Earnings Labs

AAON, Inc. (AAON)

Q3 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 3, 2016

$87.80

-4.20%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the AAON Third Quarter Sales and Earnings Call. There will be a question-and-answer period after management’s brief presentation. This call will last approximately 45 minutes to an hour. I would like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Asbjornson. Please go ahead, sir.

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Good afternoon. Norman Asbjornson here. Before proceeding, I'd like to read a forward-looking 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 occurrences 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 filings, including the Annual Report on Form 10-K and the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. Before proceeding, I'd like to introduce Mr. Gary Fields, who has just recently joined us as President and I shall remain as Chief Executive Officer. Greetings an at this point primarily is to try and help us in the managerial functions which have occurred with our growth and our expected future growth. As many of you know, we are now bringing on water-source heat pumps and that's an additional burden and as you already know, last year we brought on three additional regional managers to try and help cover our sales activities and Gary is going to concentrate on all the sales activities whether the warranty or the sale of the product or anything else regarding customer service in that area and I shall pay more of my attention to the internal workings of the company so that we shall better serve our customer base. I'd like to have Gary say a moment a little bit to you and give you his brief background so that you are more up to date.

Gary Fields

Management

Good afternoon. This is Gary Fields. Going back to the beginning of my career fourth-generation HVAC, I've been involved in the business for a very, very long time. 35 years ago I entered into the independent manufacturers' representative segment of the business which is essentially the sales agents for firms such as AAON. Going back 32 years ago I joined a firm in Texas of which we when I joined it we had eight people. We grew the company to 200 people under my leadership. When I sold my interest in the company at the end of 2012 we had increased our revenue up to about $200 million. The company has continued to grow well. So our succession plan there was intact. At that point in time, I began consulting work for AAON, consulting with the representatives across North America of which I've reached approximately half of all of our representatives and given them counsel and guidance on business development, particularly with how to build a strong independent rep organization which benefits AAON as we have stronger representatives in the field. In May 2015, I was elected to the Board of Directors. I have continued to provide those consulting services, both to the outside representatives, but it's also given me an opportunity to work within the company on product development and refining existing product and sales technologies. I've been quite involved in the development of the water-source heat pump for instance. And then as of Tuesday of this week the Board of Directors elected me President. As Norm told you, I will concentrate primarily on sales activities which also include product development. And we believe that we can now accelerate our growth beyond what it's been.

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Thank you. Now I'd like to introduce Scott Asbjornson, our CFO, who will discuss our quarterly performance. Scott?

Scott Asbjornson

Management

Welcome to our third quarter conference call. I'd like to begin by discussing the comparative results of the three months ended September 30, 2016 to September 30, 2015. Net sales were up 10.8% to $104.6 million from $94.4 million. Sales increased primarily due to increased volume as compared to the prior year offset by changes in product mix. Our gross profit increased 9.6% to $33.1 million from $30.2 million. As a percentage of sales gross profit was 31.6% in the quarter just ended compared to 32.0% in 2015. Selling, general, and administrative expenses increased 3.4% to $10.4 million from $10.1 million in 2015. As a percentage of sales SG&A decreased to 9.9% of total sales in the quarter just ended from 10.7% in 2015. The overall increase in SG&A was primarily due to increased compensation and profit sharing expenses to better results versus the same period last year. The increase was partially offset by decreases in nonrecurring donations and warranty expenses. Income from operations increased 12.6% to $22.7 million or 21.7% of sales from $20.2 million or 21.4% of sales. Our effective tax rate decreased to 31.1% from 34.1%. The Indian Employment Credit and Research and Development Credit were not extended until December of 2015 for the 2015 and 2016 tax years. As such, the effective rate for the three months ended September 30, 2016 is reduced for the impact of these credits while the effective rate for the three months ended September 30, 2015 does not reflect these credits. The estimated annual 2016 effective tax rate, excluding discrete events is expected to be approximately 36.0%. Additionally, the company early adopted ASU 2016-09, Improvements to Employee Share-Based Payment Accounting, applying the changes for excess tax benefits and tax deficiencies prospectively. As a result, excess tax benefits and deficiencies are reported…

Rebecca Thompson

Management

Thank you, Scott. We had a working capital balance of $98 million versus $80.8 million at December 31, 2015. Cash in investments totaled $41.3 million at September 30, 2016, the investments on maturities ranging from one month to 10 months. Our current ratio is approximately 3.3:1. Our capital expenditures were $23.6 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2016. We expect capital expenditures for the year to be approximately $32.7 million. Shareholders' equity per diluted share is $3.84 at September 30, 2016 compared to $3.28 at December 31, 2015. We also continued to remain debt free. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Norm who will discuss our results on further detail along with the new products and outlook for the remainder of the year.

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Net sales were up 10.8% for the quarter. Sales increased due to increased volumes and no price increase was included in that. Potential for the Water-Source Heat Pump has not been realized as early as early as we had earlier thought. It is now entered production stage which was a very interesting thing and as much as we did not copy an existing or known manufacturing format. We have gone to what we think is very, very advanced our manufacturing methodology. So the actually manufacturing of sheet metal, copper and insulation is all automated. There are no individuals involved in the manufacturing of those components. Our operation is strictly facilitative between moving the things between those functions in the automated machinery and moving them to the production line, the only other people on the production line our the assemblers and the final test individuals. So it is an extremely software driven operation which we had to create a lot of software that was not purchased off the shelf or not even close to off the shelf, it was strictly created in-house by our personnel. In addition to the computerization provided by the manufacturers, finding this system that we're using, research [indiscernible] [technical difficulty] we bought equipment from six different countries around the world, if we found something that was unique and advanced and very serious. So, as we're bringing on line at a higher rate. It is going to prove to be a very, very, productive environment in which we should cover the costs of producing the product considerably from a more conventional manner. We are not running it at a high rate of speed yet, however, because it was a challenge to get the software cleaned up, debugged if you will, and have it now to the point like…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Jon Braatz from Kansas City Capital. Your line is open.

Jon Braatz

Analyst

Good afternoon, Norm.

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Hi Jon.

Jon Braatz

Analyst

What can you tell me about as you look forward, about incoming orders for the new heat pump, are you seeing them at a level where you'd like to see them and are you taking orders for the for sort of the custom heat pump with options?

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Well we are. We've asked the representatives to give us one order for one unit they would buy for display from each one of our roughly 100 offices and with whatever they think is a popular option for their marketplace that will give us somewhere around 100 units with options which represent what they individually think they have to have for their markets. So that's going to give us an indication because a lot of them will be repeating the same option from a lot of offices and other options won't repeat. And so we'll get a sense of what the ratio is of the options that they are going to wanting from us. And we will be building those while we're building the stock of units that we're going to have standardized units with no options on there, we'll be stocking those. Because of the fact that we are not building all the different sizes, and currently we decided we would look at what the market says, what the HRI [ph] says the market is about the size of the particular unit. For instance, the 3 ton horizontal is statistically the biggest sailor in the industry. So that's what we're going to build and we're going to build the most of those. We have enough storage space to store approximately 2300 units, which if you wanted to put a dollar figure to that is probably going to be an average of let's say $1500 a unit, and you can see what we can put into stock if we get it fully stocked. And since we're doing it just one year to the size in time, we could sell a lot of whatever we're building right away early, but we don’t even have some of the ones that we're going…

Jon Braatz

Analyst

Okay, all right Norm. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back over to the presenters.

Norman Asbjornson

Management

Okay, well thank you very much for joining us for this conference call. We, like I said are largely optimistic with a little bump in the road here which we attribute to election and once that has passed we think we'll be back on a very smooth roll again, optimistic about where we're going to go. Thank you very much for tuning in and we'll talk to you next quarter.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.