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AAON, Inc. (AAON)

Q4 2011 Earnings Call· Wed, Mar 14, 2012

$87.80

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Transcript

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Good afternoon. I'm Norman Asbjornson reporting on AAON's investor conference call for the fourth quarter and the year 2011. Prior to going forward, I'd like to read a disclaimer. To the extent any statement presented herein deals with information that is not historical, including the outlook for the remainder of the year, such statement is necessarily forward-looking and made pursuant to the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. As such, it is subject to the occurrence of many events outside AAON's control, that could cause AAON's results to differ materially from those anticipated. Please see the risk factors contained in our most recent SEC filing on Form 10-K. Thank you. I would like introduce Kathy Sheffield, our CFO.

Kathy Sheffield

Management

Good afternoon, and welcome to our conference call. Thank you for joining us for this review of AAON's financial performance for the fourth quarter and full year 2011. I'll begin by discussing the comparative results of the 3 months ended December 31, 2011, to December 31, 2010. Our revenues were down 4% to $63.4 million from $65.8 million. The decrease in revenues can be contributed to 10 less production days due to plant shutdowns associated with the holidays and to a decline in orders from customers who were not able to receive their orders before the year end to take advantage of that Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act for equipment that was put into service in 2011. Our gross profit decreased 39.1% to $8.6 million from $14.2 million. As a percentage of sales, gross profit for the quarter was 13.6% compared to 21.5% a year ago. In addition to the lower productivity that we just discussed, the gross margin for the quarter was also affected by several other factors: Inefficient sheet metal production due to changing out of approximately 50% of our capacity in a short period of time in order to have our new equipment that we installed in the fourth quarter operable by the end of the year, numerous costs expensed during the change out of the equipment, inefficiencies in production due to lack of sheet metal parts in a timely fashion, costs associated with relocating 3 assembly lines and rearranging 2 other assembly lines, a continuation of component part price increases that we were any unable to fully pass on to our customers, and manufacturing inefficiencies due to the introduction of new products. Selling, general and administrative expenses decreased slightly 4.1% to $5.6 million or 8% of sales from $5.8 million or 8.9%…

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Good afternoon. I can only say that this was a very interesting year we just finished. We started the year out thinking we were going to invest approximately $10 million in capital expenses and then in December, when the government allowed us to start 100% depreciation on things, it turned our whole world upside down and it never stopped for the balance of the year for a variety of reasons. The beginning thing that hit us right away of course was the fact that the market did not improve appreciably during the year. It had a little more decline in it, and the market of which I speak is the building markets that we're serving. Now that market is the lodging building type buildings, office buildings, commercial buildings, health care buildings, educational buildings, religious buildings and manufacturing projects and then another all-inclusive group called other types of buildings. Net was in a continuing downswing start which started in 2008 and included in being almost flat between 2010 and 2011, but it still was in declining during that time period. Now I would like to talk just a little bit about the various things which we did during the year. Let us talk about the equipment, first of all. That's where everything in our world starts is our equipment. As we have been talking for several years, we've been on a very determined goal of accelerating as much as possible during this downturn, the development of a new product, several new products. We've gone through the number of products right now, approximately 70% of our volume is in those new products, which we've developed over the last 3 or 4 years. And we're in the process now of working on the final 30%, most of which will be concluded this year.…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question we have is from DeForest Hinman.

DeForest Hinman

Analyst

With the increase in backlog, have you had to hire additional workers?

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Yes. Last summer, to give you a feel for it, last summer, we were running about in Tulsa, we were running about 1,200 people. In Longview, we were running about 400 people. When it started slowing down in the last half of last year, we just didn't hire people. We left attrition diminish our people and most of our business that we report to you is from the Tulsa facility. Most of Longview's business comes up there in the form of material to get put into our product. So I'll talk primarily about the Tulsa facility. In letting it go down, it went down to, from right at 1,200 to it went down to 1,071 people. And that occurred at about the second week of January, at which point in time, it became obvious to me by the order input that I'd better stop it. So I stopped it and, I started replacing the people. About a week later, it became obvious that something bigger was happening and we started hiring people. We are now back up in Tulsa to 1,121 people at this point in time. So we've hired back from 1,071 to 1,121. We are not at the present time hiring because we think the increased productivity which we've accomplished by rearranging all those production lines and buying that machinery probably we'll be able to stay with about that much personnel and be reasonably able to do the same volumes we did last year. That remains to be seen of course. But at this point in time, we're going to be running with about somewhere around 80 people less than we were the last year.

DeForest Hinman

Analyst

Okay. And are there any worries there in terms of efficiencies taking on the extra workers or do you think you can get them trained up to speed relatively quickly?

Norman Asbjornson

Management

We think we have a pretty good way of doing it. We have a lot of training things in place and we have a logical way of bringing them from an untrained worker on up to as a highly skilled as they want to make themselves be and work for us. And so we're not concerned with that. Although unemployment in Tulsa, I saw last night, in Oklahoma, had dropped to 6.1%, it's not -- there's not as many people looking for work around here. I think we're in the same general area in our Texas facility as far as unemployment.

DeForest Hinman

Analyst

And the 50 people that you added, how many people of those were rehires?

Norman Asbjornson

Management

I don't really know. I would say the majority of them were not. The majority of the ones that because recognize the ones left, left without us letting them go. They left on their own volition, so the likelihood of them coming back is not very great, I don't think.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Jon Braatz.

Jon Braatz

Analyst

In 2011, last year, you spent about $36 million in new equipment, so on, so forth. Now, obviously, there was going to be a nice payback on that equipment, productivity, other cost savings and so on and so forth. I know this may be a difficult question, but if you would look at maybe your gross margins that you achieved a couple of years ago when things were really rocking and rolling, I think they were 25%, 26%. Now, under similar circumstance, incrementally, how much do you think this investment can add to your margins, maybe not at the peak, but just during any period I guess, if I could say that, how much are you...

Norman Asbjornson

Management

If we replicated the volume we had last year, we have very easily concluded that it will be an excess of $1 million just over the machinery we're using and we bought more machinery than what we need. So if we were growing and have the ability to use all of the machinery to the fullest extent and recognize -- we run 23 hours a day, 7 days a week on that machinery. If we were able to add that much business, it would be somewhere $2 million to $3 million that we would have gained by having this new machinery as opposed to that old machinery we had. And the primary reason for that is that the machinery have been improved that much by the manufacturer and it's almost twice as fast as the old machinery that we would have replaced, not counting the downtime.

Jon Braatz

Analyst

Okay. And sort of what -- if you could, is there a at capacity utilization number that you're on, you're at in terms of that new machinery? Are you operating at 50% capacity, 60%?

Norman Asbjornson

Management

You know what we did last year and here's what we are and where we believe we are. In our analysis of our facilities, recognize some of the facility is ready for more business but there are choke points in the facility that I have not expanded and would cause us to have to do something to get rid of those choke points. But in general, we think that the buildings would presently handle about $800 million. Okay? And the machinery, as it is, as we have it right today would handle around $600 million. So you could say we're way overstocked on building and we're way overstocked on machinery. But here is the reason why that exists. On the building side of it, we can afford the building for the improved monthly productivity. And consequently, even though at the present time, in order to complete the building process that we have already planned, we always do our planning several years in advance because initial planning is never very good, and as we get a little older and a little smarter, we keep changing the plan. So we start out several years before we need to embark on it, so we kind of get it more correct by the time we're ready to build the plant. So we have already planned out the buildings and we've already done all the internal work as far as figuring out what kind of volume we can get out of it, what we're going to have to do, how many fork lifts, how many everything down to very minute details we do in this planning. And at the present time, in the Tulsa area, to finished off everything we've got. We need about 59,000 more square feet. That is in 2 building processes. There…

Jon Braatz

Analyst

Yes, yes, okay. I listened to a couple other related companies in their conference calls. It sounds as if that one particular area of the, let's say, nonresidential construction market, that has been strong and sort of new manufacturing facilities. And I guess number one, are you seeing that too? And number two, is that apparently good for you? Are you better in that market niche or stronger than that market niche or does it really matter?

Norman Asbjornson

Management

I will give you a very specific answer in just one moment. In our manufacturing business, that normally has been about 14% of our marketplace. Okay? Now flipping to the most recent one, which I have the census data on through January of this year and looking down through it and looking at January of 2011 versus January of 2012, manufacturing is up 38.3%, which is phenomenal. So I don't know what's driving that. In January of 2011, there was -- these are all in millions of dollars, $29.7 million of was spent in '11 and in '12, $41.197 million was spent. And If I go back on the sheet I'm looking at, it only goes back in September, but all of everything from September up to January is all $40 million or more. So yes, there is a very big upswing in manufacturing buildings, by far the biggest upswing many times more than anything else. The next biggest one, for instance, education is our biggest market place and that is up 5.8%.

Jon Braatz

Analyst

Okay, okay. All right. Do you have a stronger market share on the manufacturing segment as opposed to other market segments?

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Well, no. I wouldn't say so. I'd say we probably we have a stronger market share in the educational. But we are -- what some of the things we are doing or have done recently has put us in a position to enhance our ability to go after the market share in that arena more than we were able to before. So I think we probably can take some advantage of that.

Operator

Operator

There are no questions in queue at this time.

Norman Asbjornson

Management

All right. Well, thank you very much for your tuning in with us. We appreciate your involvement with AAON stock and without further ado, I'll say goodbye and talk with you next quarter hopefully. Goodbye.