JOST Werke SE (JST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

in the decline in trucks with a strong trailer and tractor business and also includes some pricing effects since we have raised our prices at the beginning of the year. North America, very strong region, 7% growth in the production of Class 8 trucks and also 12% in the trailer production. So very strong underlying business, very strong demand in the transport segment. In the tractor, agricultural tractor segment, more or less even with compact tractor declining but higher sales in higher horsepower tractors, which benefited us because that's -- these are the more valuable and also the more profitable products in our agricultural lineup. JOST performance with 52% outperformed this market. There is certainly some pricing effect and also some FX effects that Christian will explain a little later. But overall, a very strong performance, outperforming the market also with market share gains. Looking at Asia Pacific, Africa. You see here in the official numbers, a minus 56%, that is impacted by China, especially in the comparison between Q2 of last year 2021, there was a huge decline in China because in China, the emission regulation changed first of July 2021, and we had a pre-buy and therefore, a preproduction effect in Q1 and Q2. So that drop comes mainly from China. In trailers, we see a growing market actually with 11% growing in the total region. The JOST performance in this -- we were also impacted by China, but we only went down 20%. And that is because our other regions in that -- or other countries in that region more than offsetting a big portion of that China impact. And also, if you look at the profitability, that Christian will explain in detail, you see that even at this level, we have a very healthy business in that region. Having that said, let's come to the details, and I hand over to Christian.

Yes, Joachim. Thank you very much, and also a very warm welcome from my side. Good to be back here in the JOST Studios after 1 session outside. But let's quickly go through the financials for Q2. As Joachim already pointed out, quite successful Q2 in our opinion. So starting with the region Europe, you see that our sales grew by about 16% reported organically, actually a growth of 17% for H1, even 17.6%, and you do see here some negative FX effects headwinds, both in sales but also in the -- on the profitability. I'll come to that in a second. Overall, sales grew, as Joachim pointed out, 16% in Q2 despite significant supply chain disruptions, especially due to the Ukraine war, and those were not only visible within Europe exactly because there are also a significant impacts of the war on transportation. So overall, the production of trailers and tractors was less affected as we said, and the demand remained very strong. Revenues were supported by previous sales price adjustments. However, the increase in input factors, input costs remained very, very high also in Q2 and that will require future price increases, especially in the region Europe in order to fight those price increases. Overall, the FX headwinds in Q2 amounted to roughly 1 point -- minus 1.3 percentage points, and those were resulting mostly from the Swedish krona the Swedish kroner, it's worth to talk about that a little bit more specifically because we see several effects here. First of all, the Swedish krona deteriorated against all major currencies that affect our business in the agricultural -- on the agricultural side, the euro -- versus the euro, it deteriorated by roughly 4% versus the U.S. dollar by 13% versus the RMB in China, about 7%. So overall, very negative impacts and unfortunately, all to the detriment of JOST. But the good thing is that the vast majority of those negative impacts, and you'll see that also in the result is not realized. So speaking about the results, we were able to grow our EBIT in Europe from 12.4% from -- sorry, we were not able to grow our EBIT in this quarter nor in the H1 numbers, you see a slight decline of 3% for H1. And therefore, this is basically accompanied by a lower margin of 8.2% in H1 or 6.8% in Q2. Main reason for that, obviously, what I already said, the increase in input factors, so especially material costs went up, but also transportation costs. However, and that is very important to understand the foreign exchange rate effect that I was just pointing out of the Swedish krona had an overall negative impact of EUR 4.3 million. So if you were to add the EUR 4.3 million to the EUR 12.4 million in Q2 you would see that our margin would be right on the same level as it was in Q2 2021. So if we take that into consideration. I would say it was a quite decent quarter where we were able to pass on most of the price increases that we saw on the purchasing side also to our customers. But needless to say that foreign exchange changes are always part of the game and therefore, our EBIT slightly deteriorated in Q2 and thus also in H1. With that, I would like to go over to the next region, North America. Here, we see a different foreign exchange rate effect. You see that our organic growth in Q2 was 35%, and our reported growth was 52% and that is even stronger on the H1 results where we were able to organically grow by 44% and reportedly even by 60%. So overall, a very positive development there, significantly outperforming the market, as Joachim already said, but certainly also supported by very strong FX tailwinds in this case, 17 percentage points in Q2. So that's quite significant. And we all know that the euro overall as our reporting currency deteriorated against most currencies, but not the Swedish krona. I would like to point out that our aftermarket sales in all regions remained very stable throughout Q2, but also throughout H1 compared to prior year. So we are still in a growth rate, so more growth on the OEM side and less growth on the aftermarket side also pointing to future potential if there should ever be a downturn, but aftermarket year-to-date in North America, about 25%, 28% in Europe. Adjusted EBIT also grew even stronger than our sales, H1, 74% growth, now up to an EBIT margin of 9.2% and Q2, you see the 62%, and the margin went up by about 0.6 percentage points, now at 9.7%, making North America once again the second strongest region in the group. So we -- obviously, with more sales, we were benefiting from higher capacity utilization and better operating leverage and that all combined with positive foreign exchange rate effects really made up this very, very positive result in North America. Last region, Asia Pacific, Africa, again, a totally mixed picture. On the 1 side, China, on the other side, the rest of Asia Pacific. But the rest of Asia Pacific really needs some phrase here because they were really picking up what was sort of left behind in China. And you know that looking back into the past of JOST, China -- the Chinese market roughly accounted for somewhere between 50% to 55% of the overall sales, I would say, roughly 50% on average. And that portion dropped dramatically. It basically dropped down to roughly 30% in H1, and this is just all attributable to the overall decline in the Chinese truck market. The Chinese truck market has been very, very weak ever since we came into Q3 2021 when we had the change of emissions regulation. And ever since then, the market was very weak, and we have yet to see a strong recovery. There are certain positive signs. We were watching them carefully, but it's still I would say, somewhat disappointing what's happening in China with the overall economy. What's especially happening with lockdowns, lockdowns in China affect us in multiple ways. When the port of Shanghai gets closed, it will affect our ability to transport products, be it finished, semifinished or raw material from China to Europe or North America. On the other hand, such port closures also affect our ability to deliver parts within China. And as you know, it's not only the port of Shanghai that was closed down. It was overall Shanghai that was closed down. And so were other major cities, especially some major cities where our customers sit. So once again, China rather weak development. And I would say, given the unusual circumstances, our teams in China did the best they could, and they achieved a positive result, which is still good and also a growing result, but it cannot be compared to what happened in Q2 2021. But back to the rest of Asia Pacific, Africa, and I would like to specifically point to India, to Australia to New Zealand and to South Africa. And last but not least, to our Southeast Asian business in Singapore. They all performed very well picked up what was left behind in China, and you can see it there, especially in the margin development. The margin in H1 increased from 17.6% to 19.5% in H1 2022. And this is all due to the fact that we were able to compensate some of the missed sales in China through sales in the other regions. And how is that? Basically, the main factor is that we see a lot more off-duty -- off-highway heavy-duty business in those countries that I just mentioned, while specifically China is a more on-road market for us. And as you may know, if you've been following us for a while, heavy-duty off-road business is much more profitable than on-road business. And this is exactly visible here in the numbers for the Asia Pacific region. So the better product mix really helped to improve the situation in this region. I need to point out that overall, we still see a small decline of 7.5 percentage points because China is just so big that there was no way to fully compensate the missed sales, also bearing in mind that H1 2021 and especially Q2 2021 were unusually strong quarters in China due to the already before mentioned prebuy effects due to the change in emissions regulation. So let's move over to the group. And Joachim has already pointed out, organically, we were able in H1 to grow by about 16%, reportedly by 19% a good split between transport and agriculture. Agriculture, up 37% and transport 14% and in Q1, similar -- Q2, sorry, similar development plus 29% on agriculture and plus 14% on transport. Adjusted EBIT margin remained inQ2 stable at 10%. I believe that was a challenge, but it was a good result. If you bear in mind how many headwinds we were seeing operationally, we had the lockdowns in China. So that caused supply chain disruptions. We had the war in Europe that caused some of our customers, especially in Europe, not to be able to produce because they were missing parts. And then overall, everything was inflated. We saw inflation on material, energy, logistics and alloys, and all of that was coming our way. And on the other hand, we needed to react and go through our customers, but I must say that there will be a time lag when we will see the positive effect from price increases with customers compared to the negative effects that we are seeing from our suppliers. So keeping in mind that we achieved the 10% plus if you added the EUR 4.3 million foreign exchange rate effects that were there, we would have even ended up at a better margin in Q2 2022 compared to Q2 2021. But again, I'm not debating that the foreign exchange rate effects are there. And so therefore, we have to say that, yes, we grew our adjusted EBIT by 7.2% in Q2 to EUR 32.1 million or 11.4% in H1 to EUR 66.5 million. But there were some negative effects coming our way. Also, I would like to point out that this is now the second consecutive quarter where we recorded not only record sales of EUR 300 million, above EUR 300 million per quarter, but we also recorded another second quarter in a row with EUR 30 million in profit. Also, this is something that we have never achieved in the past. So that brings me now to some more financial numbers driven by balance sheet and other developments. So first of all, our typical walk through the adjustments plus the taxes and finance results. So you see here a net income in H1 of EUR 38 million. That is double what we had in Q1 this year. Taxes grew quite strongly to EUR 10 million, and then the finance result remained stable at roughly EUR 1.5 million, EUR 1 point some million and therefore, now accounting to EUR 3 million overall year-to-date. Here, you can actually see that we also had an increase in our net debt. So EBIT for H1, the non-adjusted EBIT amounts to EUR 51 million then you see the typical development of the depreciation and amortization of our purchase price allocation that has now doubled compared to Q1 that's EUR 14 million. Other exceptionals, very small ones, only with EUR 2 million. So also this is a number that's absolutely in line with what we were expecting. So nothing unusual there. And that overall brings us to an adjusted EBIT of roughly EUR 66 million, a record result for a first half year at JOST ever. Now we do the walk backwards down to the adjusted net income, minus EUR 3 million finance results and a pro forma tax rate of 30% brings us to an adjusted net income of EUR 44 million. And that is not only doubled from Q1, but it's also significantly higher, about 10% higher than it was in Q1 -- in H1 2021. One word on reported earnings per share and adjusted earnings per share. So reported earnings per share grew significantly from EUR 1.61 million to EUR 2.53 million. And the main reason why the growth was so strong. And by the way, the adjusted EPS didn't grow as much. But the main reason was that the reported -- in the reported result last year, we had negative impacts because of the disposal of our subsidiary, JOST U.K. And now we did adjust them, and therefore, you see that the adjusted EPS rose from EUR 2.69 per share to EUR 2.99 per share. But still a EUR 0.30 growth is remarkable, if you ask me. Now I would like to go to the next slide, where we speak about ROCE, equity ratio and net debt. ROCE basically is stable at 16.5%, so it was 16.6% at the end of December, now 16.4%. basically driven by a minor increase in net debt. But overall, quite stable, 16% ROCE is in line with our expectations. Equity ratio, happy to report that we're now above 33%. As I've already mentioned several times, the 30% is basically the threshold where we would like to stay at. And now with 33.3%, we're significantly above that number. Net debt, I mentioned that a small increase from the leverage increased from 1.45x to 1.53x and but still very much within our target range of somewhere between 1x and 2x and you see the total number here, slight growth of -- from EUR 194 million to EUR 216 million overall, okay, if you ask me. Cash flow. If you look at cash flow, you see here that the free cash flow is once again positive. The cash conversion rate is also positive with plus 0.4% better than last year and also better than in Q1. We did work on our working capital. We will continue to work on our working capital. But overall, it's a cash conversion rate for -- that we are okay with. We're below the 1x target or 1 target. But this is just the middle of the year, and we continue to work on those numbers. CapEx, also positive in a sense that we are not behind our CapEx plan. So with EUR 6.4 million, significantly more than we did in the last year at the same time, and therefore, we are at 2%. However, we need to be realistic with the strong inflation in sales, it is uncertain whether we will end up at 2.5% or it will remain around the 2% mark that we're currently seeing. But I can assure you, we are continuing to invest and make the right moves that we will not just make investments because we want to achieve a certain CapEx ratio. We will invest in euros the exact same amount that we have planned, and that's basically what you're seeing here. Net working capital, we have a slight increase from 20.3% in Q2 last year to 21.2% this year. And the main drivers are certainly our inventory numbers. You see here an increase of roughly EUR 60 million compared to 1 year ago and you know the reasons. Those are the same that we've already communicated in Q1 and also in Q4 last year. We needed to improve or increase our inventory numbers because of all of those supply chain disruptions. Last year, end of last year, we were basically -- sorry, not end of last year, end of Q2 last year, we were still not affected by any kind of war. We did have certain corona effects, but they were kind of going away. And now we see a significant increase, but it is necessary in order to deliver our parts to our customers. And as you know, the history has shown that it was always beneficial when we were able to deliver. And therefore, there needs to be a compromise between inventory levels and the ability to deliver to the customers. And this is something that you're seeing here. We do not see a very significant increase in inventory days. It's roughly 9 days going up. So it's not as severe and we will continue to manage those numbers. So this was it from my side on the different financial KPIs in different regions. And I hope those gave you a good insight of what was happening in this good quarter 2022. And I would like to hand it over back to Joachim.

Yes, thank you very much, Christian, for the detailed analysis of the results. And I would like to present to you how we expect the remainder of the year to continue. And these are the official numbers that you see from the external consultants LMC, career consulting FDR. And they are for Europe unchanged to what we presented last time. So they see a contraction in Europe on truck and also on trailers and a slight growth on agricultural tractors. Our outlook is that on top of that, you can account a certain price effect. So we expect a slight growth for the full year in Europe. North America, here, if you compare it to the previous expectations, they have reduced the expectations somewhat. So it used to be 10% to 15% growth in North America for trucks, for example. So there is a slight reduction in the outlook. You'll see it's a bit more conservative and have reduced the expectations for North America and also for China. But you've seen the performance already in the first half year and also in the second quarter where we've been up 50% in North America and 30-something percent, excluding the FX effect. And we also expect to outperform this over the course of the year in North America. [indiscernible] They have further reuse, as I already mentioned, their expectations, and that is mainly driven by China. But mind you, this is the full year 2022 that we see here. And in China, we have to consider that we had, if you do a full year comparison, a very strong first half year of 2021. And now if you compare Q3 and Q4, we will be able to compare to a lower base because we already had much reduced volumes in China in Q3 and Q4. So I don't expect for the upcoming quarters to see the same decline versus last year than we have seen in the first 2 quarters just because we have a different base to compare it to. So our numbers, will not reflect the negative numbers that you see here in April for the total year. But if you look at the remainder of the year, it should probably not be negative at all. So that's the outlook from the market. And based on that, we can confirm our guidance that remains at mid-single-digit growth year-over-year in sales and in terms of the comparison to 2021, we had EUR 1.049 billion (sic) [ EUR 1.049 million ] sales. Also, our adjusted EBIT grow mid-single digits so that we will -- we are counting on a stable EBIT margin. CapEx, Christian already explained, we are focusing to do the necessary CapEx according to our CapEx plan, but we're focusing on the absolute values. So if sales due to pricing inflation effects grow beyond that, then that may lead to a smaller ratio because we're focusing on the absolute investments. With that, I would like to come to the summary. And we can summarize that we had another successful quarter with sales exceeding EUR 300 million in 1 quarter and adjusted EBIT exceeding the EUR 30 million mark for the second consecutive quarter in JOST's history. I think that's especially in the current market environment and with the current uncertainty, a very positive result. Both business lines, transport and agriculture continue to drive the growth momentum. And we are benefiting in both from a good order intake. North America was our strongest growth region once again supporting by growing demand for our products in transport, but also in agriculture. And given the current macroeconomic uncertainty and the rising inflation worldwide, we -- it's hard to predict and the visibility remains low. But our underlying fundamentals are still strong. So transport and agriculture are things that are needed even in this uncertain world. And therefore, we confirm our guidance for the financial year 2022. And we are confident that we will achieve this based on the results that we've seen so far and also on our ability to limit the negative impacts that we see with rising costs and supply shortages. And we are doing that with our operational flexibility, but also with our product portfolio, which is very balanced between truck, trailer and agricultural tractors. With that, I would like to thank you for your attention and for your interest, and we are looking forward to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Jorge González from a Hauck Aufhäuser Investment Banking.

Can you hear me?

We can hear you, Jorge.

Christian and Joachim, so I have 2 questions, mainly. The first 1 is regarding the guidance for this year. So after this strong set of results, you are in a very good position to beat the guidance, especially we take into account that you might enjoy correctly windfall profit in the last part of the year because of this pass-through mechanism. So I was wondering if you can comment on what you need to see before upgrading your guidance? Because I imagine that you want still to be conservative here. But what needs to happen between this point and Q3 to have more confidence to raise the guidance. And the second question is for next year. I know that it's pretty difficult to obviously foresee the market this year ,but and especially interested if you see the trailer market to be as resilient as the truck market looks like because of the [ area. ] What are your views on this? .

Yes. Jorge, first of all, thank you for your questions. I will start with the question concerning next year. And then I will give a few comments on the guidance and then I'll hand over to Christian for more details to the guidance. I think it's a very good question for next year. And as you said, all predictions are uncertain, especially when they affect the future, that's clear. But the question is very good because I think the certainty on truck is higher than on trailer because overall, the truck industry claims that they have not been producing the required amount of trucks in 2020 because of COVID in 2021 because of semiconductors. And in 2022, they're still not at the level that demand is at because they have issues with the supply chain from Ukraine, continued issues with semiconductors. So they say, there is a lot of pent-up demand. And you're right, the trailer industry has been more capable to follow the demand than the truck industry. So in terms of pent-up demand, you probably see a stronger order book and the stronger pent-up demand in trucks than you see on trailers. But it's also true that even on trailers, the trailer aging is quite high and talking to customers in North America and also in Europe, they are running quite old trailers because especially the rental fleets have not replaced the speeds that they typically replace. So also there, even though it's probably less strong I see that there is also a certain pent-up demand because the aging of the fleet is still relatively high. So that's a positive outlook for 2022. Concerning our guidance, you're certainly right that we are running very well on the sales side. But we also have to consider that we typically have seasonal effects where Q1 and Q2 are much stronger than Q3 and Q4. And with the uncertainty in the market, yes, we like to remain a bit conservative. You're certainly right on the sales side with the pricing effect that we'll probably getting very close to the guidance. And I think Christian can give a bit more detail of what we would have to see in order to adjust that.

Yes, Jorge, I also believe that sales is probably the 1 component of the guidance that might be slightly understated, but still we are in a very volatile market environment. And we don't know exactly what would happen to our customers. If our customers continue to produce, we will be able to deliver. I think I pointed that out several times. The other thing is really on the profitability. And I mean just looking at what happened last year, we were stronger last year than we were in terms of percentage-wise, not absolute numbers, but percentage-wise, our margin was stronger last year. And you remember what happened in Q3 and Q4. At the end of 2021, we ended up at a 10% margin. We're still above the 10.5%, but it's not going to be a walk in the park. This is yes, we are also -- I agree, we are also seeing some positive developments on the material side in terms of steel pricing. On the other hand, all the other factors remain very high, be it energy, be it personnel that is now starting to kick in. Everyone wants more money because of the inflation overall. Alloys are very, very expensive, plus we are still seeing growth on the transport side prices. So overall, it's a mixed bag, and it's difficult to say where we'll end up at. And we have a history. We typically like to see what will happen to our customers and to the market once they return from their summer breaks and then we will reevaluate the situation. And rest assured, we're doing that very closely. As soon as we see enough confidence that we can adjust our guidance, we will do so. And we would hope it's -- that we can do that, but we need to remain cautious. And I think we've proven also at the beginning of the year, that we always try to be conservative but stable. And we don't like big jumps and ups and downs. And therefore, we keep it low, but we are watching the situation.

One follow-up, please, Christian. When you're referring to seasonality is because of the agricultural business, isn't it?

That's both. It's both divisions. It's transport and agriculture. Agriculture obviously has a very weak Q3 because -- that's typically when the farmers are harvesting and they have no time to purchase new products. Then Q4 should be better, but the best quarters in both business lines are mostly Q1 and Q2 and especially transport, where we also are very much impacted by a typical calendar year seasonality with a lot more holidays in Q4 and then Q3 impacted by some more shutdowns of the bigger OEMs. That's why we typically have the weaker quarters in the 2 quarters to come. And this is now -- with the 1 exception of 2020 where we had corona in the first half and then a lot of pent-up demand in the second half of the year. But with this only exceptional year, you can see it if you go back decades in history of JOST. And Romy is just showing those numbers. And you can really see that. If you look at the right side of the slide, you see also the margins where they are always starting high in Q1, Q2 and then they go down in Q3 and Q4.

2018 and '19 was without agriculture. So even in transport, we have the same seasonality.

So it is what needs to be expected. 2021 was a typical year. And right now, we have no reason to believe 2022 will be any different.