Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the first quarter 2025 Quanex Building Products Corporation Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. Then hear an automated message advice and raise withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Scott Zuehlke, Senior Vice President, CFO and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

This conference call will contain forward-looking statements and some discussion of non-GAAP measures. Forward-looking statements and guidance discussed on this call and in our earnings release are based on current expectations. Actual results or events may differ materially from such statements and guidance and Quanex Building Products Corporation undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect new information or events. For a more detailed description of our forward-looking statement disclaimer, and a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures, to the most directly comparable GAAP measures please see our earnings release issued yesterday and posted to our website. I'll now turn the call over to George Wilson for his prepared remarks.

Thanks, Scott, and good morning to everyone joining the call. Before I begin my commentary, I want to take a moment to acknowledge Curt Stevens for his many years of dedicated service on Quanex Building Products Corporation's Board of Directors. Curt's expertise in the building product space combined with his financial background, added immense value to our board. His leadership in chairing the audit committee for many years has been instrumental to our business. On behalf of the entire Quanex Building Products Corporation team, I want to thank Curt for his service and wish him all the best in his retirement. Turning to the first fiscal quarter of 2025, our results align with expectations despite significant macroeconomic uncertainties in the challenging winter weather environment in the U.S. Year-over-year improvements in both revenue and earnings were largely driven by the contributions related to the acquisition of Timon. Since the acquisition closed last August, our focus has been on integrating the two companies. Our primary objectives are to achieve or exceed the expected financial synergies from the transaction and to establish an organizational structure that both supports our current business and provides a scalable platform for future growth. From a synergy perspective, I'm pleased with the progress our team has made and remain confident we will meet our publicly announced target of $30 million in run rate synergies by the end of year two. We are also working diligently to identify additional synergies and explore opportunities to accelerate the realization. We look forward to providing a more detailed update during our second quarter call. Regarding organizational design and as outlined in our recent investor presentation, we will be resegmenting our business into three new units: Hardware Solutions, Extruded Solutions, and Custom Solutions. Each of these segments will have a global scope and…

Thanks, George. On a consolidated basis, we reported net sales of $400 million during the first quarter of 2025, which represents an increase of approximately 67% compared to $239.2 million for the same period of 2024. The increase was primarily driven by the contribution from the Timon acquisition that closed on August 1, 2024. Excluding the Timon contribution, net sales would have declined by 6.2% for the first quarter of 2025, largely due to lower volume. We reported a net loss of $14.9 million or $0.32 per diluted share during the three months ended January 31, 2025, compared to net income of $6.2 million or $0.19 per diluted share during the three months ended January 31, 2024. On an adjusted basis, net income was $9 million or $0.19 per diluted share during the first quarter of 2025, compared to $8.4 million or $0.25 per diluted share during the first quarter of 2024. The adjustments being made to EPS are as follows: amortization of step-up for purchase price adjustments on inventory, transaction advisory fees and reorg costs, restructuring charges related to severance and disposal of software, amortization expense related to intangible assets and a pension settlement refund, and other net adjustments related to foreign currency transaction gain/loss and effective tax rates. On an adjusted basis, EBITDA for the quarter essentially doubled to $38.5 million compared to $19.3 million during the same period of last year. This equates to adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of approximately 150 basis points year-over-year. The increase in adjusted earnings for the three months ended January 31, 2025, was mostly attributable to the contribution from the Timon acquisition combined with the realization of cost synergies. Now for the results by operating segment. We generated net sales of $134.3 million in our North American Fenestration segment for the first…

Thank you. At this time, we'll conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you'll need to press star one one or enter the star one one again. Please standby while we compile the Q&A roster. And our first question comes from the line of Reuben Garner of Benchmark. Your line is now open.

Thank you. Good morning, guys.

Morning. Good morning.

I was hoping you could talk about the progress of margins you're expecting for the rest of the year in specifically, Scott, on the gross line, the last two quarters kind of in the low to mid-twenties range and the guide for the year is I believe, closer to twenty-nine. So it pretty big step upcoming. Is that just seasonality in time? And can you just kinda walk us through the components to get there?

Yeah. That has everything to do with the PPA step-up related to the acquisition, which hit in Q4 and ran off in Q1. So the rest of the year, gross margin should be jumping up meaningfully to hit that full-year guidance. Improving each quarter.

Okay. And then can you can you talk about the divergence you're seeing in the kind of growth rates between the cabinets business and the penetration business and in North America kinda went opposite directions in the quarter. Does that tell us that, you know, how big of a role weather might be playing or any other kind of factors going on?

Well, I think the weather had a big piece to play in it, especially with the window and door market. A much harsher winter in most of the country. I think, did have an impact on demand in our fiscal Q1. And that's why you saw a little better performance in terms of volumes in the cabinet side of the business. I also think, you know, what we had seen is that that cabinet segment had been hit harder sooner, and that that kind of been a leading indicator and we always see the cabinets drop faster and sooner on than the window and door markets, and they tend to lead on the improvements in those segments as well. So nothing that we haven't anticipated or expected.

Okay. I'm gonna sneak one more in kind of a big picture question about your confidence level and your outlook and, I guess, just the maybe, the change in tone now versus a month ago? Or are you feeling less confident in the mark this kinda full-year guidance type numbers? Because it seems like you would need an improvement in the end market at least to get to the top line outlook.

Yeah. You know, I think it goes back to what we said in the fourth quarter. I think some people were surprised on our call or questioned maybe our conservative approach, but I think we've had a realistic view of this year from day one, and nothing has changed for that. So for us, yes, the back half of the year shows some improvement, but that's really based off of what we currently see and the normal seasonality of our business. So we feel really good about where we're at in terms of our projections. In addition, I feel extremely confident about the work that we're doing with Synergy. So I think we feel very comfortable both the revenue and our earnings guidance for the full year based on those items.

Great. Thanks, guys. Good luck.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Steven Ramsey of Thompson Research Group. Your line is now open.

Good morning. I wanted to maybe ask a follow-on question to the guidance outlook and kind of the second half improvement that's part of that. I guess, first, if you need that second half improvement to get to that full year, level, is there certain segments maybe that are greater drivers to get there? And then maybe secondly, just high level your full-year outlook maybe seems more optimistic on an order of magnitude basis maybe than the window cabinet producers that shared their outlook. So maybe I'm curious on those two fronts, how you think about those things.

Yeah. I mean, in general, what I would say is the way we forecast the business from a low watermark in one to high high in Q3 and Q4 is just typical seasonality. There's nothing different that we're expecting this year than any other normalized seasonality for this year. So that's what gives us some confidence that we will see an uptick in the second half just because of seasonality. Anything above that would be in addition to what we've already forecasted.

And I think to reiterate my answer to Reuben as well, I think we were more conservative when we came out with guidance in the December year-end conference call than most people were. So I think our approach in December was to be very realistic conservative than others. In our view of this year. And I think that that's coming to fruition. So for us, nothing that we didn't anticipate. And to answer your other question, Steven, I think in terms of the segments, I think we see more seasonality in the window and doors than we do in cabinets. So I think, you know, we will tend to see more of a pickup from the Timon piece of our business and what we would consider our NAF segment versus the European business, which is less seasonal. And our cabinet business, which has a different seasonality.

Yeah. And just one more couple data points that we went over in the investor day, but it's probably important to reiterate. If you look at the five-year average for free cash flow and adjusted EBITDA, we typically generate about 10% of our free cash flow in the first half with the remaining 90% in the second half and then about 40% of adjusted EBITDA in the first half with 60% in the second half. Rough numbers. I mean, just shows you how seasonal our business really is.

Okay. That's great, Tyler. Thanks for sharing all that. Maybe to continue the cash flow, and cash flow usage topic, your debt pay down aggressive and working nicely. You repurchased some stock in the quarter as well. I'm curious how you think about putting capital to work on each of those pads through FY 2025. I get your opportunistic, but maybe share some of your nuance perspective on how you're choosing to deploy capital into those two areas.

Yeah. We obviously analyze it every day, every week as we go on. You know, just being very direct here that I would think where we're trading at today, you know, we feel like directing a large portion of our cash flow to repurchase in our stock at these levels absolutely becomes a priority. So I think, you know, a lot of it depends on the market. We do not have any sort of dent ten b program so we have limited time to be in the market. But, at these levels, I would say that the priority will probably be share buyback versus debt repayment. And depending on cash flow, we'll evaluate that each and every week.

Alright. And then last quick one for me. Good to hear that the synergy target and timeline is intact. And you said that you would have more details on the next call. But maybe just high level thinking about the three new segments that you will have. Or is any one of those maybe an outsized beneficiary of the synergies you execute on or another way of asking, do any of the three segments new segments, have better margin expansion potential over the next couple of years?

You know, we broke down our synergies really into three buckets. You had the corporate cost, which really do not benefit any sort of segment. That'll be applied equally over all the segments on an allocated basis. You had the head counts in that will that was primarily North American, the overlap between our North American businesses between Timon and Quanex Building Products Corporation were very similar. So that will be probably a little more weighted towards hardware versus and some to the extruded solutions, and then finally, sourcing, which will be equally applied. So maybe a little heavier weighted towards hardware, and then to extruded, probably a pretty good summary would be broken down by how our revenue will be split, which was identified in that investor deck.

Thanks for all the color.

Thank you.

One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Adam Thalhimer of Thompson Davis. Your line is now open.

Hey. Good morning, guys. Nice quarter.

Good morning. Good morning. Thanks. Thank you.

If you did see an impact from tariffs, which segment would that impact mostly?

You know, as we look at the commodity breakdown, what I would say in our new segments, it will probably impact the hardware business a little more direct because of their metal buys. In the aluminum. But again, we're protected with some of the index pricing mechanisms that we have here in the US and surcharges from the wood, again, hard work index. So, you know, I think it'll be balanced across all three, but maybe a little more heavily weighted to hardware.

Okay. And then, George, I was hoping you could give a little more color just on the conversations with customers and kind of their macro outlook.

Yeah. You know, all the conversations tend to focus around, you know, consumer confidence. And you know, it goes back to the macro question. There's a lot of noise in the media. The tariff and, you know, that changes on an everyday basis. And so there's unknowns on what the future cost to the end consumers are gonna be in both repair and remodel and new build type of projects. So I think our customers are apprehensive because there's not a lot of good visibility in what's going on, and there's really no good visibility on what the Fed's going to do. Nor is there a strong visibility on where the tariffs will shake out. I think customers are cautious and kind of on hold mode on in terms of where they're gonna go, and again, as we said in our script and has been proven over the last few years, from a Quanex Building Products Corporation perspective, our model is built to ramp up or ramp down fairly quick. So we feel good about where we're at and that we'll be able to adjust well, but, you know, until some of the tariff items and consumer confidence rebounds a little bit, I think, again, it's gonna be a bumpy year. As we originally anticipated and built into our guidance back in December. So again, we're not seeing anything that we didn't anticipate. But it's coming to fruition.

Got it. And then when does the buyback window open?

Two days after three days after earning. So I think Thursday this week.

Sounds good. Thank you.

Thank you.

One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Justin Machete of Sidoti and Company. Your line is now open.

Good morning. This is Justin on for Julio. Thanks for taking questions.

Sure. Good morning.

So in the first quarter, the Timon adjusted EBITDA margin of 10.8% when compared to the strong European segment margin seems a bit low. Anything notable to help us understand the difference between the two? And can you give us a refresher on Timon's historical seasonality?

Yeah. Very similar to our historical seasonality. You have to keep in mind that about 60% to 70% of Timon is North American focus. Which was one of the appeals of when we acquired them. So it's not a direct read-through to our European Fenestration segment.

Thanks. And then the Jackson, Georgia facility was highlighted during your Investor Day. Beyond increasing regional capacity, how does this facility strengthen your competitive and what unique advantages do you expect it to bring?

So, you know, the decision to open the Jackson facility was phase one on being able to serve our regional customers. It absolutely capitalizes and protects our customers from freight costs to be able to serve that region. Two, it gives us an opportunity to add some additional capacity for our mixing and our compounding type of business, which will allow us to continue to grow in adjacent markets, such as flashing tapes and solar products. So, you know, it was a strategic decision on numerous fronts and we look forward to being able to deliver that. It was a long-term look for that project, and we're excited about what it can potentially deliver.

Great. Thanks for the color there. That's all for me.

Thanks.

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I'll now like to turn it back to George Wilson for closing remarks.

I'd like to thank everyone for joining today, and we look forward to providing you with another update when we report our Q2 earnings in June.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.