John L. Garrison, Jr. - Terex Corp.
Management
So, Nicole, let me walk you through – this is important as we think about Cranes. And obviously, there's a tremendous amount of work in restructuring going on in our Crane segment. And first, on the encourage side, we did see the increase in bookings and the growth in backlog which we needed to see. Remember, we think that first half of the year is going to be kind of down mid- to high-teens compared to 2016, and then flatten out to 2016 levels. And the year right now, I would say it's playing out that way from a bookings and backlog growth standpoint. The next thing that we would like to point to is the work of the restructuring is starting to take hold, and you are seeing it now. Unfortunately it's in decremental margins; I'd rather talk about incremental margins. But on the decremental margin side, if you look at Cranes at Q1 of 2016, we had a 35% decremental margin. And in this quarter, again, it's decremental, but that was reduced down to a 15% decremental margin. So you're seeing the impact of some of the activities that Steve and the team are taking around SG&A, footprint, the closing of Waverly and Waukesha last year. We do believe, as the production stabilizes and we get some better order visibility, that we're going to see improved productivity and absorption in the second half from our plants. Once they've got some stability in the backlog and what they're building, we think that will transcend to a little bit better productivity performance across the plants, OKC and Zweibrücken explicitly. And then, we also have better product mix in the second half. We've got some larger cranes that we've booked that we'll deliver in Q2, Q3 and into Q4. And so, that product mix gives us better visibility to some better profitability as we go forward. So as we lay out Cranes through the year, it's a challenging start, but frankly in line with our expectations. As John said, Q2 will – we're going to see a – we need to see a smaller operating loss in Q2, and we need to see it revert to some profitability in Q3 and especially in Q4. So as we think about the year playing out for Cranes – given our restructuring activities are back-end-loaded, things like Jinan and Montceau-les-Mines and closing our aerials business in Brazil – we'll see some of that improvement in the back half of the year. So, that's why we're maintaining our guide, if you will, on Cranes' performance. A lot of work to do, a lot of moving parts. Some things in Germany have been pushed out; it's just a timing issue. But the team is executing to the plan, and we're confident that we're going to turn this business around and make it a profitable contributor to Terex.