Earnings Labs

Alta Equipment Group Inc. (ALTG)

Q4 2021 Earnings Call· Thu, Mar 31, 2022

$8.02

+0.88%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Alta Equipment Group Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Tania and I will be your moderator for today's call. Our lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions-and-answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I will now like to pass the conference over to our host, Jason Dammeyer with Alta Equipment Group. Please go ahead.

Jason Dammeyer

Management

Thank you [Indiscernible]. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us today. A press release detailing Alta's fourth-quarter and full-year 2021 financial results was issued this afternoon and is posted on our website along with the presentation designed to assist you in understanding the company's results. On the call with me today, are Ryan Greenawalt, our Chairman and CEO, and Tony Colucci, our Chief Financial Officer. For today's call, management will first provide a review of the fourth-quarter and full-year financial results. We will begin with some prepared remarks before we open the call for your questions. Before we get started, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain certain forward-looking statements, including statements about future financial results, our business strategy and financial outlook, achievements of the company and other non historical statements as described in our press release. These forward-looking statements are subject to both known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including those related to altered growth market opportunities, and general economic and business conditions. We have based these forward-looking statements largely on our current expectation and projections about future events and financial trends that we believe may affect our business financial condition, and results of operations. Although we believe these expectations are reasonable, we undertake no obligation to revise any statement to reflect changes that occur after this call. Descriptions of these and other risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are discussed in our reports filed with the SEC, including our press release that was issued today. During this call, we may present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's press release and can be found on our website at investors.altaequipment.com. I will now turn the call over to Ryan.

Ryan Greenawalt

Management

Thank you, Jason. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our strong fourth quarter capped off an outstanding year for Alta. We delivered record revenue surpassing $1 billion in revenue and delivered higher profitability in our first full year as a public company. We did this while navigating a challenging environment and continuing our investment strategy to scale our business for stronger growth in 2022 and beyond. On the call today, I will go through highlights from our financial results and update on the progress we've made against our growth objectives before touching on M&A and our initiatives for the year ahead. I will then turn it over to Tony, who will provide a more detailed review of our financial results for the full year. The outperformance in the first nine months continued with record financial results that reflected the underlying strength of both the material handling and construction businesses, as well as the progress we made on our operations throughout the year in executing our strategic plan. Last year, we completed six acquisitions that added 152 million in revenue and 15.2 million in adjusted EBITDA. These acquisitions expanded our presence in key markets and broader capabilities to new regions. We gained share in our new regions, particularly in our construction business in Florida, while also expanding into new geographic regions, such as New York and Ohio, that offers substantial growth opportunities. We added new OEM partners and expanded our relationships with existing ones, broadening our equipment portfolio and our end market diversification. We continue to grow our headcount of skilled technicians, ensuring our customers receive optimal product support and adding to our higher-margin Parts and Service revenue streams. We expanded our presence in some of the fastest-growing end markets, like warehousing and logistics, with broadened and…

Tony Colucci

Management

Thanks, Ryan. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for your interest in Alta Equipment Group and our fourth-quarter and full-year 2021 financial results. We feel strongly about how the business performed in 2021, and look forward to more growth and positive outcomes in 2022. I first want to congratulate all of my Alta teammates for the hard work and dedication to our company in 2021. I especially want to acknowledge our skilled technicians. Our customer's businesses earned on job sites and on shop floors across our footprint by our technician base. And they continue to meet every challenge and embody our customers for life guiding principle, each and every day. A big thank you to all of Alta's skilled technicians. Additionally, I want to welcome our new team members from Ginop Sales, Ambrose Equipment, and Midwest Mine to the Alta family. The senior leadership team is committed to carrying on the impressive legacies of each of those respective businesses and we look forward to earning your trust. My remarks today will focus on three key areas. First, I'll be presenting our fourth-quarter performance, which exceeded our expectations as the business continues to gain ground year-over-year on some key metrics. Second, I thought it was an appropriate time to recap Alta's M&A activity over the past two years, as well as provide commentary on our capital structure and operating cash flows, give the company a solid framework to continue on its M&A path. Lastly, I will provide guidance for 2022 adjusted EBITDA and discuss the relative elements and assumptions that drive the metrics. Real briefly, it should be noted that there are some slides in our presentation, which was released prior to our call today, that presents our fourth quarter and full-year numbers in greater detail than what I will discuss…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator instructions] First question is from the line of Alex Rygiel with B. Riley. Your line is open.

Alex Rygiel

Analyst

Thank you Ryan and Tony. Fantastic quarter and excellent year. Congratulations.

Ryan Greenawalt

Management

Thanks, Alex.

Alex Rygiel

Analyst

A couple quick questions here. First, Tony, as it relates to the guidance you mentioned that the relationship with Nikola and the expectation for revenue from that relationship implied in your guidance is minimal. Can you expand upon that a little bit? I understand that Nikola is expected to -- we're hoping to deliver something in the order of 300 to 500 trucks this year. How should we think about that contribution to Alta? I suspect obviously it would be second half weighted. But why not start to include it in your guidance yet?

Tony Colucci

Management

Alex, thanks for the question. First of all, just to be clear, the guidance is really just embedded or the foundation of it is the two core segments with -- without any impact from the EV segment. And we wanted to be conservative there. Just given the startup nature with Nikola, we're cognizant of the numbers in terms of truck deliveries that you mentioned there. But we also have some startup costs probably that may offset any gross profit that we were able to make maybe on some truck sales. So for all those reasons, and again, the back-half weighting, we chose to just guide really with the two core business segments.

Alex Rygiel

Analyst

That's helpful. And then also as it relates to guidance, guidance appears to be somewhat tempered by timing and delivery of new equipment by OEM partners. Can you talk about, clearly I suspect that they've had some delivery timing challenges for the better part of the last months or so. Are those starting to ease yet or is there any visibility as to when that might?

Ryan Greenawalt

Management

Alex this is Ryan, I'll take that one. It's hard to generalize because of the breadth of our portfolio, but I think most accurate to say that it is tempered off, but at historically high level. We have record lead-times and most of our products, things that we delivered this year were sold last year, and orders that we're taking this year for the most part will be delivered in 2023. It's stabilized, but it's still, it's a very tight market, historically tightened and remains elevated.

Alex Rygiel

Analyst

One last question, I'll get back in the queue. Clearly because of that tight market your rent a bit is very strong, and it's obviously our high-margin business, as well as parts and services. Is there any capital or are you looking to invest more capital into that rental business, high demand given the long lead times for new products?

Tony Colucci

Management

This is Tony, I'll take that one. You know in terms of the rental fleets [Indiscernible]

Alex Rygiel

Analyst

Thank you very much

Operator

Operator

Thank you Mr. Rygiel. The next question is from the line of Bryan Fast with Raymond James, your line is open.

Bryan Fast

Analyst

Thanks. Good afternoon. We saw a strong I guess, rental utilization in the year-end. I think you provided some color, but could we get some more color on what you've seen more recently in the last few months in 2022?

Tony Colucci

Management

I'll take that one, Bryan. We -- what I would say is I mentioned in my prepared remarks is we have typically specifically in the North saw a dip in physical utilization going from, Q3 to Q4 and October and November stayed really hot in terms of just physical utilization. And we really didn't see much of a dip at all until the very end of December and that dip was probably more muted than it has been in years past. What I would also mention is we're in Florida, large chunk of our fleet is in Florida which obviously is not impacted by the weather. And we have held physical utilization right throughout the year down in Florida at a really high level. And that continues into Q1 down in Florida. So what I would say up north here is, in Q1 we certainly see a dip. There's Frost laws that prevent us from shipping large equipment in the winter time in the north. So we definitely see a dip like we have in the past. But what I would say is it's probably been more muted than it has historically. Utilization-wise.

Bryan Fast

Analyst

Okay, thanks. That's very helpful. And then just on Nikola, as that relationship continues to solidify with the new dealer territory in Arizona, could you provide some thoughts on what we should look for in terms of milestones or next steps?

Ryan Greenawalt

Management

Sure. I'll take that. This is Ryan. I think that's the first milestone for us would be announcing a large order. So we're working closely with Nikola, and they are indications of interest, there are demos that are happening. And our anticipation is that at some point this year we're able to broadcast customer number one for Alta equipment.

Bryan Fast

Analyst

Okay, thanks. That's it for me.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, Mr. Fast. [Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Matt Summerville with D.A. Davidson. Your line is open.

Matt Summerville

Analyst

Thanks. I have a couple of questions. I know it's tough to have visibility from the top-line today when you think about equipment sales, so I want to focus on product support. As we think about '22, and based on what you've seen now for the better part of the first three months of the year, what do you feel is a realistic organic growth rate or range we should expect to see our product support for Alta in '22?

Tony Colucci

Management

Matt, good to hear from you and thanks for the question. This is Tony. We always have to think about the segments bifurcated from one another as the construction segment it's realized. Organic growth numbers in the double-digits for quite some time now as we take share for our OEMs drive field population hire mechanics in kind of run the Alta playbook in the territories that we're at. As I mentioned on my prepared remarks that the bottleneck can be tech headcount, which is always difficult, we are good at it, as I mentioned, but that can connect as a bit of a governor. Having said that, we expect product support in the Construction business to continue to run very strong especially in some of the newer geographies that we've entered through M&A Upstate New York being one of the newest kind of territories that we've entered in Florida as well. I would expect something in the double-digits would be the expectations there and product support in the Construction segment. The Material Handling segment,

Tony Colucci

Management

a more mature business, as we think about organic growth rates year-on-year in that business recall that it was more impacted with COVID in 2020 probably then our construction business was, and historically the growth rate therapy and 5% or 10% and I would expect probably a return to that norm overall, especially as we are able to kind of pass along pricing increases on parts and labour. So hopefully that gives you some idea of the expectation there.

Matt Summerville

Analyst

Appreciate Tony. In terms of pricing, can you talk about what rent pricing looked like in 21 versus 20? And what you anticipate to realize on top of that in 22 over 21 and if you're able to give the same color on product support, that would be helpful as well. Thank you.

Tony Colucci

Management

You know that's a difficult question, Matt. I'll take the product support piece first. The product support piece I've certainly -- of similar to the equipment markets when there's a dearth of supply, rates tend to go higher. What I would say though is every market is different that the competitive landscape is different. And so rates are different across the board, just given when you compare and contrast the geographies. But in general, certainly something along the lines of 3% to 5% in terms of rates on product support just pricing, I guess I would say. And on the rental piece, which by the way, we would expect to continue into '22 here. On the rental plea -- the rental piece, I think again, factors that are very specific to different regions can vary. But we saw multiple single-digit increases in the markets that we're in. And for the equipment categories that we're in, in 2022 or I'm sorry, in 2021 and remains to be seen in 2022, but everything suggest that we -- the trends may continue here.

Matt Summerville

Analyst

All right. And then I'll go ahead and ask one more. Just I'm going to your warehouse solutions business, which is left the lift truck, like the automation stuff. How big is that business for Alta as of year-end '21. And what can you scale that to this year if there's -- I feel like you've referenced backlogs statistic just pertaining to that piece to the business in the past. I could be wrong. But if you guys could do a deeper dive on the automation piece embedded in the material handling, that I'll be great.

Tony Colucci

Management

Sure Matt, I will take that one. I want to say the Material Handling business was somewhere along the lines of and we produced some data last quarter on peak Logic specifically. And of course on top of that, we have the investment in Scott Tech. So combined that business -- Matt, I may have to get back I don't have it top of mind, but I want to say that that business was about $50 million combined when we bought it so between 2022 and 2021 for Scott Tech, and we would have saw something along the lines of 25% growth on that metric in 2021 here. The question then becomes, what it looks like for 2022 solet’s just say we did $65, $70 million maybe this year. And a lot of the same types of issues impact that business, supply chain being one of them in skilled labor being the other little bit different skilled labor in terms of having appropriate amount of project engineers and design engineers in that space, which are also kind of in high demand here. So anyway, hopefully that helps Matt, answer your question.

Matt Summerville

Analyst

Thank you. I appreciate thanks Tony.

Operator

Operator

Thank you Mr. Summerville. There are no additional questions at this time. Thank you for attending today's Alta Equipment Group fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect your lines.