Welcome to the Methode Electronics Fiscal Year 2020 Second Quarter Conference Call. For this quarterly conference call, the company has prepared a PowerPoint presentation, entitled Fiscal 2020 Second Quarter earnings, which can be found at methode.com in the Investor Relations section. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. This conference call does contain forward-looking statements, which reflects management's expectations regarding future events and operating performance and speak only as of the date hereof. These forward-looking statements are subject to a safe harbor protection provided under the securities laws. Methode undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements to conform the statements to actual results or changes in Methode's expectations on a quarterly basis or otherwise. Forward-looking statements in this conference call involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The factors that cause these actual results to differ materially from our expectations are detailed in Methode's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, such as our annual and quarterly reports. Such factors may include, without limitation, the following: dependence on a small number of large customers, including 2 large automotive customers; dependence on the automotive, appliance, commercial vehicle, computer and communications industries; international trade disputes resulting in tariffs and our ability to mitigate tariffs; timing, quality and cost of new program launches; ability to withstand price pressure, including pricing reductions; ability to successfully market and sell Dabir Surfaces products; currency fluctuations; customary risks related to conducting global operations; ability to withstand business interruptions; recognition of goodwill impairment charges; abilities to successfully benefit from acquisitions and divestures; investment in programs prior to the recognition of revenue; dependence on the availability and price of materials; fluctuations in our gross margins; dependence on our supply chain; income tax rate fluctuations; ability to keep pace with rapid technological changes; breach of our information technology systems; ability to avoid design or manufacturing defects; ability to compete effectively; ability to protect our intellectual property; success of Grakon and/or our ability to implement and profit from new applications of the acquired technology; significant adjustments to expense based on the probability of meeting certain performance levels in our long-term incentive plan; and cost and expenses due to regulations regarding conflict minerals. [Operator Instructions]. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to Mr. Don Duda, President and CEO. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Cynthia, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our fiscal 2020 second quarter financial results conference call. I'm joined today by Ron Tsoumas, our Chief Financial Officer. Both Ron and I have comments, and afterwards, we will take your questions. To start, please turn to Slide 4. Although our second quarter and 6 month fiscal year-to-date results were adversely impacted by the 40-day UAW labor strike at General Motors, incremental sales from Grakon, revenue from new product launches, benefits from our initiatives to improve profitability and our continuous improvement actions to reduce costs, improved Methode's year-over-year results on a GAAP basis. Methode's revenue increased 8.2%, our net income increased 36%, and our net income per share increased 35.3% for the 6 months ended October 26 of this fiscal year. Again, please refer to Slide 4 for our adjusted net income and adjusted income per share results, which exclude expenses for initiatives to reduce overall costs and improve operational profitability, acquisition-related costs, including purchase accounting adjustments and long-term incentive plan accrual adjustments in the applicable periods. As you can see on Slide 5, our year-to-date performance, excluding the adverse effect of the UAW labor strike at GM, still saw headwinds, tempering our growth. Weaker auto sales, lower industrial equipment purchases and lower planned sales as well as the impact of weaker foreign currencies affected growth. However, with the strike behind us, the opportunities that we have going forward and our team's focus on our strategy, operational discipline and managing the business, allows us to reaffirm our pretax income and EPS guidance for the fiscal year, as shown on Slide 6. Please note that we have reduced fiscal year 2020 revenue guidance largely due to the effect of the UAW labor strike. During the second quarter,…

Thank you, Don, and good morning, everybody. Please turn to Slide 10. Second quarter sales declined 2.6% or $6.8 million to $257.2 million in fiscal '20 from $264 million in fiscal '19. Sales in the second quarter were negatively impacted from the UAW labor strike at GM, which reduced net sales by $32 million. Foreign currency exchange continue to be a headwind as the euro and renminbi exchange rates were weaker than the prior year, reducing net sales in the quarter by $3.9 million. This was partially offset by higher sales from Grakon of $32.3 million. Grakon was acquired in 2Q of fiscal '19 and was included for 1.5 months versus the entire quarter this fiscal year. On a GAAP basis, second quarter net income increased $9.2 million to $23.8 million or $0.63 per share from $14.6 million or $0.39 per share for the same period last year. Second quarter GAAP net income benefited from the results of Grakon, lower acquisition-related costs, lower stock award amortization expense and the net benefit we received from initiatives to reduce cost and improve profitability, which included lower expense for those actions in the current fiscal year versus last fiscal year. On a non-GAAP basis, second quarter adjusted net income decreased $7.7 million to $24.2 million or $0.64 per share from $31.9 million or $0.85 per share for the same period last year. Negatively impacting second quarter GAAP and non-GAAP net income were the adverse impact of the UAW labor strike at GM of $9.6 million, higher expenses for net interest, intangible asset amortization, income taxes and net tariffs as well as the impact of foreign currency translation. China tariffs continue to be a headwind, although we're aggressively working to mitigate the impact on our results. In the second quarter, our net tariff expense…

Ron, thank you very much. Cynthia, we are ready to take questions.

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Chris Van Horn of B. Riley FBR.

Congrats on solid execution in a challenging environment. I just wanted to touch on guidance really quickly. I mean, obviously, the labor strike had an effect here. But when you look at kind of the underlying -- this is specifically for auto, when you look at kind of the underlying production estimates, are you changing anything from either IHS or LMC, whoever you use, in terms of your production expectations?

No. I mean, we look at both of those. I mean we're more in -- certainly in the United States, we have more truck and SUVs, so we tend to analyze those much closer, and those have remained strong. If you take -- Chris, take the strike out of it. But we are anticipating some recovery from the UAW strike in orders from our customer, not a lot, but that is in our thinking. And then in Europe, we monitor that really on a weekly basis because that still tends to be very spotty.

Got it. Got it. And as you look at kind of your awards that will be launching over the next, call it, 12 to 18 months, do you see a dramatic shift in your geographic mix as those launches happen?

No, no. I mean it's -- the U.S. -- number of launches in Europe is smaller, but larger in number, and a few in Asia with Great Wall. But I don't really see a geographic change.

Okay. Got it. And margins are holding up really well, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Grakon is a big part of that. And you're certainly making a lot of initiatives on the cost side through operational efficiency and spending there. Where are we in that cost cutting or that -- those initiatives to reduce costs? Is a bulk of it done? I know there's always stuff to be had, but it seems like you've really ramped it up over the past 12 months. And I'm just curious if you see more low-hanging fruit as we look out next year and what that looks like.

First of all, I would say that we're ahead of where we thought we would be on the Grakon factory improvements. And kudos to the team in Asia, the Methode and the Grakon team. That certainly helped us, in the quarter. It will help us for the balance of the year. But I would say we're probably about halfway. It gets harder, initially, you're picking up dollars bills and eventually, you get down to pennies. But we anticipate that we've got another year of, I think, solid improvement there. And in the course of Methode, that's what we do for living. And I know that's continuous improvement. But Grakon, we knew going into it that there were certain improvements we could make.

Okay. That makes sense. Last for me. Congratulations on your digital cluster win. Not sure how much detail you can get into. I imagine you displaced the incumbent. And I'm just curious about any more detail. It seems like a new product line for you. There are many other players in the space that we can think of that are in the digital cluster arena. So any detail about what the award was or how it came it out? And maybe your competitive advantage in that win?

I have to be very careful here because I can't really say too much about the product and certainly, not the customer. I can say that it's a customer that knows us well. And that we developed the technology probably 2, 3 years ago, and we're deploying it for the first time. Much sense, we deployed center consoles on premium vehicles years ago before we landed some of the larger piece of the business. But I really -- Chris, I'd like to say more, we're excited about it, but I can't.

Okay. Well, hopefully, maybe in the coming months or quarters, we can get some more detail around it.

Yes, absolutely.

Our next question comes from Steve Dyer of Craig-Hallum.

Congrats on the quarter. This is Ryan on for Steve. Just digging in the guidance, I guess, a little more. So you reduced revenue guidance by $35 million at the midpoint, primarily for GM, but you maintained the profitability expectations. Where are those cost cuts or efficiencies coming from, I guess, that you weren't expecting a couple of months ago when you last guided?

Well, as I was talking with Chris a little bit ago, certainly from our Grakon cost improvement. That is ahead of schedule and that definitely helped. And Grakon sales were up. And we modeled Grakon sales both looking at what our customers are telling us, plus what we're seeing from AC...

ACT.

ACT. Always forget that. And we were modeling a slight decline, and in fact it was better than we expected. We're still anticipating and modeled into our guidance a decline, but that didn't happen as fast as we thought. And again, kudos to the team, they have done an excellent job on tariffs. When we entered the year thinking around $8 million.

$8.5 million. Yes.

And we're considerably below that. So all of that contributed to it.

Great. Then just switching over to Dabir. So in early October, you announced a master product agreement with Trinity Health, but then subsequently there was a notice to disregard. I guess just any way to clarify, I guess, what was going on with those press releases? And then as well as just if you could talk about the opportunity with that health system and then what that could potentially mean for any other hospitals, too?

Okay. Very simply, we shouldn't have used their name. And they're obviously going to be a good customer, and we wanted to quickly correct that, which we did. But that is really our first system win. Most of our wins have been, if I recall, all of them have been discrete hospitals, maybe they're part of the system, but they have been one-off wins. That the exciting part of that is that a system win and Dabir will be deployed throughout their hospitals. And that we found very exciting and is why we also wanted to announce out to the Street. And I think that's probably all -- I can't say that. I can't tell you the revenue amount, but it very quickly would become Dabir's largest customer.

And then maybe as one follow-up question. You said it will be deployed throughout the hospitals. Will that be a hospital-by-hospital decision? Or is this basically like a hunting license essentially? Or is this -- will it be automatically essentially deployed across all their hospitals?

Probably a little bit of a mixed bag. We will have to go and train each hospital, but the system is adopting Dabir. So I mean I don't want to say that a hospital has to use it, but it is in their system. And we will -- it's a little bit more than a hunting license, I suppose. We have to go and train the staff and then it will be used routinely.

Great. One more for me and then I'll turn it over. So it looks like the auto and laundry launches is a couple of million worse than what you were expecting last quarter. Has there been another delay in that big product to launch there? Or what's going on?

I would say that our auto launches are on time and on track. Laundry is still behind. And if I look at going forward, what risk is there, I mean, I suppose there can be further decline in the European auto market, but we really look at the laundry program as the biggest risk to that category.

And these launches are more back-end loaded to the third and fourth quarter as well as they ramp up more towards the launch. So...

Our next question comes from David Leiker of Baird.

I wanted to follow-up on a question a bit earlier on the digital cluster. I don't know if I missed it or if you didn't say it, did you put a dollar number on that?

No, we didn't. But I can tell you, it's in the $1 million range. And then we expect it to be carried over to the other platforms.

Okay. Great. On the GM strike. I guess, first of all, are you -- where are you in terms of ramping up to full production on that post-strike?

Let me answer this way, we are shipping everything the customer asked us to ship on time.

Okay. And then can you talk a little bit about the actions you took to mitigate the impact of the strike? What -- kind of mix of what was tactical for the moment versus structural changes that are going to stay around for a while?

There were a number of tactical things which we took with our labor force in Mexico. We were very quick to -- we were taking action within 12 hours of the strike. Ron?

Well, some other things in terms of longer-term structural. We did reduce some of the workforce, and we incurred some costs in doing that, that will be rightsized going forward. And as Don mentioned, got creative with the workforce to mitigate as much as possible, and which included building some products, so that will avoid any overtime -- future overtime in the event of a ramp-up and things of that nature. So we took all those things into account and mitigated a very delicate situation pretty well, all things considered.

Did you continue any production at all? I know you weren't shipping, but...

Yes.

Yes, we did. Yes. I mean we -- it was a fine line. You certainly don't want to lay off your workforce, since you're the only one being affected by it in that business park, and you're going to drive everybody to your next door neighbor. So we did a blend of vacation, running production. We have a very clean plant, a lot of things got painted. And to say this, we would have had to take -- going into another week of the strike, we -- our plan would have called out for us to take much more dramatic action, and thank goodness, we didn't have to.

A key thing -- the takeaway is, how keen the competition is for good employees in that area. So that was part of our long-range thinking, too, was to make sure that we keep our well-trained employee base for the future. So all of those things were tangential considerations to how we managed it.

And David, we did have the advantage that since the major product that we produce there goes on trucks and SUVs, building some additional inventory didn't cause us as much of a concern, and that we know we will ship the product. If it was mainly passenger car you're not quite sure what platform. This, we can project out and do some, I would call them, strategic build. But again, we couldn't have gone much further.

Okay. And then on Slide 17, you call out replenishment. I'm assuming that's revenue that -- from volume that GM makes that they lost during this strike. Is that the way to read that?

Yes. It's basically -- David, it's about 20% of the revenue that we lost in the strike. So we'll get some of that. We anticipate getting a modest amount of that back. And the EBITDA throw from that, we're estimating to be about $2 million. So we're -- it's not a very aggressive replenishment model, but we are expecting maybe a little bit of recapture of the lost sales for that extended strength.

Great. And then on the contribution of the revenue from Grakon. How much of that could you call as still kind of the revenue from the acquisition just that wasn't in last year's numbers versus growth you've had in Grakon since the purchase? Is there a way to characterize that?

That would be...

We'd have to compare.

Would very tough. Yes, right. In terms of -- that would be pretty tough, David, right now for us to do.

I think we can answer it, I don't -- but we'd have to do a little research.

Yes, it's right now.

I can tell you it's higher than we anticipated and acquisition.

Yes, no, for sure.

Yes, Yes. Well, and you've done a great job there with the revenue performance versus the profit performance there, certainly driving that profitability higher. We're starting to see the commercial vehicle off-highway markets roll over a little bit. It seems like you're somewhat insulated from that. Or is that just being masked by the growth in other areas?

No, it's in our plan. I don't know, we're definitely not masked by it. In round numbers, we're about 80% Class 8. Those have, let's say, flattened and not as down as maybe the lower classes. But we have modeled in pretty much in keeping with ACT. And again, we are correlating that with customer releases and our knowledge of the customers' needs and their inventory.

Okay. Great. And then a couple of last items here. If we look at the appliance launches, it sounds like that's started, but it's just been slow so far. Is that the right way to characterize that?

We are shipping, but at a very small rate at this point.

And that would -- David, that's certainly a risk to our -- the delayed or -- and/or reduce volumes, as we've noted, a -- is a risk to the -- to our targets and EBITDA...

And that's probably -- we know they're going to launch or they're going to continue with the other product, which run as well. But I think that'll be slower in the third quarter and ramp up in the fourth quarter. Exactly how much, at this point, we can't say. We can't say because we really don't know.

So you don't have a lot of visibility from them in terms of what that ramp is going to look like at all still even though it started?

That's correct. That's correct. It's -- clients tends to be a little bit like auto, but not -- so they don't follow the auto launch rules.

And then on working capital. Pretty significant contribution year-over-year in the quarter. Anything in particular behind that?

No. I think Grakon is a great cash-generating business and has really high margins, great cash-generating business. So having all that with us now has certainly made a big difference in a lot of our -- and that's exacerbated, I think, by what Don had mentioned earlier about all of the operational excellence. All that has turned to cash. So we're doing a great job in terms of acclimating that business into our -- and realizing the cash flows from that perspective.

Okay. Great. I got to -- I don't usually congratulate people publicly on the phone, but you did a fantastic job of -- on the cost side in the quarter, so well done.

Thank you very much, David. That's very much appreciated.

And there appear to be no further questions at this time. Mr. Duda, I will turn the conference back over to you, sir.

Cynthia, thank you very much. And we'll thank everybody for listening, and wish you a very safe holiday and a good new year.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a great day.