0:10 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Modine Manufacturing Company's Third Quarter Fiscal 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. 0:36 I would now like to turn the conference over to your host Ms. Kathy Powers, Vice President, Treasurer, Corporate Communications, Investor Relations.

0:49 Good morning and thank you for joining our conference call to discuss Modine's third quarter fiscal 2022 results. I'm joined on this call by Neil Brinker, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mick Lucareli, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We will be using slides for today's presentation, which can be accessed either through the webcast link or by accessing the PDF file posted on the Investor Relations section of our website modine.com. 1:16 On Slide 3 is our notice regarding forward-looking statements. This call will contain forward-looking statements as outlined in our earnings release, as well as in our company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 1:27 With that, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Neil.

1:31 Thank you, Kathy, and good morning, everyone. As I mentioned last quarter, we are undergoing a great deal of change of Modine, we have transformed our organizational structure, and it's significantly strengthened our management team. Over the past few quarters, we have begun employing (ph) 80/20 to guide our decisions as we actively manage our portfolio businesses. This includes implementing responsible pricing activities, simplifying product line offerings through secure rationalization, and driving operational efficiencies. We expect these efforts to continue as we work to optimize profit margins and cash flows. By shifting our focus towards those products and markets where we have true sustainable competitive advantages and the right to win. 2:14 These strategic plans are helping us develop long range targets that will better measure and drive our success as we continue to transform the company. We're also beginning to make changes to our automotive business. As previously discussed, we are thinking about our vehicular businesses differently, focusing more on technology rather than end markets. This means reprioritizing resources and capital away from Legacy internal combustion solutions and towards system focused platforms. 2:43 Along those lines, our new EV organization is focused on providing smart thermal system technologies to specialty and commercial vehicle customers. This technology is advancing rapidly, and we are providing significant resources to those applications where we can provide a value-added system solution. Our strategy for this business is to leverage our thermal and mechanical expertise to provide a turnkey solution, the fast growing niche markets. These markets include the last mile delivery school and transit bus and specialty vehicles. 3:17 Our goal is to design and manufacture a complete thermal solution for any EV chassis. By controlling the temperature of the vehicles key components, we can improve the battery's range and life. We are…

10:08 Thanks, Neil. And good morning, everyone. Please turn to slide six. I'm pleased to report good sequential performance from the previous quarter as we continue to work through the supply chain challenges, rising input costs and labor shortages. Your organization's hard work is beginning to pay-off and we expect the trends to continue. Third quarter sales were up 4% or $18 million as building HVAC and CIS experienced significant gains. 10:41 It's important to point out that our revenue increase was positively impacted by approximately $31 million of material pass throughs and other price increases. While this is positive from a material cost recovery standpoint, it does not drive higher unit volume. Sales volume excluding the impact of price increases and foreign exchange was down $8 million. The lower volume was primarily driven by the auto segment with declines due to semiconductor shortage and the Austrian divestiture earlier this year. 11:19 Adjusted EBITDA declined 16% or $7 million year-over-year that showed significant improvement from the previous quarter. A portion of the decline was due to the lower volumes, but that was offset with higher plant productivity. The main driver of the earnings decline relates to the current inflationary environment, especially around material costs. 11:42 During the quarter, we experienced approximately $39 million in commodity metals, freight and packaging increases. However, we were able to recover $29 million of the cost increases, which resulted in a net negative EBITDA impact of $10 million. Like many companies, we've been battling significant cost increases throughout 2021 and now into 2022. 12:10 As previously discussed, we expect the cost recovery gap to narrow with time and I'm pleased to report that the negative materials impact was reduced by 50% as compared to the prior quarter. Last we are closely managing SG&A cost, which…

21:22 [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Steve Ferazani with Sidoti and Company. Your line is open.

21:40 Good morning, everyone. Nice job with the cost cuts in the quarter. I'm trying to get a sense [Indiscernible] in particularly to the SG&A with heavy duty equipment and automotive. I'm trying to think of, you're talking about $20 million of cost cuts in the future. I'm trying to think about near-term what you think you can do on the SG&A line and how much of that's related to the weakness in those segments margin wise recently or more, is this part of your long-term 80/20 initiatives or combination?

22:12 Yeah. Hey, Steve. Good morning. It's Mick. The – so the target that Neil laid out the 20 million savings target. It will be a heavy, heavy piece in the automotive segment and then a smaller portion in HDE and a little bit across some other areas of the company. From short-term nature, long-term nature of it, it was gonna take us probably the next quarter to finalize all of those plans and then still a little early, but I think it's a fair target to capture about half at least half of that in the new year. And then the balance after that, if that helps you out at all.

23:02 It does. Thanks. Then when I think about, how we should think about pricing, clearly, it was CIS, you seem to have an easier time of [Indiscernible] necessarily building HVAC and trying to get a sense of, is that based on the products, you're selling the customers. You're selling to the contractual terms, why it was that much easier to get the margins back up on CIS and then also whether we would see greater pass throughs just contractually with HD and automotive in this current quarter, although you got quite a bit this quarter.

23:35 Yeah. Now that's a good question. Hey, Steve, this is Neil here. Regarding the difference, there's, CIS had implemented those price increases pretty early on a backlog that wasn't as strong or robust as on the HVAC side. So we needed to get through some of the backlog on HVAC side of the business in order for the price increases to be realized. We just recently announced our fourth price increase in HVAC. So we've done more incremental price increases on the HVAC side, while we're burning through a larger backlog than on the CIS, on the CIS backlog.

24:11 So we should see more of it on the building HVAC?

24:15 Correct.

24:15 In the next couple of quarters. Gotcha. That's fair. Just even get one more in the 92% growth on data center sales, was there one large order there? Was there something in terms of timing? We shouldn't expect that every quarter?

24:31 Yeah, I think last year was a little bit of a dip, Steve. It wasn't one large order. These are in series. These are all generally big orders and sometimes they are – they can be lumpy, depending on just the timing of the actual shipment or when the customers ready to receive it. Well, we're on track this year, still, too, we're still targeting that $100 million range of data center revenue on a full year basis.

25:06 Great. Let me turn it over. I'll get back in queue. Thank you.

25:09 Your next question comes from the line of Matt Summerville with D.A. Davidson. Your line is open.

25:19 Thanks. A couple of questions. First with the guide, that's kind of, that’s pretty wide range with two months to go. So help me understand what kind of define the low end versus the high end and how do you risk, do you feel that bottom end would be at this point? Again, given that we have just two months left?

25:50 Yeah. I will take it. I think that's a good question. We decided and typically, we won't adjust guidance with a quarter to go, even though we could have thought about maybe narrowing that band a little bit. But as we went through the, the segment by segment results, Matt, I think we're clearly feel really good about where we sit in that range. Very hard to, if we deliver on our sequential improvement really the low we're – we're net, we're well outside of the low end of the range, right? So I would say, as I went through it, we expect sequential improvement in earnings and in margins in Q4 and if you just take that from the $102 million, we've done year-to-date. I'll leave it at that. But we feel secure within that range and we probably, the math would simply say we'd have to go backwards to get at the low end.

26:49 Yeah, great. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about price and first, I want to talk about the price capture you experienced in Q3. How much of that was structural versus formulate pass through, and how we should be thinking about structural pricing looking forward.

27:15 Yeah, and you when you talk about structural I think, it's really margin improvement. It's, you know, longer-term margin capture, right, Matt?

27:28 Yeah, that's exactly right.

27:31Yeah, so maybe I'll go through segment by segment a little bit and Neil can add up now let Neil add color over the top, clearly across the total company in the quarter, this was same as last quarter. Our largest gap is in the HDE segment. It tends to have longer lags, the auto side, frankly, is more tied to quarterly. But we have a lot more large module, a lot more components we pass through as well on the heavy duty equipment side. So that is pass through there, we have more to catch up from a lag and a lot more commercially, to go back to the customers with their. So that is and we pass through a huge amount of pricing in those vehicular spaces. That is drives revenue, right. But it also doesn't attach margin to it. So it can actually be a little margin dilutive. So we have a lot of work to do, commercially, strategically using 80/20, to not only recoup those costs increases on the vehicular side, but then think about even different ways to manage that business going forward to get structural improvements. On the CIS and HVAC side as you can imagine a lot, I think, cleaner, I won't say easier. And Neil was just talking about CIS, they were able to jump out in front of that very quickly and you could see that in the numbers. A lot of the CIS improvements. I would like to answer your question, I would say is in that structural category. And then on the building HVAC side and Neil talking about that. The first three quarters of this year, there was a, they did a series of price increases, two or three to catch up on material pass through level, what we see beginning in Q4, and beyond will be more pricing on a structural level and building HVAC. Let me pause. Neil, if you want to add anything?

29:45 Yeah, the only other thing I would add to that. Hi, Matt, this is Neil. Is that we have more liberty on the HVAC side as well as on the CIS side. We're not hindered with some of the contractual obligations that we have across other parts of the business.

30:04 Got it? And then just as a follow up, if you look at the data center piece of the business $100 million platform for you guys this year. Do you have any thoughts? I'll be able to relate on what that business does in fiscal ‘23 and if you can speak to both the hyper as well as the cola (ph) market there and that would be great. Thank you.

30:33 Yeah, Matt, I think that's a good question. We're in the process of developing our strategic plan, we should expect to see some of the outputs relative to our, our outlook relative to hyperscale, as well as colocation. We're also in the throes of our ALP planning, and we should start to see some of that forecasting come to fruition soon.

30:55 And then the only thing I would add is, yeah, I think the target for us is to continue to go greater than the market, I think it'd be hard to have another continue, obviously, at a 50% clip, that if the markets are going to be up another 15% or 20%, next year, our goal is to outpace that market growth. And as Neil said, once we wrap up our plan and provide updates, Q1, Q4, we can be a little more specific.

31:27 Got it? Thank you guys.

31:30 Your next question comes from Steve Ferazani with Sidoti and Company. Your line is open.

31:37 [Technical Difficulty] A couple of questions. I wasn't able to get to the first time around, really about the automotive and plans on restructuring. I think you've touched on a couple of the points in your presentation, but I'm trying to think about in terms of and we certainly know some of the larger automakers over the last one or two weeks is the assumption with the chip shortage could be alleviated significantly this year more, but more back end loaded. Your automotive business does can do well, in a growing market, how you're thinking about, how that affects thinking about shrinking that business, potential divestitures and longer-term, how that might affect your short of restructuring plans with automotive?

32:20 Yes, Steve. That's a good question. So as we think about automotive, we're looking at it in terms of technologies where we have a competitive position where we see evolution in the market towards EV products, where we have good strong customer relations. Those are the areas that we're going to continue to rally around other areas where we don't have a competitive advantage, regardless of the vehicle recovery. If there's margin compression and margin issues and challenges, those are going to be areas that we're going to continue to have conversations commercially, as well as looking at the other options.

33:00 For these initiatives, and how much of it is controlled by the market itself?

33:06 Can you just repeat that, Steve, one more time?

33:08 What's your, what's your timetable for some of the bigger plans in terms of maybe individual facilities in the automotive market in terms of what you might do with them and how much of it's controlled by the market itself? Is it easier to potentially divest in a recovering markets and it would be when the market still remains weak?

33:29 Yes, back to the restructuring plans and the savings Neil targeted by first. So first and foremost, those numbers are nearly all tied to SG&A cost reductions, really refocusing on the areas that Neil said that we think, drive value for us, so not plant restructurings in there. And then we talked a little bit about this last quarter out of the automotive business and Neil talked about looking at as a technology. There's a smaller piece of that now. So the last couple of years, we – it's – we've shrunk it, we executed the sale in Austria. There's a third or so that is non-strategic. It isn't tied to the technologies, emissions changes fuel economy EV that Neil was describing and that we will probably have a long tail to it and then the balance of it is the core stuff that Neil was covering. We think A, already today has good margin or margin potential, and B, leads to the EV transformation.

34:48 Great, thanks. Thanks for letting me have these follow ups.

34:55 I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to Kathy Powers.

35:03 Thank you and thanks to everyone for joining us on the call this morning. You will be able to access the replay of the call through our website in about two hours. We hope you have a great day.

35:14 This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.