Chart Industries, Inc. (GTLS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, good morning, everyone, and thank you for taking the time to join us today. I think we all already know, Jill, but just as an introduction, we have with us Jill Evanko, Chief President and CEO at Chart Industries. We will be going through a couple of quick slides here. And I think the slides are on the website, but Jill, do you want to take it from there?

Absolutely. Well, thanks, Ati, for having us today. And apparently, we didn't get them up on the screen, so if you want to follow along, they are on the Chart website. Just a quick overview, and I'll start on Slide 4 for those following along on the webcast. I just wanted to give a few minute overview and background on Chart Industries and what we do. So we are a design, engineering and manufacturer of equipment and technologies for full solutions across a very broad set of end markets, diverse set of applications. And we're very unique, and I'll talk to you a couple of the differentiators that we have. One of the unique parts of the business that we have is not only do we have the process technology across a variety of solutions in-house, we also manufacture all mission-critical pieces and parts within our portfolio in our own 64 newbuild manufacturing facilities. We call ourselves molecule agnostic. So that's how we hit such a variety of end markets and applications. And through that, we're able to not have to choose one end market as a winner. In the last year, our portfolio has increased as well as giving us 30%-plus aftermarket service repair, which is at higher margin than the total company margin. So I'll move to Slide 5 for those following along, and you can read this. This is just some stats on the company itself and the pie charts give you a sense of the diversification of the end markets as well as the geographies that we play in. I'd also point out that about 25% of our global team has engineering background, and when you add welding into that, about 35% of our total employees have engineering and welding backgrounds. So moving to Slide 6. This kind of summarizes it in what we call a menu of the Nexus of Clean. So we refer to the Nexus of Clean as clean power, clean water, clean food and clean industrial. Well, the reason for that is we're seeing more and more customers buy more than one thing from us and cutting across a variety of different end markets. A good example of that is we have one brewery customer that originally bought CO2 tanks from us and now has purchased small-scale carbon capture unit as well as a water treatment system for SDOX. The other part of this is if you're a customer, you look at this and you can choose a full solution or you can choose a component, which is shown on the right-hand side of the slide. So moving on to Page 7. This is just one example of the types of applications that we can serve across the board. Selecting energy here, we serve not only traditional oil and gas, we also serve biogas, LNG, hydrogen, helium, to name a few. We're able to do that because we don't have to change our manufacturing capacity or our manufacturing lines. The same equipment that's used in traditional oil and gas is used in hydrogen as an example. So heat exchangers, fans, air coolers, and that's how we're able to utilize our flexible manufacturing strategy and serve so many different customers in so many different geographies. Slide 8 is a good example of the fact that you don't necessarily see the Chart brand everywhere you go, but a lot of our products are used in every day in your life. So we call it Chart City, and this is a good visual to give you an example of some of those. Moving to Slide 9. So all of this, and I think Ati is going to talk about end markets and demand in those end markets. But all of this really gives us the opportunity to continue to drive demand into our backlog, and as I said at the beginning here, we don't have to rely on one end market and pick a winner. And so that gives us a lot of flexibility to continue to grow through a cycle as well as sequentially in the coming years ahead. Last week, we announced a few LNG awards that we had recently won, and we talk about LNG in 4 pillars: Big LNG, small-scale floating, LNG infrastructure and aftermarket service repair. And we've continued to see demand in all 4 of those LNG pillars and expect that to continue in the years ahead. In terms of hydrogen, we've been in hydrogen for 150 years. No one cared about it until about 3 years ago, but that's given us a nice installed base advantage as well as being able to play in a variety of countries. A lot of times, when we think of hydrogen when we talk in the United States as United States, but we serve hydrogen currently in 25 different countries and we're a market leader in terms of certifications and safety standards. And perhaps underappreciated in the portfolio is ChartWater. This has the opportunity for the current macro secular tailwinds that are helping drive water treatment globally to really kind of have a kick start later this decade when you start to see further regulations in a variety of international countries that are focusing in more and more, not only on clean power, but also on clean water and diesel. And so I commented that we have unique differentiators that other companies do not have. And at the top level of chart, we don't have any peers. So we don't have a competitor that has the same portfolio set that we have. There's multiple differentiators that you can see on Slide 10. I'm just going to touch on one, which is new product development and innovation, R&D. We get sticky early with our customers. What that means is because we have design and engineering capabilities, we're able to work with our customers in pre-FEED and FEED and therefore, get specked into a project or a solution. And we're also interested and take on first-of-a-kind opportunities which gives us the opportunity to actually be a market maker as well between the producers of the molecules and the end users of the molecules. So multiple different ways that we drive innovation throughout the culture in the organization. So to wrap up on the last slide, which I believe is 11, where we focused on execution to drive growth across the cycle, sequentially, continued margin expansion with a lot of activities that are within our own control and then achieve our deleveraging target that we've put out there from a financial policy perspective. So with that, all yours, Ati.

Thanks, Jill. You mentioned hydrogen, no one cared about it up until 3 years ago. And you now have an end market which goes into hydrogen and carbon capture and you've got multiple sort of end markets, including LNG, and I was trying to reverse engineer the pie chart that you had at the earnings and I got like 10%, 12%, maybe orders were about hydrogen up until 3Q. As you think about the opportunity set and as things are evolving, what's the thought process for that mix potentially being in '24, '25 and maybe in 2030?

Yes. So we have, and I'll just refer to year-to-date kind of [ 9/30 ] numbers when I refer to numbers. We've seen in 2020 to 2021 to 2022 to 2023, that kind of first 3 quarters, we've seen a gradual increase in terms of the demand as well as in the commercial pipeline for hydrogen. Just to step back, we serve the gaseous and the liquid hydrogen value chain. And so that's unique because it gives us a lot of addressable market to go after and to do so globally. As you mentioned, it's kind of evolved in the last 3 years where we -- originally, the first 2 years of that 3, we saw mostly production, producers of the molecule and then stores and transporters. So the first 2 pieces of the hydrogen value chain. And in the last 12 months or so, what we've seen is more demand coming into the backlog in the third category, which is end use. And so that kind of gives an indicator that it's not only a supply game, it's also starting to kind of fill out and become more of an infrastructure. And so I think that's what you're going to see more of in '24 and '25 and '26, is continued higher scale on production, which drives down cost. And then more and more parties that are actually spending real money on the end use, whether that's fueling stations or trains or any of these other applications that you hear about. I would also say that the global nature of hydrogen is interesting because it's actually regional, right? So while we say global, right now, the regions are all acting independently. And so I think over the course of the next 3 to 5 years, you're going to see more and more of the regions working together and kind of creating a self-sustaining ecosystem for hydrogen itself. And then specific to your question about what do we see? And what do we think? Certainly later in the decade, where we see a massive amount of opportunity based on our current commercial pipeline as well as based on kind of the adoption that we've seen some of the public sector funding and approaches that are out there but aren't yet in our commercial pipeline or in our backlog. So pretty large addressable markets in 2030.

Does that stairstep from like being around 10%, 12% today to like 25% by 2030? Or is it more like 50% by 2030?

I'd say it's somewhere in between those 2, and that's really, it's a matter of the adoption, the time it takes for some of these stimulus packages to roll out. And there's a lot of private sector money in hydrogen that wants to be deployed. And when I say private sector, that's private sector companies that are doing it, but also private equity money that's looking for places to deploy capital. So I don't -- it's not wholly dependent on the public sector, but certainly, as an example, the hydrogen hubs are a good example to say, as those roll out, that could really be a catalyst to a stairstep up.

So for the private side, what are the steps that you think need to happen? So you were at COP28, there were some certification adoptions, there was this conversation around regional to a global market. And then there were developments from the treasury in terms of some tax credits for the developers. Are you -- do you think that those pieces are enough to catalyze your customers to start spending capital on the private side in particular? Do you think there's additional stuff that needs to happen?

So to answer the second part, I think there's additional things that have to happen, but this is a good start. And I'll weave in some of the things from COP28 that I think were really important to drive the tactical actions that needed to occur. If you look back a few years ago, everybody talked about green hydrogen, and you're not going to rip out the existing infrastructure and replace it all with green hydrogen. And so now there's really practical conversations happening about we should be color agnostic to hydrogen, and we should be looking at this as a stairstep to get there versus just this wholesale change. And so that's a positive. This was really the first activity and event that I was at, where there were some tangible outcomes being talked about, both between multiple dozens of countries and the private sector. For example, there was an ISO method for GHG emissions, and so that's something that's a positive because it gives a structure so that companies that are looking to invest understand what the methodology and the measurement and the metric are. I would say probably most importantly, at the event that I heard was around the public private sector aligning on countries being willing to share and trade certification. So if you're certified to do a hydrogen trailer in Korea, that these other countries are willing to reciprocate that certification. That's a big step toward going from this hub-and-spoke kind of small-scale model to something that could become more global, but now it has to be deployed. And then the reason I answered that I think there's more to happen is when you're looking at and we'll take the U.S. because that's been the most in the news, kind of the 45Vs as well as the hydrogen hubs. I think there's a little bit, at least outside of the industry, a lack of understanding of what those steps are ahead of us. And there's 3 or 4 steps that have to happen on the hydrogen hub side. So once those get deployed, and there's a good road map to that and what the steps are, you're really looking at kind of the kick start of demand for the spend to happen in 2025 on that side of things. And while there's, I'd say, a variety of views on the 45V, it's certainly further along than many other countries, and so it gives a framework to at least have private companies that want to spend money with a company that's doing a project and has some of those credits and some of that stimulus is starting to push that along. So we've seen an uptick in terms of the commercial pipeline itself but we've yet to see those types of projects actually coming into backlog.

So when you think about the -- between 25% and 50% of orders being hydrogen, that's probably accounting for some of these pieces that still need to be figured out?

Yes.

And so if you are able to figure it out, you could reach the higher end of it. Is that the right way to think about it?

That the right way to think about it, yes. So we view those types of things as upside ahead of us.

Okay. Involvement in the hydrogen hubs, you said you would have participation in all 7 of them. Can you talk about what that looks like?

Absolutely. So we are a partner in high velocity, so 1 of the 7. And the way that the partner works is you participate and had participated in the application process with other companies that were in that hub. That doesn't mean that you get the funding or the work for anything. So we wouldn't directly receive any funding from the hydrogen hubs themselves, but rather we'd be a supplier to those that are doing the projects in it. Behind the scenes on all of the hubs, there's multiple applicants for funding. So the partners in the hubs are going to evaluate the projects that want to access those 7 hubs' funding and then they'll allocate that based on the criteria that's set, whether that's a portion of it has to be green or size or scale. And it's interesting because I think 4 of the 7 hubs comprise something like 75% of the output that's expected across the 7 hubs. But when we say we expect to and anticipate to have content in each of the hubs, that's because we've worked with a lot of the folks that will be doing projects in those respective hubs if they're selected. And so we would anticipate to have content because we know who they are, we know what their projects are. We've done a lot of the upfront work to help them with their applications, but it's not -- nothing is guaranteed. And none of those -- again, none of those are in our current backlogs. So that's upside opportunity.

So when you put all of this together, and as analysts, when we are trying to model what that opportunity set could look like, it sort of boils down to you've got trailers, you've got 15 ton per day sort of liquefiers and you've got fueling stations and compressors, correct me if you -- if I missed out anything. Is there a way that we can track what the projects are announced publicly, maybe a database that's out there and try to make an assessment of what the equipment could look like and sort of arrive at a ticket size and get a ballpark estimate of the orders that you could be getting?

So that's a -- as always, I'll caveat with that difficulty because it depends on the content and the sizes of all of that. But I'll refer back to things I've said over the course of the last couple of years in terms of our general price ranges for those types of key pieces of equipment. And to also reiterate there's other -- there's kind of downstream applications too with air coolers. You've got compressors, things like that, that sit on either end of this. But the things that we've commented on that are probably helpful in modeling are the liquefaction units. So most common, as you point out, 15 ton per day liquefiers up until now, with our content on the 15 tons per day would be somewhere in the kind of high $20 million to $40 million range. We're starting to see in the last few quarters, more 30 ton per day. So the scale is moving up, which is a positive, again, for the industry to drive the cost down on the production of the molecule and the 30 ton per day for Chart content, again, depending on the whistles and bells that you put out there would be, I guess, somewhere in the $45 million to $55 million range. And so that gives you a sense of the liquefaction. And then when you get into trailers, we've said in the past, kind of $1.35 million to over $2 million depending on the size for there's various lengths in content carrying. Storage tanks are typically under $1 million. And then you'd go into things that would start getting to vacuum jacketed and vacuum insulated piping, and fueling station is probably the other one that's helpful because that's a metric that is out there in the public domain and a fueling station, again, is going to be $4 million plus-ish.

A piece?

A piece. Yes, per.

And you also had on your Analyst Day, I believe, a pie chart that showed how much capital is being allocated to R&D related to hydrogen. I remember talking about the pump that you were making for India, I believe. What are the other pieces of equipment that you think that you don't have in your portfolio today that will potentially come out from that? And what does that impact and how does that impact your potential order mix?

Yes. So we do a lot of innovation in R&D. And in my prepared remarks, I commented about first of a kind and things like that. And that's -- it's interesting because it really does get you set apart because you're a leader not only in creating the piece of equipment that's necessary, but also in getting it certified to the safety standards and their respective usage. So we had developed a hydrogen pump -- a liquid hydrogen pump over the course of the prior 4 years. We work now closely with Flowserve who manufactures that for us. And then in the pipeline right now, certainly, a lot of -- as I've spoken about, a lot of the new product development hits multiple different end markets. So it isn't just dedicated to hydrogen but a few of the ones that are, about 300 ton per day hydrogen liquefaction. And that is the scale that we are starting to get multiple inbounds around from customers that are big companies that you would be aware of that don't need funding. They don't need public sector. These are companies with the balance sheet that are really going to start to invest into that larger scale infrastructure. So we would be unique in having that, and we're fairly far along in terms of that development. Also some marine oriented hydrogen applications. So for onboard vessels as well as for the bunkering side, there's certainly a movement now in the marine area from assuming that it was going to be an ammonia answer to looking more and more at hydrogen onboard, and there's multiple others behind it. And then the other thing I'd comment on is the interplay of hydrogen cycle and helium as well because we're seeing more and more activity related to helium. And so there's a good pipeline of potential projects as well as a good pipeline of R&D around mainly the storage and transport of helium.

Got it. Moving to carbon capture. You already have [Technical Difficulty] facility. The CC that gets sold in the food and beverage industry is doing pretty well. But you also had equity investments, I believe, in Svante and I think SES as an in-house service. Can you give us an update on what's happening on the large-scale carbon capture? Where are we in that process? Are we still derisking technology? Are we close to commercializing them? Any updates there?

Yes. So you're correct, by the way. Svante, we have a small minority investment in, and Svante does basically an absorbent carbon capture at a large scale. And then SES or Sustainable Energy Solutions we own. We bought that in 2021, and that's a large-scale cryogenic carbon capture technology. What I would say is all of these large-scale technologies work. And so there's -- while there's nuances to when you would choose one or the other, meaning, is it the x ton per day cost? Or is it a plot size that you have to deal with? Is it purity? So those are kind of the differentiators, but they all work. The -- what we're seeing is still kind of movement from speed to small-scale smaller orders, but nothing that's really gotten to the point where you say the large scale has been strongly commercialized. The good news on it is that it's starting to gain some traction from -- at least from our technologies in the reuse cases. So the larger reuse cases make economic sense. In particular, a lot of our SES customers are cement, concrete guys and also manufacturers. So that's, I think, where the market is going to go for at least our technology. But the interesting part for us is we don't necessarily have to have our technology be the one that's picked because we have all of equipment like air coolers and compressors, blowers that are utilized and needed for all of these technologies regardless of whether it's cryogenic or ambient, and so we'll really make the money through the volume in the equipment regardless of the technology itself. And then the other comment I would have is you would have heard me say before the U.S. rules on direct air capture that it wouldn't economically make a lot of sense, but we have seen a few different fan, air cooler orders for direct air capture in 2023.

Right. Water treatment. You've mentioned that it's underappreciated. There's obviously a lot of development still happening over there. But do you think that we have enough of the catalysts from the macro perspective to get that going? Are there pieces there that you think the industry needs to wait on? Or like how do you see that evolving?

I think water has the catalysts that are there. And I think that's -- it's an international market. And just by way of background, at Chart, we have water treatment technology that hits all of the 300-plus contaminants that are out there. We actually originally started in water as a tank provider. So the tank to store the gases or liquids for whatever technology was being used. But the -- in water, in particular, in the U.S., the decision is made by the operator through the owner's engineer for the actual contaminant treatment. It's not the equipment. It's how am I going to treat what is causing my issue. So having the technology itself and the treatment is something that's been able to pull through more demand for us on the equipment side as well. But I think that there's a conscious acknowledgment that in the United States, the EPA is not going to give up on the water regulations and rules ahead. And then internationally, what we're seeing is less about policy itself, but more about doing the right thing for areas that either don't have access to clean water or need more desalination or dealing with agriculture. And so we've had a really strong kind of forward progress outside of the United States in the water business, in particular, in India, where once proven, the states will tend to do repeat and then also recently in the last couple of years in Brazil. And what we like about the water business is not only is it nice margins, but it also has a lot of opportunity for repeats. So you don't typically have one source of water that you're treating and then you're done, but rather a series or a sequence of them. So that's a great kind of global dynamic. So I think that one is here. We have an area that we play in and the size that we play in and Treatment as a Service is something that's gaining more and more traction in our portfolio in water.

So as you think about the Treatment as a Service, is there a rule of thumb around the ticket sizes that we can think of. If you were to try and project orders similar to the hydrogen question, like can we look at a list of projects out there, what can we sort of use as a leading indicator to model it?

So the content of our water orders has increased since we've added the technologies themselves, and that's positive. What I would say is you can't -- there's not really a size of a water treatment project that I can equate to a dollar amount because, again, it depends on what they're picking in the portfolio. On the low end for us, a very small, Treatment as a Service is going to be $250,000 and then at a high end for a water project. I think the largest water project we've booked on an individual basis is $10 million.

Okay. Deleveraging has been an area of focus. Last year, the target was to get to $500 million in asset sales. You've been able to achieve that. Is there a plan of attack on the cap structure as you think about deleveraging this year? How would you go about it? And any kind of color you can provide there?

Yes, absolutely. So first of all, stepping back, back in the fourth quarter of 2022, we said that we would -- we had a certain asset perimeter that we intended to work to divest, which we had anticipated would bring in proceeds of approximately $500 million. We were pleased to do that, to execute on that within the original perimeter, actually a smaller portion of the original perimeter. And more than anything, we were happy to do it on the time frame that we did, not only for bringing the cash in to delever faster, but also to get away from the distraction inside of the business of divestitures, and is it going to be my business that is selected and so on. So that's a positive in terms of having that behind us and having accomplished that. Looking ahead, operating free cash flow is going to be the #1 driver of continuing to delever. We've also talked about some of the other things that we've done and we'll continue to do around real estate or consolidation. So we have a couple of factory consolidations that are underway. And through those kind of synergy activities and cost synergy activities, we're able to then also bring cash in for the underutilized or the sale of property. Through the global footprint, which is now more non-U.S. than it is U.S., we have strong in-region collection activities. And so we're in the middle of optimizing our entity structures. And through that, we're also able to repatriate cash without having negative tax effects to that. So things like that, that's just a short list, but #1 to delever is on the operating cash flow side of things.

On LNG, I think a lot of the conversation throughout today has been looking forward to adding a bunch of capacity, export capacity, particularly from the U.S. between '25 and '28, but there's -- it's really a global market. So for you guys, as you think about the Big LNG prospects this year or even small LNG and we'll touch on that. How should we think about the stuff that's not potentially in your backlog right now? And then on the cash side of that, I believe the large projects, you do get some cash upfront. So is that accessible for you guys to pay down debt immediately? Or is there a holding period on that before which you can sort of access it?

So if I step back, I made a comment at the outset of the discussion that we are bullish on the 4 pillars of LNG for the year. And I'll repeat that statement because we are -- and that's both the macro and a Chart-specific comment. And I'll talk to the Chart-specific side of it because it really goes to our IPSMR process technology. So that's the liquefaction for modular mid-scale. That is also used in small scale. It's used in floating, and it's now going to be used in international oil companies, non-U.S. Big LNG projects. So that's not in backlog right now. Our understanding from that operator is that, that would be moving to FID at the end of 2024 or beginning of 2025 time frame. What we like about that is that's our first IPSMR big win. And it also is an indicator and what we're hearing more and more from our customers is they're moving toward the modular concept. So that opens up more addressable market for us than we had before. And this is 5 years of validating and testing with the operators themselves and the EPC is making sure that IPSMR is going to be accepted and is certified in their organizations. We haven't really made a big deal about that externally because all of these are under NDA, but what we're seeing now is more and more international opportunities for IPSMR. So that addressable pie has dramatically changed from 18 months ago to where we sit today. The other thing I'd say is this IPSMR for process technology for small-scale floating and what you call mid-scale and everybody defines it slightly differently on. Basically, it's the size of the trains themselves, has really gained a lot of traction in terms of just not being U.S. If you talk to us, 2, 3 years ago-ish, most of the small-scale wins that we had on the LNG side were U.S. specific, and they were onshore U.S. And over the course of the last couple of years, we've seen more and more activity on the small scale and the floating, not just in the U.S. Gulf Coast but also in Asia Pacific and off the coast of Africa. So the amount of traction that we have gotten in IPSMR has been incredible over the last few years. And again, that's -- a portion of that was we never had it before 5 years ago, and then a portion of that was over the last few years. We really had to have it validated and tested and approved by those operators that are going to use it. I could go on and on, by the way, on the service side because I think that we're going to see -- we're going to start to see some of these brownfield facilities needing more service in refurb, and we've started to see that in 2023. So the last part of your question was around the Big LNG projects, the way that the milestone payments work. And these are specific to the projects themselves. So this is not a general -- you can't really generalize this answer. But there are -- on all of them, we have milestone payments that will cover the material. And so we're never upside down on these large projects in terms of the working capital themselves. But in terms of getting larger payments early and being able to use that not just against the project, that's less the case than not.

Right. Capital allocation, you had mentioned on the Analyst Day that you would focus on high ROI organic investments first and then look at inorganic opportunities as well. So maybe if you can touch on both pieces. So you mentioned automation, I believe, will be one of the drivers of the organic side. Is that largely to try and get your 31.5% margins higher? Is there other stuff going on in there? And then inorganic, are there equipment pieces that you would like to add to the portfolio or the geographic footprint that you need to make hold, anything there?

So there's really 2 drivers on the organic side. One is, to your point, we see the ability to drive that [ 31.5% ] over the coming years. And that's -- the nice part of that is it's really through actions that are in our own control. So productivity and automation, as you mentioned, also around the ability to continue to sell the full solution offering more and more because on the full solution side, you tend to get more margins than just a component sale. The other piece, so beyond just increasing margin, the other piece of why we were doing some of these high ROI projects is because we're the only one in the world that can make something and there's a lot of demand for it. So our Theodore, Alabama #2, we call it Teddy 2 facility, that we've invested in and accelerated some of that investment. We had customers saying, "Hey, we need this and we need it by this date," and we've got over $115 million of backlog in -- for that facility as of the last time we gave a public number. And so you see kind of this balance of we've got customers that want something that we're the only one or one of only a few in the world that can do it, and there's a lot of demand for it. So those are the 2 pieces that kind of pull on each other. And there's the other one I'd point in terms of organic and high ROI is some of the capital we're spending in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we added a brazing furnace. So that's our flexible manufacturing strategy that we can make everything in our portfolio in more than one location. And so adding a brazing furnace in Tulsa occurred a year ago or so, and now we're kind of going around the edges so that we can get double the number of pre-brazed cores that we can get through in a week. And that again goes not only to the LNG demand that we've discussed, but also the fact that the brazed core is used in a lot of the specialty applications as well. And then the last comment on your inorganic side of things, certainly, we watch very carefully and ensure that if there's any innovative technology that we think would match really well, that would be an area that we look to. Service and repair is something that has just been a really proven out strategy for us that the customers want, not only the new build, but they want us to do the service and repair. So that could be organic or inorganic. And those are the types of things that we watch, but the #1 thing we're focused on is driving to our target net leverage ratio right now, paying down debt.

Great. Thank you so much for taking the time, and thanks, everyone. I know you're on CNBC later on, so don't miss her on CNBC. But thank you.

Thanks, Ati. Thanks, everybody.