Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to AAON’s Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Joe Mondillo, Director of IR, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. A press release announcing our third quarter 2022 financial results was issued after market close today and can be found on our corporate website aaon.com. Joining me on the call today are Gary Fields, our President and CEO; and Rebecca Thompson, our CFO and Treasurer. Shortly, I’ll be handing the call off to Rebecca, for her to go through the third quarter results. Gary will then provide further insight on the quarter along with commentary on our outlook, and then we’ll open up the call to Q&A. Prior to that though, we begin with our customary forward-looking statement policy. During the call any statement presented dealing with information that is not historical is considered forward-looking and made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, each as amended. As such, it is subject to the occurrence of many events outside of AAON’s control and that could cause AAON’s results to differ materially from those anticipated. You are all aware of the inherent difficulties, risks and uncertainties in making predictive statements. Our press release and Form 10-Q that we filed this afternoon detail some of the important risk factors that may cause our actual results to differ from those in our predictions. Please note, that we do not have the duty to update our forward-looking statements. And with that, I will turn the call over to Rebecca.

Thank you, Joe. I’d like to begin by discussing the comparative results of the three months ended September 30, 2022 versus September 30, 2021. Net sales increased 75.1%, $242.6 million from $138.6 million. The largest driving factor to the growth was organic volume, which contributed 26.9%. Volume growth reflected the Company’s strong backlog and a third straight quarter of record production. Improved productivity, along with an approximate 18% increase in organic headcount helped drive the increased production. In addition to volume, pricing contributed 24.4% and the acquisition of BasX contributed 23.8%. Similar to the legacy business, BasX perform extremely well in the quarter. BasX realized record sales and EBITDA of any quarter in its history, while increasing its backlog 33.8% from the end of the second quarter of 2022. Our gross profit increased 82.1% to $65.6 million from $36 million. As a percentage of sales gross profit was 27%, compared to 26% in the third quarter of 2021. The expansion in gross profit margin was driven by higher pricing and improved productivity, partially offset by higher costs and adverse effects of supply chain issues. Gross profit was the highest since the second quarter of 2021. Similar to the trends realized in the second quarter of 2022 gross profit margin improved throughout the third quarter. Selling, general and administrative expenses increased 81.7% to $28.9 million from $15.9 million in the third quarter of 2021. As a percentage of sales, SG&A increased to 11.9% from 11.5% in the third quarter of 2021. Excluding BasX, SG&A expenses increased 41.5% and totaled 10.7% of sales, down 80 basis points from a year ago. We continue to do a good job of controlling these expenses. Income from operations increased 82.3% to $36.7 million, or 15.1% of sales from $20.1 million or 14.5% of sales in…

Overall, we’re extremely pleased with third quarter results, record sales, production, EBITDA, earnings and record backlog. The Company is performing very well, particularly compared to where we were just a couple of quarters ago. Gross margin is still not where we want it to be, but we have made substantial progress. Gross margin and operating margin in the third quarter was the highest since second quarter of 2021. I’m very pleased with our operations and the overall team and want to continue to commend their performance. The last 18 months have been an extremely challenging environment. And to be able to say we just realized a third straight quarter of record production is truly commendable. Organic volume growth at 26.9% that was realized in the third quarter is pretty much unheard of in this industry. And the comp was not easy. Volume in the third quarter of the year ago period was down 1% from a record third quarter in 2020. On a two-year stock volume was up 25%. This performance is a result of several factors. First, as Rebecca mentioned, headcount of the legacy company was up 18%. We continue to do a good job with onboarding new employees. Second, productivity has improved significantly. When we look at our unit sales on a per day per production employee basis, the third quarter was the highest it’s been all year. And that’s when eliminating all the price increases. The legacy operation is operating at a much improved level. And I can say that this trend continued through October. Lastly, the volume growth is also a reflection of our premier sales channel and the backlog our rep partners have been able to generate for us. I’d like to thank all of our channel partners, as well as all of our internal…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Chris Moore with CJS Securities.

AAON historically has been priced at roughly 15% premium to the market. Even with your recent price increases that pricing delta looks to be maybe in high single digits, in some cases close to parity. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what’s driving that closing gap? And do you expect this to be the new normal?

Well, we’re watching that carefully. We’ve always kind of managed to margin, not so much to market. But I think we need to pay attention to that because we are a value over most of our competitors. So, I think that the equipment definitely warrants a bit of a premium. As I’ve said in past calls, quite a while back, at a 15% premium, there’s a fair amount of work goes into proving the value. And in the past, it took some pretty strong talents in the sales channel to do that. As that premium comes down to 10%, it becomes much easier to explain and people begin to take notice of it much better. So, I’d like to make sure that we stay in that range but we’ve also added a lot of marketing tools that help explain that value. We have a new building that’s going to be opening up probably first quarter of 2023 where we’ll have our equipment along with different competitors equipment sitting side by side and the visual representation is quite strong by itself without a lot of calculations.

Got it. Very helpful. Maybe just one more. You guys have introduced some cold climate air source heat pumps us here, I guess maybe a few questions there. How is the market reacting to them? How significant they are relative to the whole decarbonization trend? And lastly how do the capabilities compared to the rest of the market?

All right. I’ll start with your first part. The market is loving it. We had significant building owners in the laboratory recently for them to witness the testing of those units. We’ve already proven their performance, but we keep a unit available to display to people, so they can see the performance characteristics with empirical data, not some model data. This particular client has kind of made the news recently for not building quite as much as what they had originally intended to. But what they’re doing is going back and looking at some existing buildings and trying to bring them into compliance with some of their decarbonization goals that they have. So, we have multiple clients looking at it that way. And that’s where e-commerce, warehouses, maybe on a new construction basis have slowed down. But our impact on that is growing substantially. And I think a lot of it’s going to be changed out. Another thing you may recall was, when I came to the company six years ago, we were about 50% new construction and 50% replacement. And I made the statement then that our goal was to raise the replacement percentage, while also growing the new construction application. We’ve been very successful with that. I don’t have latest figures on that, but it’s somewhere upwards of 60% approaching 65% the last time I saw it on replacement. And I think the cold climate capable air source heat pump is driving a fair amount of that. The next thing -- I got your third part of your question on the capabilities, I’ll ask you to repeat the second here...

Yes. The second was just how significant these products are relative to the whole decarbonization trend?

Well, they’re very significant. When you look at the portion of the United States or North America for that matter that a zero degree Fahrenheit capable air source heat pump with good efficiency and good capacity applies. It’s significant. We have development ongoing with new technology that will take us down to minus 25 Fahrenheit. But that’s going to also be completed in conjunction with the refrigerant changeover. So, at this point in time, we’ve opened up a lot of possibilities with zero degree capable, and we’re seeing strong support for that. As we get the new parts and pieces that are required for minus 25, I think it’ll be very, very significant. And I’ve forgotten your third part. Give me the third part again.

Just in terms of…

Is it compared to rest of the market? What else is out there? Yes. Okay. So the vast majority, according to the research that my team has provided me, the vast majority of air source heat pumps that are out there, which there’s not that big of a selection in package rooftops. There are great selections in residential unitary, split systems, but in package rooftops, there’s not a huge selection, but most of them seem to not be viable below, maybe 30 degrees or even 35 degrees Fahrenheit. So, being able to capture that delta, will use the smaller number from 30 degrees down to zero degrees. That captures a huge amount of operating hours in areas that are not Sunbelt areas. So, it’s pretty significant. And like I say, with the research we’ve got products that they’ve already been in the lab and tested with prototype materials. As those become commercially available, we’re going to be able to capture just a significant more of that -- people that want to decarbonize.

Your next question comes from the line of Brent Thielman with D.A. Davidson.

Hey Gary. It looks like you got about 24% from price of the 75% in total growth. I was wondering if any of the march price increase, which I think was 7% -- is any of that represented in the revenue you’ve reported today? And I guess you’ve still got the 1 percentage point increases thereafter?

Yes, a very -- I don’t have the exact percentage, maybe Rebecca might have that. I’ll ask her to look that up and see if she can get that for you percentage in the quarter. I know in October, we’re getting a good bit more of the market price increase. We looked at it how that occurred. At one time, I was told up to 7%, we got about 5% in October. So, it was beginning to come into the quarter, but it would have been the very tail end. So, there’s quite a bit left to gain. And then as you mentioned, starting June 1st, we had 1% per month, and that’s still in place. We’ve not discontinued that yet.

And then Gary, last quarter, you guys talked a bit about all the inroads that BasX is making and maybe some opportunity to produce product out of Longview for a customer or maybe set of customers, is there any update on the progress on that front?

Yes. The first prototype units have been built. There’s one on the way to the laboratory right now for final testing. It may be there by now. Last week, it was finished. In Longview, the manufacturing facilities ready to go. We vetted out the process. We built three prototypes, o that we could learn what was most manufacturable to meet the expectations of the client. And we actually ended up giving them a little more than what we originally thought we were going to give them but it was a more manufacturable unit. So, we’re not anticipating starting full blown production till around January 1st. Between now and then we’ll be vetting out the manufacturing process, refining it, and so forth. Because remember, you design and build one of these units once -- you design it once, and then you build it hundreds, if not thousands of times. So, they are very, very custom but you get to put a fairly large number in front of the bill of materials when you go doing it. So you want to make sure everything’s as optimized as possible. And that’s what we’re in the process of cleaning up and finishing up right now.

Hey Brent, I can circle back to you on that pricing question. For the March price increase that was 7%. We saw about 1% of it in August, almost 3% of that in September, and a little over 6% of that in October. So we got to…

Thanks, Rebecca. Yes. And then, maybe just another one. Gary, you mentioned potential for backlog to come in here at some point in 2023 as your lead times improve. So, some of the competitions out there has talked about continued stretched lead times in the industry. Maybe you could just talk around that. And I guess, what you see, in terms of visibility for 2023 and even ‘24, if you can comment on at this point?

Well, I want to go back to the beginning. It’s six years ago last week that I began as President of AAON. And when I became President, I took over all the sales, engineering, and manufacturing, the back office stuff stayed with Norm. Norm made the statement to me as I walked in the door that the Company could build more than we could sell. And so, I went about working with sales channel to improve a lot of things that I knew was holding them back from being more successful. And unfortunately, we proved Norm incorrect on that statement. That’s why ‘18 -- ‘17, we did pretty good, ‘18 and ‘19 were very challenging. Third quarter in ‘19, we began to show that we had figured out this manufacturing deficiency, had corrected it and we actually had good capacity. Now all of this process is well documented. There’s a lot of objectives that we monitor and measure. And so, we’re very confident that we know what our capacity is. So, we got well ahead of where we were, as you’ve seen the CapEx investments have been substantial in additional capacity. Let’s just circle back to Longview for a second. We built a new building. And it won’t be two years that it’s been in production until February of ‘23. But they are now producing over double of what they produced prior to that new building. So, we have put a lot of investment into manufacturing capacity. I felt certain that the demand was there for the equipment. The sales channel proved that way back there in ‘17, ‘18. And they continue to prove that. They’ve done a great job for us. And we’ve listened to them intently on what product positioning should look like for them. What we can do for just adding capabilities that help them to close sales more efficiently. And so, we’ve invested an awful lot in those aspects of the business and they’re all finally coming to fruition. And you began to see it, like I said in fourth quarter of ‘19, but then the pandemic hit, and kind of slowed things down for us for a little while. So now, we’re able to -- the supply chain has thawed out a lot. It’s not totally without strain, but it’s substantially improved. And we’re able to ramp up headcount along with the availability of these components that have been a little scarce from time to time. We already had the manufacturing infrastructure. So, all of these things are going to power us to increase production. And the demand is very solid. So, like I say, if we were to reduce the backlog a little, it’s not going to be because of reduced bookings, it’s going to be because of increased production.

Your next question comes from the line of Julio Romero with Sidoti.

If you guys could just talk about the customer reception to the shift in pricing strategy to that 1% monthly. And secondly is the order number you put up in the quarter kind of a cleaner order number with less noise, so to speak?

So let’s talk about the 1% price increases. I took that advice from Norm. He had lived through inflationary times in the 70s, and had used that strategy once before and said it was very successful. We needed to kind of get -- we had to make some big moves to get back between the proper range, I call it between the guardrails. Once we felt certain that we were there, then, with inflation running roughly just short of 10%, I felt like 1% per month was very appropriate. So, we did that. And our sales channel just really appreciate that. They said, it’s very predictable. They know exactly what to expect. And we have not yet shut that off, because inflation hasn’t yet shut down. I mean, we’re looking at wage rate increases, electronic component increases. While some raw materials have come down the component cost have not. So, we feel like that we’ve got it handled really well with the 1% per month. And we’ll probably continue that for a while yet until we see things strengthen and our margins a bit above historic, which very likely could happen in ‘23, if we’re able to keep these price increases. We also look at the bookings rate to make sure that we’ve not slowed bookings down. And as you can see, with the increased backlog and the bookings the way they are we’ve not slowed down anything. So, we’re very satisfied with what we’re doing on that price increase strategy. And what was your second part, Julio?

Yes. On the order number, I was just looking to see if, my thought process is with the monthly price increase, it’s very predictable, as you said, you would see less kind of spikes, ahead of a price increase. So just trying to see if that that order number is more indicative of underlying demand for at least on a relative basis than prior quarters?

On a relative basis, it is. We’re not seeing -- when we had 3%, 5%, 7%, 8% price increases, we saw a huge pull forward. I mean, January 1st was just absurd. We saw a pull forward on that. It was in the not quite 200 million, high 100s that pulled forward. And that’s what damaged our margins for so long there for a couple of three quarters. And so, with the 1%, we’re not seeing much pull forward at all. It’s fairly insignificant. It’s not totally absent, but it’s pretty insignificant. So, I think that the bookings rate is normalized. I mean, this goes all the way back to June now. So, that’s several months that we’ve done that. And each month, our prediction, our projection actually from the sales department telling us what’s going to happen. That’s pretty much what’s happening. We’re not having any surprises on the high side or the low side.

And I guess, with that change in pricing strategy, talk about where you are with price cost alignment. I think you mentioned, some of those component costs are still if not rising, at least not coming down?

Yes. So, we’ve put together an FPNA team. And I’m very happy with the information they’ve been providing to all of us. It’s something that we were probably in need of. If the market is very stable and FPNA a team’s job is pretty boring, it’s when, it’s so dynamic like it’s been for the last couple of years that their value is just absolutely proven. Whit what they’re telling me, our margins are going to continue to strengthen. What we see in 4Q looks like, we’ll be well into that 28% to 32% range. And then, we might possibly see something a little stronger than that first quarter if things stay the way they are. So,, we’ll just have to monitor this along. But I’m very confident that we’re in that range and that we’re capable of staying in that range.

And then just last one for me, you just mentioned on that higher margin backlog that’s flowing through. I don’t know, what are your thoughts on the duration of that higher margin backlog? Like how long does that tailwind potentially go on for you guys?

Well, if you look at absolute run rate and absolute backlog, you’re looking at about six months, it’s in the house. And orders have not slowed down a bit. Historically, the company had a bit of a bell curve on bookings, the first quarter and the fourth quarter were always a little slower than second and third quarter, we’ve not yet seen that. This has been a steady slope up. And I think a lot of that is the better product that we’re putting together, like the cold climate capable air source heat pumps, the growth and opportunity as a result of acquiring BasX. All of these things are keeping that going forward and up. And with regards to the margin, again, we’ve got that margin where we want it, and it’s going to going to continue to strengthen a bit.

Your next question comes from the line of Jon Braatz with Kansas City Capital.

One question, you’re moving a lot of products out the out the door. And I think you indicated that headcount was up 18% in the quarter year-over-year. And as you look at the production opportunity or the sales opportunities going forward, what kind of additional headcount might you need for next year? Obviously, productivity is improving, but do you need that type of increase in headcount next year too?

We’re monitoring it based on -- so that the manufacturing facility as a whole has probably around 40% more surplus capacity as a whole. The headcount, we need to measure it, and that somewhere between 15% and 18% headcount is probably the maximum that you can measure in effectively. If you bring them in too fast, you’ll either have turnover or you’ll have low productivity. And as you’ve seen, we’ve measured in 18%, but our productivity has gone up. So, our onboarding procedures, training procedures are much advanced over what they were a few years ago. So, what we’re monitoring now is supply chain. And as parts are available, then we’re able to relay that to HR and say, bring us more people. And so, we’ve kind of been ratcheting back and forth between the two as more parts are coming, that we’re adding people. So, I think our limiting factor in ‘23 is twofold. I don’t want to add people so fast that we become inefficient. That’s number one. And number two is I don’t want people standing around without parts to put together. Now, we manufacture a very high content of our equipment. One of the things that go back four or five years ago, we bought WattMaster Corporation, now called AAON Controls. They’re in Parkville, Missouri, not far from you. And we challenged them with designing and building more of the electronic components in our units than what they had historically supplied to us. And they’ve been very successful with that. They keep moving forward with that. So we have a better handle on that set of components than we ever have had in the past. The next thing was that our fan manufacturer that we were buying 35,000, 40,000 fans a year, we were able back in late April to purchase from them the intellectual property, tooling, all the fixtures, along with instructions. They’re teaching us how to build the fans. So, we’re starting to build fans in Tulsa here, in another month or so. Slowed down a little bit by some of the major equipment we had to purchase to do that. Those people had supply chain issues. And ironically, our purchasing department went to bat for them, and got them some of the parts to build our equipment for us, which I thought was fun, and pretty innovative. And so, they’re getting these big pieces of equipment to us probably three months ahead of what they had told us not so long ago. But being able to build our own fans is another thing that we can control a lot of the supply questions on. So, we continue to look at vertical integration, what else is being constrained? What else can we do? And we’re very creative and innovative with that. We’re going to continue to do that. And some of our 2023 CapEx is going to be dedicated towards that exact quest is increasing our manufactured content even more.

Okay, Gary, one other question. Obviously, BasX had a good quarter, looks very, very strong. And maybe incorrectly I thought BasX more as a data center company, but we talked a little -- you talked a little bit about the semiconductor opportunities? Is that something that is sort of new and emerging and have they done a lot of work with semiconductor manufacturers before?

Well, actually, the founders’ heritage was from semiconductor. Dave Benson began his career with Intel. And when he left Intel, he went to Brod & McClung PACE Company in Portland, and built units for Intel. So, I would say he’s got around five decades of experience with semiconductor. It was probably -- I don’t have the number off the top of my head, but I think they’ve been doing about 30% to 35% of their revenue with semiconductor and clean rooms. And that is something that is accelerating. The alignment with AAON is allowing some of those -- to see those by huge, huge orders at a time. And previously if they wanted to give them an order that they were capable of technologically building but maybe not physically building because they didn’t have enough physical infrastructure to do it. So now, they’ve got more infrastructure, the new building they built just prior to us purchasing them helped that. And then the legacy AAON facilities helped that a little bit too. So, this is something that’s a very, very good opportunity for them. They have very high regard in the industry for their abilities. And now, they’ve got a strong foundation underneath them that will allow us to capitalize on those.

If things continue well for BasX, do they have -- in combination with your legacy business, do they have the footprint to, let’s say, double sales?

Easily. What we’re able to do for them in Longview, just in the data center itself doubles their sales.

There are no further questions at this time. I’d like to turn the callback to Mr. Joe Mondillo for closing remarks.

All right. I’d like to thank everyone for joining on today’s call. If anyone has any questions over the coming days and weeks, please feel free to reach out to myself. Have a great rest of the day. And we look forward to speaking with you in the future. Thank you.

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