Earnings Labs

JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. (JELD)

Q4 2025 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 18, 2026

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Krista, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the JELD-WEN's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to James Armstrong, Vice President of Investor Relations. James, please go ahead.

James Armstrong

Analyst

Thank you, and good morning. We issued our fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings release last night and posted a slide presentation to the Investor Relations portion of our website, which can be found at investors.jeld-wen.com. We will be referencing this presentation during our call. Today, I am joined by Bill Christensen, Chief Executive Officer; and Samantha Stoddard, Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn it over to Bill, I would like to remind everyone that during this call, we will make certain statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our earnings release and provided in our Forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC. JELD-WEN does not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements, including the guidance we are providing with respect to certain expectations for future results. Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable financial measures calculated under GAAP can be found in our earnings release and in the appendix of our earnings presentation. With that, I would like to now turn the call over to Bill.

William Christensen

Analyst

Thank you, James, and good morning, everyone. Before turning to results, I want to thank the teams across JELD-WEN. The fourth quarter remains challenging and the progress we made required sustained effort in an environment that continued to put volume pressure on the business. Our employees stayed focused on customers, operated with discipline and worked through the realities of the market. I'm grateful for their commitment and their work continues to strengthen the foundation of the company as we move forward. The macro environment remained very soft during the fourth quarter, consistent with what we expected coming into the period. End markets did not improve meaningfully and demand across both new construction and repair and remodel continue to be under pressure. Despite those market challenges, we delivered results at the high end of our expectations. That outcome reflects disciplined execution and sustained effort across the organization to manage through a difficult environment. As seen on Slide 4, we delivered the high end of the sales and adjusted EBITDA range we forecasted through a combination of top line performance and cost actions. Sales came in stronger than we expected, driven by the hard work of our sales team, combined with improving operational execution, including continued progress with on-time in full delivery. At the same time, we took deliberate labor and cost actions to better align the business with market conditions, consistent with what we outlined in November, including reducing full-time positions by approximately 14% or about 2,300 people in full year 2025. These actions were structural and reflected our view that demand is unlikely to improve meaningfully in the near term. While cost actions played an important role, we remain focused on serving customers and securing the long-term health of the business. Adjusted EBITDA also came in better than we expected.…

Samantha Stoddard

Analyst

Thank you, Bill. Turning to the financial results on Slide 6. Fourth quarter net revenue was $802 million, down 10% year-over-year from $896 million in the prior year. Core revenue declined 8%, driven primarily by lower volume. Mix was stable year-over-year following the shift towards lower-cost products we saw in 2024, and pricing was a slight positive. Overall, the revenue performance reflects continued pressure from soft end markets rather than changes in customer mix or pricing discipline. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $15 million or 1.8% of sales compared to $40 million or 4.5% of sales in the fourth quarter of last year. The decline was driven primarily by lower volumes, resulting in unfavorable operating leverage as well as ongoing price and cost pressure. These headwinds were partially offset by continued productivity improvements and lower SG&A costs. The fourth quarter is also seasonally weaker from a margin perspective and adjusted EBITDA was also impacted by approximately $7 million of timing-related items that are not expected to recur. Excluding those items, underlying adjusted EBITDA performance would have been higher. From a cash flow perspective, we were roughly free cash flow neutral in the quarter. Operating cash flow was largely offset by capital spending, and we benefited from a $55 million reduction in net working capital, driven primarily by lower accounts receivable and inventory levels, consistent with normal fourth quarter seasonality. As Bill mentioned, we also completed a sale leaseback of our Coral Springs facility during the quarter, generating approximately $38 million in net proceeds. Overall, our focus during the quarter was on disciplined cash usage and managing liquidity carefully in a very challenging macro environment. As a result of lower EBITDA, net debt leverage increased to 8.6x at year-end. Importantly, this increase was driven by earnings pressure rather than incremental…

William Christensen

Analyst

Thanks, Samantha. Turning to Slide 11. I want to provide our market outlook for 2026 and the assumptions that underpin our guidance. We continue to see a challenging and uncertain environment, and our outlook reflects disciplined actions rather than any expectation of a meaningful near-term recovery. In North America, we expect the overall market for windows and doors to be down low to mid-single digits. Within that, we anticipate new single-family construction to be down low single digits with repair and remodel activity down mid-single digits. Multifamily activity in the U.S. is expected to be relatively stable, while Canada remains under pressure. We continue to expect high single-digit declines in the Canadian market, reflecting the ongoing economic slowdown and weaker housing activity. In Europe, we are seeing signs of stabilization. We expect volumes to be broadly flat year-over-year with no material improvements, but also no further deterioration from current levels. Demand remains subdued, but year-over-year conditions appear to be more stable than what we have experienced earlier in the current cycle. Importantly, our company volume expectations are more conservative than the underlying market. As we move through the last year, we have taken pricing actions to cover cost inflation. As a result, we do expect to lose some volume and are prioritizing pricing discipline. That share pressure is intentional and reflected in our guidance. While we are seeing improving service levels and have actions in place to regain share over time, we are not assuming any benefit from service-driven volume recovery in our outlook. Taken together, this framework reflects a cautious view of the market and a disciplined approach as to how we are managing the business. Our guidance is built on our view of current demand levels with pricing actions largely already implemented and a focus on protecting margins…

James Armstrong

Analyst

Thanks, Bill. Operator, we are now ready to begin Q&A.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Susan Maklari with Goldman Sachs.

Susan Maklari

Analyst

My first question is around that price versus volume dynamic that you spoke to in your prepared remarks. Can you talk a bit more about how we should think of the amount that price may decelerate as we move through the year? And how much of that you're willing to give up in relation to volume as you continue to face some of those cost headwinds that you mentioned?

William Christensen

Analyst

Yes. Thanks for the question, Susan. So as we signaled in the prepared remarks, our pricing actions are more or less into the market. So there was a lot of negotiation and work with our customers through the last number of months to get ourselves ready for 2026. So as you can see on the bridge and where we're showing the look forward in 2026, we still expect headwind from a price/cost standpoint, mainly due to some tail inflation and some of the input cost increases that we're seeing on glass. But we believe that, that brings us back into a reasonable pocket, which clearly we have not been in through the last few years. So we feel fairly good headed into this year about where we are and the partnerships with our customers to drive performance and make sure we're delivering what we need to for our customers.

Samantha Stoddard

Analyst

So, just on that, Susan, from a phasing standpoint on price. So with price being implemented and being put in already, we're expecting that to be fully into our financials in Q2. So we do expect Q1 to be down year-over-year with slightly positive EBITDA, and that's really because of the price dynamic that I just spoke about, which you'll see that pick back up in Q2. In addition, the year-over-year headwinds from Towanda being included in the majority of January 2025 and not in '26 and then some of the winter storms. So I just wanted to give you kind of that pricing phasing as well.

Susan Maklari

Analyst

Yes. No, that's very helpful, Samantha. My second question is moving to the slide that you walked us through outlining the efforts at the Kissimmee facility. It sounds as if there's been some very basic blocking and tackling that's happened across your operations. And can you talk a bit about where you are in terms of implementing this across the business? And how we think about that freeing you up to then tackle some of the larger productivity and efficiency projects that are sitting out there and also that ability to eventually regain share?

William Christensen

Analyst

Yes. So thanks for the question. That's exactly why we wanted to share this progression, Susan, to make it very clear that we are making progress. And of course, in a down market environment, it's challenging because, obviously, the volume reductions have eroded a lot of the efforts that we are making behind the scenes. So the first message is we have a system that is working and is being implemented. I'd probably say we're 85% of the way there through 2025, meaning spreading it across to all of our sites, really having the leadership and the layered audit structure and an ownership at site level on controlling their own destiny and serving the customer. So great progress there, and we're very happy with that. I think the second fact is it still remains a challenging environment, but we are controlling what we can control. And a lot of the things that we're doing here are to shop floor-based improvement activities and layered structuring of problem solving and less requiring large capital expenditures to drive scale improvement. Of course, we think we'll get there when the volume returns. But again, this is more us focused on controlling what we can control. And I think the third lever is productivity. There's also a lot of opportunity on productivity. Clearly, if the volume does recover, it's a lot easier for us to gain productivity benefit across our North American and European network. And right now, that's one of the biggest challenges that we have, the scaling up of the volume is not allowing that productivity drop through.

Samantha Stoddard

Analyst

So, Susan, your comment is spot on about the blocking and tackling. And I think Bill highlighting and showing some of that improvement will give color into some of the guidance bridge that you see. And that's the slide that we have in 13, it's the 2026 guidance. So the two large green bars add up to about $110 million. 50% or just more than 50% of that is structural cost actions that we executed. So that is in the bag that were done in '25, especially in Q4 that then carries over into '26. You have about 25% of it that are executed actions that need to be scaled full year. This is exactly what Bill is talking about when it comes to the operating model and scaling that from a full year standpoint. And then the remaining 25% is productivity projects that are identified and are in progress using this simple model that is really driving root cause and solving some of the challenges even despite the operating headwinds of lower volumes.

Operator

Operator

And that concludes our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the conference back over to James Armstrong for closing comments.

James Armstrong

Analyst

Thank you for joining our call today. If you have any follow-ups, please reach out, and I would be happy to answer any questions. This ends our call, and please have a great day.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.