All right. Good morning. This is the 11:30AM session here with Terex. My name is Chirag Patel. I cover machinery here at Jefferies. It's my pleasure to introduce John Garrison, President and Chairman and CEO, and Julie Beck, the CFO. John's gonna start off with a few slides, and then we'll move right into the fireside chat Q&A portion. Thanks.
Thank you, Chirag, and, thank you for your interest in Terex. Just a couple slides. First slide is our forward-looking statement. We will be making forward-looking statements, so please, review, this. My lawyers would be not happy if I didn't say that. So, we start every meeting at Terex with a review of our overall safety performance and our Zero Harm, safety culture. And, you know, this. I think this, these statistics are indicative of the challenges. After several years of significant improvement in our safety performance, you see a plateau and actually go up slightly in 2021 and 2022, and slightly in 2023, as well as the industry averages. And I think this also what it speaks to is the level of disruption that we've been experiencing in our manufacturing operations and our ability to overcome that disruption that we've had.
We talk about hospital inventory, and this is an example of the disruption of multiple handling of equipment in the manufacturing process, and in some areas new workers to the workforce that have not operated in a manufacturing environment. With all that said, our job is to continue to our 2024 objective, and the team is committed to doing that. We like to say at Terex, we're gonna win in a competitive marketplace, but we're gonna do it the right way, in accordance with our Terex Way values. So if we look at in Q2, we really had a strong. I wanna thank the team, a global team. We did have outstanding execution in a very dynamic environment. And really, in the quarter, what we saw was we were able to break through.
We've been range-bound at about $1.1 billion-$1.2 billion in revenue for about six or seven quarters, and with the improvement in supply chain in the quarter, we were able to, you know, to produce about $1.4 billion in sales, up significantly year-over-year. And then what was even more impressive was we were able to drive some of that operating leverage on the higher sales in terms of improved operating profit and absolute, but also a great, great job on operating margin. That's been a lot of hard work behind the scenes for multiple years now, and seeing that fall to the bottom line was very encouraging, which also dropped to our EPS line.
Dramatic improvement in EPS, which enabled us to beat and raise and put a $7 earnings per share target out there, objective for us for the full year. All in all, in a dynamic environment, I wanna thank the team for some pretty strong execution and helping us to deliver for our customers. Now, the big question out there is, hey, you know, there's a rising interest rate environment, rising continued risk of a recession, but behind the scenes, there's also some dynamic activity ongoing, especially here in the U.S. and in North America, around infrastructure investment, green energy or clean energy, and the digital economy. There's three very large physical bills out there, and I'm sure you've heard people talking about them.
The amount of money that is going to be spent over the coming years is staggering here in the U.S. We also chose to put out what the global spend is, 'cause we're a global company, and one of the things you see is, from an infrastructure standpoint, the world does invest in infrastructure, and that helps us. It's only here in the United States that we've been behind that are now adding to that. Digital economy, the CHIPS Act, we'll talk about these are investments, frankly, that are gonna occur irrespective of what the interest rate environment is. The chip manufacturing plants are not being done here because it's a low-cost place to manufacture. They're being done to reduce geopolitical risk, and those investments are going to occur. The green energy or the electrification, those are investments also that are occurring.
If we're gonna get anywhere close to the objectives that we've set out for ourselves in terms of green energy, substantial investment in power, substantial investment which helps us significantly in our Utilities business, transmission, and distribution, is essential going forward. Longer-term trends around waste and waste recycling, changes in environments around the world, processing, construction, demolition waste that starts in Europe and now is spreading around the world, those are long-term macro trends that we believe support, especially our MP business, as we go forward. Talked about the digital economy, great for us in the construction phase, but also our aerial products, our Genie products, have a tendency to stay in those operations longer term.
We don't talk a lot about urbanization, but in the rest of the world, significant investment in urbanization, that again, being a global company, helps our product, product line. And then adoption. Adoption of aerial products in markets continues, but also adoption of our MP mobile crushing and screening equipment, and adoption of using mobile crushing and screening equipment for recycling activities. That's a form of adoption as regulatory rules change. So what we're saying is that there's a significant headwind, you know, called rising interest rates, threat of recession, but there's tremendous tailwinds that we believe will potentially offset that.
And if you look at total non-residential construction, you know, think 15%, 20%, 25% kinda range of, of things that are gonna be impacted by higher interest rates, like commercial buildings, like retail, but these 65%+ of the non-residential construction is really not tied to interest or interest rate sensitivity. So we think that provides a good backdrop for us in the coming years, and we're just starting to see this now in our business. We really think this is a 2024, 2025, and on to 2026 with the level of investment that's required, especially here in the United States. Now, this is a slide that we used in our Investor Day, and we think it's appropriate, is how are we gonna grow the business, not quarter to quarter, but longer term?
Capitalizing on the megatrends that we just talked about in terms of especially around recycling, the circular economy. We think we're well positioned to do that. Our MP segment has been a gem of a business or segment within Terex for a long time, and it has consistently grown, as it brings new products to marketplace, new adjacencies that we grow into. The world needs infrastructure and investment in that space, so we'll continue to do that. We made substantial progress this year in our Genie margin performance. And Genie, really, it's a great business, but our through margin, through cycle margin performance hasn't been what we needed it to be. Simon Meester and the team there has done an awesome job taking cost out of that business, and you're seeing that flow to the bottom line.
With, again, focus, there will be a cycle at some point in time. We have to operate through that cycle at a lot higher level of profitability than we did previously. Our utilities business, it's a great business. Our challenge there is we have to produce more. The demand is there, the demand is there for years into the future. Again, the needs on the electrical grid are substantial, and investments need to continue and will need to continue into the future as we go forward. And finally, certainly not last, you know, is our parts and service business. We've invested a lot in technology, improving our ability to deliver for our customers and our dealer in our parts and service business. It's incredibly important for them to keep the product up and running.
It's incredibly important to us because that's where the good margin opportunity is. So we believe there's opportunity for us on these five, you know, strategic growth priorities that we've laid out at Investor Day, and we're gonna continue to execute on as we go forward. So finally, you know, Terex really is a house of brands. It's a collection of really great businesses. You know, you're looking at a Powerscreen here, a Powerscreen from Finlay. The businesses that we have that remain in our portfolio are leaders in their respective space and incredibly strong brand awareness around the world. We're gonna continue to drive improvement in our execution and never stop. Somebody asked me if I was happy earlier this morning. I'm never happy.
There's always opportunity for continuous improvement, and we think the team will continue to do that. The other thing that we have not mentioned is our balance sheet. You know, we have the strongest balance sheet, frankly, in the history of Terex. You're at 0.7 net debt to EBITDA now. When we achieve our objectives for 2023, it will even be substantially below that. So we've got a very strong balance sheet. Probably ask some questions about M&A. I will say we will remain disciplined, but the good news is we've reduced the financial leverage of the company, and we're in a great position, irrespective of what the economic environment is in front of us. We think it's gonna be strong, but if it turns out not to be, we're in a great position.
And again, we do think that there are some strong headwinds that are gonna provide some buoyancy for us in the face of, you know, the uncertainty that we're all facing in growing markets, especially here in North America, but literally around the world. And again, the other thing I'd like to mention is that we've invested over $700 million of capital in our businesses over the last seven years, and we're returning 28% return on invested capital. So those investments that we're making on the organic growth side of the business are definitely working, and we're gonna continue to make those investments as we go forward. So Chirag, that's just a quick overview and highlight of some of the things that are going on at Terex.
Again, appreciate everyone's interest in Terex and look forward to your questions.
You know, there's a lot to unpack there at the end of the day. There's a lot happening at Terex right now, and one of the things I wanted to hit on initially is just the idea of the 2Q performance was excellent. And just what's the margin sustainability look like? What's kind of the progression as we kinda go forward here into next year?
Well, thanks, thanks. You know, Q2 was a nice, strong quarter, as John mentioned, and you mentioned as well. Really what happened is we shipped more volume, and John mentioned that we'd been stuck in that $1 billion-$1.2 billion range. We were able to get $1.4 billion, and that's because of improved supply chain performance. So we were able to get more out the door. We were able to clear about half of our hospital inventory. We talk about that inventory that's sitting outside waiting for those final parts. We were able to reduce that balance by about approximately $25 million in the quarter, which resulted in increased volume. And with that, increased volumes, comes some productivity and manufacturing-favorable manufacturing variances, which is great.
We haven't seen that for a long time because of all the disruption in the supply chain. So we saw that, and we also saw, in our Genie business in particular, they've been working on a lot of cost out reduction activities, including value-added engineering. And some of these projects take years to implement, and we're starting to see that flow through the bottom line. So you know, that was, some nice financial performance in Q2. You know, going forward to the rest of the year, you know, we're in the middle of bringing up our Monterrey facility. In the second quarter, what we did is we moved from our temporary facility, which is a couple kilometers away from our permanent facility.
So we moved production that was already in Monterrey into a different facility, and now in Q3, we're starting to migrate from different various factories, whether it's Redmond, Italy, China, moving into that facility, and there'll be some increased costs as we make those moves. And so that will impact our margins in Q3 and Q4 and going into 2024. But when that facility is up and running, and as we enter into early 2025, we'll see margin improvements in that Genie business of about 200 basis points. But some nice performance in Q2.
... Excellent. And I kind of wanna touch on Materials Processing first, and then we'll move to the AWP side. Backlogs in that business were about $1.5 billion. It's actually down 15% year-over-year, but still well above any sort of normalized level. Can we talk through the idea of what do you think is the right backlog number for you guys to enter any year? Does it still need to come down? How, how, how do you kinda think about that, and, and what's the underlying order trends as well that you're seeing in the business?
Yeah so, you know, in terms of backlog there, our backlog overall at Terex at $3.7 billion, $2.5 billion of it is in MP, you know, almost three times historical norm. So we have extensive backlog. Part of that's driven by the supply chain disruptions, and our lead times have extended. So the demand environment overall, you know, our bookings in the quarter were up 9% year-over-year. It's just we were able to produce some, you know, more to get it out there. Overall, demand environment remains relatively robust. We called out a couple areas in MP though of weakness. Tower cranes in Europe, for example, was an area that we called out, that was seeing some weakness, but overall, continued strength in bookings and backlog.
And really, given the strength of our overall backlog, what we're really looking at are cancellations and pushouts. Those are the first indicators. Is there some softness? Everybody's worried about double ordering in the backlog. And what we can say is we're not seeing anything above a normal, what we call noise, in cancellations in our backlog in MP, but also in AWP. So again, you know, the strong demand environment, and I've talked to a lot of investors about this, and I know it's a bit of a paradox, Chirag, as we look at it, but we can be in a strong demand environment and see two things happen: backlog decrease and book-to-bill actually fall. Why is that?
Because as production improves, our lead times come in, book-to-bill is impacted, it's math, as well as backlog. So I know there's a lot of consternation over backlogs and booking rates, and clearly we're watching that. But because of the disruption, because of the environment we've been in, it's possible to have a strong demand environment and still see book-to-bill fall and backlog to fall. As a matter of fact, I would expect it as we go forward, as things begin to normalize, as we go forward.
I guess, one of the other things that probably hasn't been done in several years here for not just you guys, but across the board for OEMs, is the idea of normal maintenance within your factories and your facilities. Can we talk about what that kinda means for production between first half, second half, and what are you kind of taking as far as actions go right now?
Well, let me take a step back and, and just say, 'cause I made, I made the comment. We have invested heavily in our manufacturing facilities over the last... And, you know, Julie talks about 1%-3% of our sales, and we've been at the higher end of that range, especially with our Monterrey facility. So we believe in investing in our facilities and investing in our technology and product development. So we're, we're gonna we did that through the down cycle.
Mm-hmm.
We're gonna do that through all cycles, is we're gonna continue to make prudent investments in our property, plant, and equipment, and then I might add technology. Because if you're not investing on the technology side, you're falling behind. So you're gonna continue to see us invest here. Julie, you wanna add anything more to that?
Yeah, no, I think we'll continue to invest in our facilities. I, I think he's answered it really well.
Yeah.
Monterrey, you know, we'll continue to invest in Monterrey into 2024 as well.
Then just on the MP business real quick, the margins were an all-time quarterly high, I believe. There was some productivity benefits, as you were talking about before. What areas within that business are seeing the most growth, most opportunity? What do you kinda see as the profile as we go forward here?
Well, for our MP business, you know, we're really pleased with, you know, their performance. You know, we talk about, you know, margins in the 16%-17% range. We wanna grow that business. We see an opportunity to grow in that business, both organically and potentially through M&A. And so, we wanna invest in that business going forward and invest in it, in technology as well. And so, the business has just performed consistently strong for a long time.
Mm-hmm.
You know, continues to improve throughout with their strong, consistent performance. So we really like the business and wanna see it grow.
I'd just add that we did see, you know, in the quarter, and we think that will continue some, you know, favorable product and regional mix-
Mm-hmm
... in that. And again, that, the strength of North America does come through, in the margins of that business.
Mm-hmm.
Excellent. And then moving to the AWP business here as we go forward, what are you seeing from the customer interactions right now for as far as being predictable of what volumes you can see into next year and whatnot?
Mm-hmm.
What are some of those activities looking like? And then we'll also wanna touch on the competitive landscape as well, if you've-
Sure
seen anything changes there.
So, you know, talking about because the industry's been constrained and the constraints now are starting to move out from that, the cycle of order patterns has been disruption. So we're actually in much earlier conversations, especially with the larger national accounts. Normally, that would occur, you know, late fourth quarter into the first quarter, but because of the situation, we're actually engaged in those conversations now. And again, I think if you see what the public company, traded companies are saying about their end markets, a lot of the reasons that we talked about earlier in my opening comments, they're seeing strength in their markets. Now, I'm not gonna forecast yet what 2024 is gonna look like, but they're buoyant, and they're optimistic about what their capital needs are.
If you look at specifically Genie, the other dynamic there, that's a helpful dynamic now for demand, is that the replacement cycle's been delayed. And so you've seen the age of their equipment increase at a time when their utilizations were quite high. And now, you know, they're getting some, you know, slack, I guess, because, hey, your time utilization's down. Well, their time utilization's down off of unsustainable levels, all right? And so they had high time utilization with aged equipment that needs to be replaced. And so we think that sets up for a pretty nice environment as we go forward into 2024, again, to buffer this headwind of potential recession and higher interest rates. And then on the MP side, the MP, 75% of that business goes through dealer organizations. Our dealer inventory levels-...
are not where they need to be, i.e., either lower than what our dealers would like. So there's a bit of an inventory restocking that's required in that business as we go forward. They use a lot of this equipment in their rental fleets for rental purchase options, rent-to-own type contracts.
Mm-hmm.
And their fleet has been depleted because we haven't been able to produce at the level they needed. Their fleets have been depleted, so they wanna up that. So those are some positive factors that give us some, you know, some degree of buoyancy as we look out into, you know, to 2024 with the risk of, you know, higher interest rates and a potential recession. We think those things help.
AWP has a very strong backlog.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, $2.6 billion-$2.7 billion of backlog, which is fantastic.
Yeah, and as Julie said-
Mm
... you know, for us, you know, for investors out there, we at the end of the second quarter had $1.5 billion of backlog for 2024. That is unheard of for us. It's like I said, it's three times historical norm. So that, again, gives us some buffer if things, you know, if there's some headwinds out there.
Well, with that backlog extending that far into 2024, what's your confidence in the pricing and the margin that's embedded in that backlog and going forward?
We've worked hard, you know, on the pricing side. Our MP team did an awesome job all the way throughout, very dynamic pricing. On the AWP side, we were behind the pricing curve, you know, the first half of 2022. We were price-cost negative, made up for it. We're price-cost neutral, you know, for, for this year, and, and for products that are scheduled to be delivered in 2024, we're anticipating what the cost structure is for that in that pricing.
Okay. I guess one of the other things I was thinking about was just the idea of, with all these mega projects out there in the world and coming to fruition in 2024, 2025, 2026, hopefully, what are your rental customers saying as far as their current fleet sizes, ideas of expanding it? Do we have capacity to be able to kinda meet those needs?
Well-
Mm
... let me answer in reverse order. So capacity standpoint, yes, we're, you know, we're producing 15%-20% less in Genie, you know, now less capacity than what we were in 2018 and 2019.
Mm.
So we have the capacity. Now, let me be absolutely clear: we didn't build Mexico to add Monterrey to add capacity. We'll get some incremental capacity. We built that to be globally cost competitive. Now, in terms of as customers are looking out, again, no long-term contracts. Our agreements are year to year, but we are engaged in multi-year discussions with the larger customers now about their fleet demands-
Mm-hmm
... over, you know, over the coming period of time. Again, two dynamics: strong replacement cycle on aerial equipment that is needed, and then if you've got any growth on top of that replacement cycle, that's a pretty good environment for us as we go forward. Again, you know, if we're gonna have the headwinds of a potential recession.
We talked about the rental guys having aged equipment.
Yeah.
In your view, how long does that... How much- how long can that replacement cycle last for you guys? Are we talking about two years' worth of volumes? Are we talking in order to get back to a normalized age?
It's gonna take the industry time to get back to normal because we were constrained for that.
Mm.
I don't think it'll take as long as we were constrained. I think we'll come out of it sooner than that. But nonetheless, their fleet has aged, and it's aged with very high utilization rates, which is also unusual.
Mm-hmm.
And so it does, in fact, need to be replaced. The rental customer companies, especially larger public trading companies, have done an incredible job in investing in a lot of technology. They understand their business to a level of detail that they didn't understand or no one did 10 years ago, and so they know when they want to change out that equipment.
Okay. Then I guess there was a little bit more of that hospital inventory to work through. Are we through that now into the third quarter, or do we still have a little bit more to go?
We still are carrying-
Yeah
... you know, about approximately $25 million of hospital inventory at this point.
Yeah.
We still have some stuff to clear, and we still experience supply chain disruption.
Mm.
We're not through this yet.
Yeah.
Every day is different, and there's a different issue, and the operations and supply chain teams are doing a great job of trying to work through those. But we're still not at the supplier on-time delivery levels since that we-
Yeah
... were at pre-pandemic.
Yeah.
Okay. And I guess when that does, we also talked about the idea of inefficiency in production, given the supply chains and whatnot. What's kind of the incremental margin opportunity that you can realize in a smoother kind of environment for production?
So we have a 25% incremental margin target. We would expect the businesses to get 25%. Now, sometimes in the MP business, at this point, we're making some investments in that business, in SG&A, in engineering, in technology, in digital. So we like their absolute level of performance, and it still goes. So they've been-
Mm
... you know, ranging in that 20%-21% incremental margin at this point. But we're... Again, their absolute margins are strong.
Excellent. And then one last thing on the pricing front. As we kind of go into the back end of the year, what's kind of the expectation of industry pricing as we kind of move into 2024? Are we talking more normalized? Is there still some tailwind and opportunity still to be?
Oh, I would say that, you know, the first thing is, you know, our pricing strategy has been try to be price-cost neutral, right? Offset what we're seeing from, you know, our suppliers, freight, logistics, so on and so forth. And the good news is we have been able to achieve that this year. The other good news is the rate of inflation is declining, but we're not seeing deflation. I mean, just look at labor costs around the world, and once it goes into the labor rate, it never comes out. And so the good news is the rate of inflation is definitely declining, and we've seen some absolute reductions in things like freight, but most of the time that's a pass-through anyway.
Mm-hmm.
But we're not seeing deflation yet.
Okay. Do you anticipate some level of that at some point, or more than likely-
You know, again, we'll see. Again, our pricing-
That's right
...strategy hasn't changed, and it, and it will stay for that environment. You know, the good news is the rate of inflation is coming down. The, you know, the other side of the coin is we're not seeing deflation.
Okay. And then I guess, we touched a little bit on the mega projects and the infrastructure spending and whatnot. You indicated that that's more of a 2024, 2025 opportunity.
Mm.
Are we starting to see some of those dollars and projects being unlocked right now? What's kind of the early-
Yeah, I would say we definitely are, especially if you look in industrial spend and non-residential construction here in the United States. You're definitely seeing some of that money to flow because you're seeing double-digit, you know, year-over-year increases in industrial spend, and a lot of that is associated with the start of these mega projects.
Excellent. We are at time, actually, so I will thank you guys for taking the time-
Thank you
... and spending it here at Jefferies, and thank you guys in the room.
And thanks to you.
Thank you all.
Thank you.
Thanks for your interest in Terex.