L.A. Turbine (GTLS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Chart Industries, Inc. conference call about the acquisition of L.A. Turbine. [Operator Instructions] The company's supplemental presentation was issued earlier this morning. If you have not received the release, you may access it by visiting Chart's website at www.chartindustries.com. A telephone replay of today's broadcast will be available following the conclusion of the call until July 8, 2021. The replay information is contained in the company's press release. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that statements made during this call that are not historical, in fact, are forward-looking statements. Please refer to the information regarding forward-looking statements and risk factors included in the company's latest SEC filings. The company undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jill Evanko, Chart Industries' CEO.

Thanks, Gigi, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us on this first day of the third quarter of 2021. We're excited to share our acquisition of L.A. Turbine with you today, another key cog in our strategy wheel of being molecule-agnostic and serving the nexus of clean energy, clean water, clean food and clean industrials, which we believe will be a hybrid of power sources. Starting on Slide 3 of the supplemental deck released this morning. As you're all well aware, Chart is a unique way to play the energy transition. As Barron's stated last Friday in their article, we are a unique way to play both legacy and new energy sources. L.A. Turbine brings another key element to our more comprehensive one-stop shop solution and provides more options for our customers in hydrogen and helium liquefaction, carbon capture and energy storage, industrial gas, natural gas, LNG, PDH and petrochemical, covering the breadth of energy sources. This acquisition aligns with our inorganic investment principles and contributes to our financial growth and strength through expanded revenue and profit. Later, we will share more financial details, but coming out of the gate, LAT will be immediately accretive to us. But before we get into those specifics, let's talk about why turbo expanders are critical to our solution offering as well as why we want this capability in-house. Slide 4 gives you a little technical background on how turboexpanders play in our offering. They are an essential and key component to our process refrigeration cycles for a variety of types of energy applications and complementary to our brazed aluminum heat exchanger and cold box offerings. Turboexpanders provide the pressure left down and temperature drop to achieve the desired cryogenic cooling while using extracted work to power plant compression or generators. You can see in the visuals on Slide 4 how the expanders fit on a hydrogen liquefaction process. Turboexpanders are located near the bottom of the cryogenic liquefier cold box and the precooling cold box. But this isn't simply adding an expander to our offering. This is adding a company that has a very unique and very rare set of capabilities. Turning to Slide 5. There is a very unique expander required for hydrogen and helium liquefaction, which is difficult to obtain in the market due to a limited number of companies like LAT that are capable of designing and producing it. These very specialized expanders are difficult to design and produce as they require very high efficiency in some cases, oil-free machines, oil bearings for plants producing 10 tonnes per day and smaller and magnetic bearings for larger helium and hydrogen liquefaction plants. Hydrogen is very difficult for steels, so these machines need to be hermetically sealed to eliminate leakage that could create safety hazard. So why foil bearings or magnetic bearings. First things first, when you're doing a clean energy project, people do not want oil bearings. Second, I'll go a little technical on you, but it's important to understand. Foil bearings are sometimes also called gas bearings. The machinery floats on a cushion of processed gas instead of oil. Foil bearings are good for very high speeds and high speeds are needed for small, i.e., that 10 tonne per day hydrogen and helium liquefaction plant size to get good efficiency. Magnetic bearings suspend the machinery via electrical magnets or sometimes permanent magnets, magnetic bearings can take high loads for plants 30 tonnes per day or larger, but they are limited to speeds of 60,000 to 70,000 RPM. That speed works for the larger plants to get good efficiency, but not on the smaller plants, which can require up to 120,000 RPMs. The magnets are exposed to hydrogen, so they have to be made suitable to avoid hydrogen embrittlement. Further to the required technology for these projects is another dynamic that has come into play. Within the last 3 years, the other qualified suppliers are able to do these specialty expanders have been acquired by companies that in many cases, only use their hydrogen and helium turboexpanders for in-house dedicated purposes, i.e., discontinuing sales to third parties. Plus as part of the liquefier is one of the longest lead time items at 1 to 2 years depending on the configuration. L.A. Turbine has these capabilities and our ownership of these capabilities further position us to win liquefaction projects and deliver them in significantly shorter time frames, a further differentiator in the expanding liquefaction market. And lastly, to have optimum cost and efficiency, it's necessary to iterate between the rotating equipment and brazed aluminum heat exchanger designs. So owning LAT and owning our brazed aluminum heat exchanger capabilities, the process technology, this totally makes a smooth, fast and seamless iteration to get that optimum cost and efficiency. But this isn't just about hydrogen. As you've heard me say numerous times, we are molecule-agnostic and believe the current and future state of global energy sources will be a hybrid of a variety of molecules. And we are extremely well positioned to serve all of these applications and markets with our offering. LAT adds the comprehensive offerings for each, further differentiating our one-stop shop capabilities or as I like to say, our menu allows customers to choose from a full solution, including process technology and equipment or an a la carte menu, where they simply can pick and choose the pieces and parts that work for them from our portfolio. I will go through each of these on Slide 6, but I would point out that we now have a fully owned in-house process for each of the applications in the first column. You've already heard how this works with hydrogen and helium liquefaction. Our commercial energy team is thrilled with the addition of LAT. Now we have spinners, not just static equipment. And nearly everything involved in energy transition to the cleaner and greener arena involves energy recovery in the form of heat transfer and/or turbomachinery. With LAT, we now have both. Regarding carbon capture, we are seeing more desire in the market for carbon capture with energy storage and the combination of our SES Cryogenic Carbon Capture process, our heat exchangers and now LAT's expanders, this is a complete solution inclusive of storage. Additionally, this acquisition builds on other recent additions to our portfolio, including Cryo Technologies, helium and hydrogen liquefaction capabilities, which will also utilize L.A. Turbine's equipment. There are also other cutting-edge applications not shown on Slide 6 that we expect to serve with the combination of Cryo Technologies, SES, Chart and LAT. Let me give you 2 examples as teasers. First, we can offer a Tritium separation system for special chemicals. This is a cryogenic process using helium refrigeration to separate Tritium, one of the isotopes of hydrogen from other hydrogen molecules to reduce the radio activity in the power plant for maintenance reasons. Second, we are developing LNG revaporization with carbon capture. This design uses the refrigeration available in the LNG to significantly reduce the power for carbon capture when a combined-cycle power plant uses LNG and also carbon capture from the gas turbines exhaust. So you've gotten a sense of the synergies already, but let me share a little bit more and build on my opening remarks about this deal being immediately accretive. Moving to Slide 7. As with all inorganic investments or acquisitions, we only purchase or invest in companies with strong leadership and teams. L.A. Turbine is no different. We are excited to welcome our newest team members, who are well known amongst our Chart global engineering team as they've worked together for years. Danny Mascari will continue in his role as President of the business, which has led for the past 10 years. Welcome, Danny and team. As you might imagine, both of our businesses have very active commercial order pipelines right now, and there are multiple requests for hydrogen liquefaction and processing as well as a variety of energy projects. So having the additional engineering resources as well as more manufacturing capacity brings us agility and flexibility, not just for the specific products that we've talked about today, but also bringing an enhanced set of engineering skills into the business, that allow us to further organically develop new designs for a variety of applications. With numerous trade secrets, all LAT equipment is custom designed and engineered to integrate the key design features such as standard frame sizes, anti-surge control, rotor layout, wheel shaft attachments and coding strategies. LAT also brings a very strong aftermarket and service presence, which will bolster our repair, service and leasing segment as well. LAT is expected to be immediately accretive to Chart with 2021 positive impact to full year guidance to be shared on our second quarter 2021 earnings call, which is scheduled for July 22. Looking ahead to 2022, when we will have ramped up our combined benefits, L.A. Turbine is expected to contribute between $40 million and $50 million of revenue and $0.20 to $0.30 of non-diluted earnings per share on approximately 35.5 million weighted shares outstanding with an assumed 18% tax rate. Our total addressable market, or TAM, for our specialty products is expanded by $350 million resulting from this acquisition and brings our total specialty addressable market size to over $6.6 billion, as shown on Slide 8. Today's increase is the result of the expanded TAM for hydrogen liquefaction, helium liquefaction and carbon capture with energy storage, and you can see that breakdown on Slide 8. I expect this number to significantly increase as the roar in 2020s takes off. But remember that this is a near term, i.e., next 3 to 4 years addressable market figure. Soon, I will share a 2030 estimate on addressable market, but not today. So let's head into Q&A as we're sitting at the front end of the holiday weekend and the beginning of quarter end results. There'll be much detail about the second quarter shared 3 weeks from now. So with that, Gigi, please open it up for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Eric Stine from Craig-Hallum.

So maybe just -- I guess, first question, what does this do maybe for a representative project, if there is one you can say to the content per project for Chart?

Sure. So this would be somewhere, let's say, let's take a 10 to 15 tonne per day hydrogen liquefaction plant. And typically, for us, those are going to be between kind of $25 million and $50 million of our current state. This would add somewhere in the $5 million additional per project. So we would have gone out and had to outsource otherwise.

Yes. Yes, absolutely. Okay. And then maybe just last one for me. I mean any commentary you can give on L.A. Turbine in terms of growth if you're willing to at this point or maybe it's in a few weeks, just talk about their margin profile. And you mentioned a pretty robust pipeline, but just some additional details on that would be great.

Sure. And I'll give you much more detail with specificity to the second half of 2021 in a few weeks, but as kind of a generality, the way that we look backwards at the financials and they're private, but we'll share a little bit of this on average. The gross margin as a percent of sales in the mid-30%. We expect that steps up as we start bringing more of the specialty side in the mix. And then there's various different cases that we run around the growth profile. And if you simply said, I'm not going to have any specialty in the mix and just go with traditional or legacy "energy applications", you'd still be looking at a 5% to 7% growth in the coming couple of years. But we expect that to be higher than that just given the fact that we have 28 hydrogen and helium liquefaction projects in our commercial pipeline that we're currently bidding on. And this brings us a really nice, I'd say, likelihood, a higher likelihood to win given that it shortens that lead time and that delivery significantly as this is one of the longer lead time items in that supply chain.

Our next question comes from Ian MacPherson from Piper Sandler.

Similar question. It struck me that your upgrade to the TAM of $100 million is relatively subdued vis-a-vis the 2022 revenue accretion. So I presume that you've got outside of specialty within traditional heat exchanger businesses, additional TAM expansion beyond the $100 million that you've scoped out for specialty. Is that a fair assumption?

Totally fair assumption. We've got, I think, $350 million in the specialty expansion from this, but the traditional -- more traditional energy businesses, we expect that there's quite a bit of synergy here and growth in that area, too. So while we -- in our prepared comments, we're focused more around the hydrogen helium and carbon capture side, the reality is that we're seeing a recovery across the more traditional markets, whether it's pet chem or LNG or natural gas and this is just hugely complementary to our existing products for those markets. And if you ask our teams, our commercial team, I don't know which side is more excited about it. But I'd say, I think that actually the traditional energy guys have been jumping for joy waiting for us to get this done because it makes it a lot easier to sell that full solution as well.

Understood. Yes. Sorry, I misspoke on the $350 million, not the $100 million for specialty next year. And then, I guess, we're -- we've grown accustomed to this cadence of acquisitions, but you always want to look peak ahead and ask what your expectation is for the next several quarters with regard to the inorganic pipeline and whether we hit pause here or whether you see more opportunities similar to the -- to keep pushing the envelope?

So this was the highest dollar acquisition target in our pipeline. So to give you a sense of we had said, there's really nothing greater than that $100 million headline price in the pipeline, and this was the top end. The pipeline that we have, in general, the headline prices are much smaller than this, and we'll be picking along kind of depending on how they fit strategically, depending on where they are, but there's no other $50 million plus in our pipeline at all right now. This was a significant strategic addition for us that we really felt like we needed in our portfolio. Everything else in the pipeline right now is more opportunistic, and we'll be really disciplined on valuations and making sure that there is a need for it in our portfolio. So the -- what's been happening over the last 12 months in our business on the inorganic side is tempering just based on what we need and where we sit with a pretty complete and robust structure that we have.

Our next question comes from Martin Malloy from Johnson Rice.

I just wanted to ask about the repair and the aftermarket side of the business. It looks like looking at their history that this company started off on the aftermarket repair side. And maybe if you could talk about what percentage of the revenue is coming from that, the opportunities for maybe to pull through between them and Chart's repair and maintenance capabilities? What kind of synergies you're seeing there or potential over there? It looks like...

Absolutely. Yes. No, it's a really good point, Marty. And we didn't spend too much time spotlighting it, but it probably needs a little more spotlight on it because that's a key part of the business. And as you said, the business started on the aftermarket repair and service side and in many cases, also repairing and servicing not only their own expanders but others' expanders. So they're very well known and I'd say appreciated and viewed as top notch on the aftermarket repair and service side. To us, that's very meaningful, especially as you know, we have our target to get over 20% of our total revenue out of the RSL segment very near term in the next couple of years. And this will add to that with -- and it depends on the year because the business had different characteristics depending on what's happening in the markets. But I'd say, on average, over 20% of their revenue being on the back end side of the house on the recurring side. And from our standpoint, that capability in their respective product is fantastic, especially with that percent of revenue. But where we see the synergies is we need more field service people that know how to service both rotating and static equipment, and they bring that capability. So having more hands on deck and coverage for a business that we get called every day to have field folks go out is a significant benefit to us, and that's both in North America as well as in the EU.

That's great. And then my last question was just, you talked a little bit about the long lead time item, and this allows you to maybe compress the delivery schedule or maybe I'm reading too much into it. But could you talk about your ability to do that and maybe offer customers a more standardized piece of equipment or solution in a quicker amount of time to delivery?

Yes, it's a very meaningful part of this acquisition is compressing that delivery schedule. So regardless of what project you're talking about, and I'll just take liquefaction as an example. Every one of our customers want it sooner and faster. I mean they take new fortress energies, name their project fast LNG that we're participating in. And so the movement toward speed, and I think a portion of that in the customer behavior is the result of the fact that everybody is seeing this trend toward the energy transition and how being a first mover is really important in getting your product and your solution out there. So that's going to be super helpful. In some cases, that could be 9 to 12 months of compression in a schedule, which would put us in a position to win on something otherwise we would have been thrown out because we couldn't commit to a particular delivery. But I think the second part of your question has more ultimate legs over the coming decades, which is around the standardized solution. And that's the other thing that you've seen in industries like LNG as the movement toward kind of an out-of-the-box or a standard answer with standard pricing and standard lead times where there's not as much customization happening upfront. And that's something that this really adds to our capability to offer that off-the-shelf solution and do so in that lead time. So meaningful leaps and bounds by having this in there towards the standardization. And you'll see us do that on the hydrogen liquefaction side. That's something that we've been working on organically behind the scenes is to have a standard hydrogen set of size plans, right? So you have the 10, the 15 and the 30, and that's something that we'll be commercially bringing to market fairly quickly here.

Our next question comes from J.B. Lowe from Citi.

I was getting worried. We hadn't had an acquisition for a couple of weeks, so I was worried about you guys.

Yes, yes. Heart's still beating over here.

Nice. Just a question on kind of the competitive dynamics. I know you said that a lot of their competitors have been snapped up by some of these bigger players. I guess, for the applications that you guys are talking about, both on the legacy energy and the specialty side, can you talk about the market share that L.A. Turbine has versus some of these other competitors?

Yes. So you do have to split it between the more legacy markets and then the specialty markets. And you've had -- the reason we put whatever slide that was in our deck to talk about the evolution over the last 2.5 to 3 years of acquisitions in the space is important because what 5 years ago would have been, okay, in a legacy market, I can go out and I can find these fairly easily now has become much more difficult. And I would say, to address the question specifically, in particular, in North America and Europe. So I'd leave Asia out of this because LAT does not have a strong presence, picked and chose, big challenge that LAT had on their own, and this is what they told us when we first started talking about this was, hey, I had to pick and choose projects because certain ones required an amount of working capital or capital or backstop, and we're a small business with limited capital. And so that was why Asia wasn't a market that they traditionally went after. Now that's another synergy that we expect to be able to pull through, in particular, in our Southeast Asia businesses. So in North America in the EU, I would suggest there's probably a 15% type of market share with the more traditional guys like ACD that was bought by Air Liquide or Rotoflow bought by AP or Sulzer bought by Linde kind of being the ones that had the biggest brunt of the market share. Now when you head into the specialty side of things, this is where you get a little more technical and it goes into the actual capability and design and ability to produce those foil and magnetic bearings. And that becomes a whole different ball game where we'll be extremely well positioned, and I expect to have a much higher market share in those applications just given the -- where we are with LAT already in the capabilities, the partnering and the design of these more advanced and specialty expanders. So all in all, we -- at the end of the day, we're an equipment provider, but we got to be able to provide that equipment and having this in-house will allow us to do it.

Great. That's helpful. My other one was just the revenue guidance that you guys contemplate for next year $40 million to $50 million. How many specialty projects does that include?

So that one actually only includes one specialty project, one hydrogen liquefaction project. So we booked 3 year-to-date of hydrogen, helium liquefaction projects that you guys are aware of, two in the first quarter for Plug and one in the second quarter for the Russian gas company. Two of those, we already have expanders committed in the pipeline. One of those we will use LAT for. And that's all that's included in there. I do expect there to be upside to this, especially given that we have 28 potential hydrogen and helium liquefaction commercial opportunities in our pipeline right now, none of which are yet booked. But I'd be extremely disappointed if we're not talking about a couple more of them between now and the end of the year coming in-house, which given the lead times would hit late in 2022 from a revenue perspective.

Our next question comes from Pavel Molchanov from Raymond James.

Given the level of accretion you're anticipating for next year, it implies that the EBITDA multiple of this deal is really, really low, I mean less well below 10x EBITDA. I'm curious why L.A. Turbine would agree to sell at such a low price.

Well, you got to remember that's also inclusive of our combined synergies. So that's something that was really important to LAT with having an owner that would have synergies and would be able to continue to grow the business, especially because the founder and owner, John had built this from the ground up since 2003. And in discussions with John and the team, it was really around landing with the right culture, landing with a growth platform and the combined synergies make that multiple look really good from our perspective. They did have other suiters, and we were blessed to be able to bring this in-house and be the winning suitor here. But the other point in time that John has made a decision that he's going to retire and this was the right time to sell. So it was kind of a nice combination of all the stars aligning with a really good combination of companies.

Right. And as I understand, L.A. Turbine's manufacturing is in Los Angeles or Valencia, California, which can be on the higher cost side of the spectrum. Are you going to continue those operations? Or are you going to move some of it to Georgia or anywhere else?

So we're going to do a hybrid of that. We're going to keep the manufacturing location in Valencia. And this is -- Pavel, this is a great question because it's a little more of a complex answer than just yes or no. We actually intend to utilize their location for other Chart products as well that we've had a harder time getting to the regions in the amount of lead time that our customers have wanted. Vaporizers is a great example of that. We can't keep up with vaporizer demand. But having vaporizers in locations that are close to where they need to go, has been the #1 hurdle we've faced. So we will put vaporizers in that location. So it is actually a strategic one for us. But we will take some of the manufacturing that's currently done in their facilities and move them to lower cost locations in Tulsa, as an example, is one. We would also look to be able to do this in the EU and probably in the Czech Republic. So it's a little bit of -- my favorite word lately is hybrid, a little bit of a hybrid answer there. And we'll be able to get some cost savings out of that. And I expect -- and we've conservatively built that into our model. So there's probably some upside to that. But that takes a little bit longer of time to get that set up in each of the locations that are lower cost.

Very clear. Congrats again on the deal.

Our next question comes from Rob Brown from Lake Street Capital.

Just wanted to understand the cyclicality in this business, has it historically been cyclical? Or is it a fairly steady business? I want to understand that.

It's been a fairly steady business. I would say COVID would have been the point where you saw a dip and -- but we're seeing the recovery coming out of that. So less cyclical than our traditional heat transfer systems. But still, you'd still have some level of cyclicality when you had market dynamics like last year.

Congrats on the acquisition.

Our next question comes from Marc Bianchi from Cowen.

Looking back to Slide 5, and you mentioned the majors -- the gas majors did these acquisitions of similar companies. Why was L.A. passed over by them? Is there just something different about the offering? Or what would you say to that they might have passed on L.A. when doing these other acquisitions?

Well, I don't know the actual answer to that. So I'd purely be speculating. But if I were speculating, which I'll do for you. I'll take a guess, a wild guess. I think the businesses that they bought were larger in the space. So different scale of the size of impact to the market. And this is a smaller business compared to ACD compared to Sulzer and Rotoflow. That would be my venture of a guess. And perhaps the other element is the lack of Asia. Could be one.

Okay. And it sounds like -- maybe I'm reading into this too much, but this kind of opens the door to larger liquefaction projects. And we've seen so far are kind of on the smaller end. Are there now, I think you said 28 I think that you're quoting, are there some larger ones in there? And does this sort of help your opportunity there? And what's the content if you mentioned the [ 20 ] to [ 50 ] on the smaller end, what does it look like for a larger one?

Well, that's very perceptive, Marc. Yes, it does. And there are some larger projects in our pipeline that this really helps us increase the likelihood to win. So absolutely -- you're absolutely accurate there. We haven't built a ton of that larger end into our addressable market yet because we want to -- we would like to get a couple of wins under our belt, but this helps a lot. And on the larger end, you could be talking kind of $60 million to $100 million per, if not a little bit bigger, just depending on the size. And we're seeing that trend happen outside of North America, in particular, on the hydrogen side, so toward the larger. And in North America, it's still kind of 30 tpd or less right now in the pipeline.

Okay. Cool. If I could just squeeze one more in. So you're going to give us a guidance update at the call with incorporating the effect of this acquisition. But just curious if -- for the balance of the business, should we expect a kind of positive update for that? And if you could point to sort of what parts of the business? I know it's maybe too early to talk specifically, but just kind of generally what parts of the business could be seeing upside?

Yes. I mean that's -- it's only July 1, so I'm not going to give any specifics on the quarter. But I think in May or late May, I had indicated that April and May were very strong order months. So I will just -- I'll throw that out there but leave it at that.

[Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from Craig Shere from Tuohy Brothers.

So could you elaborate on potential overall company margin uplift from LAT given both the vertical integration. So the outsetting $5 million to whatever, just under $40 million per project, but medium-sized project. But presumably with vertical integration, each project's margin is increasing. And then you were just talking about the ability to optimize manufacturing across facilities. Could we see some noticeable improvement across the entire company margin?

Yes, yes and yes to both of your points, and I do think you've accurately stated, right, that you have the higher margin product categories that this is going to play more into. But you also have that where if you have -- they're selling -- in a historical supply chain, everybody wants to make money. And so an expander that we had to buy is going to mark it up and then our total price had to include that in it. So we're going to get that just simply from having it in-house and passing that savings along to our customers. And in part, having that vertical integration naturally does that. But yes, there's also some cost synergies that we see out there and some efficiencies. And not just for simply LAT, but also for our products like that what we make, where concept that we talk about on, we call, flex manufacturing is going to be benefited by this as well. So pretty excited about that. And I think this goes right into that high-growth, high-margin areas of business that we wanted to continue to expand, and if it's just like a glove in there.

Great. And my last one, since this is kind of the last of, I guess, 4 acquisitions, maybe the smaller as you pointed out, in the space. Are you effectively blocking out any future competition outside of the big 3 industrial gas companies?

Yes. Very candid answer is that part -- that was part of our strategy. So yes, I mean there's very few others. And the other guys that are out there do need some development around this area, especially on the foil and magnetic bearing side of things. So for us, this was important to add for that reason as well. And I would also go back to -- I think I mentioned this in my remarks, I'm not sure if I included it or not around the idea that operating cost and efficiencies in these plants is what's going to continue to differentiate who is going to win them. And having the ability to iterate in-house between the brazed aluminum heat exchanger and cold box and the rotating equipment is going to give us a significant advantage there, too. But yes, it was also a blocking strategy.

And there are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.