects that we’re sequencing clearly gives us conviction that we’re going to be able to definitely offset volume headwinds based on our current expectation. I’d say we’re in the early innings to use a baseball analogy. We expect from the 100 that roughly 50 will roll forward into 2024. And as I said in my prepared remarks, we’re in the process of sequencing and we went through a pretty broad-based process across our organization to gather all of the opportunities, put some pricing around it. and put some resources on it. And so that’s what we’re kind of getting dialed into 2024.

There’s a couple of implications that’s going to have, number one, is expectations, our EBITDA will be up. Number two, we’re expecting, as we’ve been signaling a significant CapEx increase to fund those high ROIC projects, our expectation is kind of moving from the roughly 2.5% into a quarter of 3% or 4% to fund those projects. We have ample cash flow, obviously, based on the performance to self-fund all of that. So, we feel pretty comfortable given current market conditions. But as you well know, Phil has been pretty volatile. So, we will definitely share a lot more color in February when we can really share a better line of sight and obviously, our sequencing and execution of projects continue. So we’ll obviously give some more detail at that point.

Phil Ng: Thanks a lot. Appreciate the color.

Bill Christensen: Yes, you’re welcome. Have good day.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of John Lovallo with UBS. Please go ahead.

Matt Johnson: Hey, good morning guys. This is actually Matt Johnson on for John. I appreciate I guess, first off, based on your 2023 outlook, it looks like 4Q EBITDA margin is implied around 7.5% on which looks like it will be down a little over 200 basis points sequentially and recognizing sales will be lower sequentially as well. I guess, is there anything else driving the sequential contraction in margins?

Julie Albrecht: Yes, good morning. This is Julie. Yes. No, not really. I mean, it’s really very seasonal. When you look at our historical seasonality trends of sales and EBITDA, you think about ended the year with the holidays and the impact that has on really demand and our operations, we typically see fourth quarter margins down really, so looking maybe more importantly is year-over-year that — and you’re right about that 7.5%, that is the implied margin in our guidance. That is almost 100 basis points over last year’s fourth quarter. And so I think that’s what I would really highlight more than the sequential drop-off is more of that year-over-year improvement in the fourth quarter.

Matt Johnson: Appreciate that. And then I guess, you guys also mentioned seeing a bit of a pickup in R&R activity during the third quarter. I guess, what was driving this? And with regards to inventories being very low are you guys expecting some replenishment across the channel within your 4Q guide? Or do you think this would be more of a 2024 phenomenon if it did happen?

Bill Christensen: Yes. So, definitely 2024. If it did happen, we’re not planning or expecting any significant rebalancing of inventories in the channel. Our comments have been consistent that channel inventory is extremely tight. We’re seeing stockouts. We’re seeing some lines drop below 90% in stock, which are trigger points for some of our big retail partners to reload. So there’s specific balancing that’s happening. We were expecting, as we shared in the third quarter kind of mid-single-digit declines, which is how it’s played out and I wouldn’t point to any specific factor driving this. Year-over-year comps are mixed, depending on if you’re looking at windows or doors into your exterior, I would just say the general feeling is that consumers are cautious about spend for the obvious reasons that we hear about almost on a daily basis and all of the news that we reach.

So, no big changes expected in Q4 and no major rebalancing of inventories that are baked into our Q4 results.