SPX Technologies, Inc. (SPXC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by, and welcome to SPX Acquisition Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Paul Clegg, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. With me on the call today are Gene Lowe, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mark Carano, our Chief Financial Officer. This morning, we issued a press release announcing the completion of our acquisition of ASPEQ Heating Group and an increase in our 2023 guidance to reflect the transaction. You can find the release and our earnings slide presentation as well as a link to a live webcast of this call in the Investor Relations section of our website at spx.com. I encourage you to review our disclosure in the press release and to follow along with the slide presentation during our prepared remarks. A replay of the webcast will be available on our website until June 12. Portions of our presentation and comments are forward looking and subject to safe harbor provisions. Please also note the risk factors in our most recent SEC filings. Our guidance comments today will focus on adjusted financial results for our continuing operations. And now I'll turn the call over to Gene.

Thanks, Paul. We are very excited to have closed the acquisition of ASPEQ, a leading provider of highly engineered electrical heating products in industrial and commercial end markets. This transaction is accretive to our margins and accelerates our growth strategy in electrical heating, where we see significant benefits from secular trends and strong opportunities for further core consolidation. To reflect the transaction, we are raising our full year 2023 guidance for adjusted EPS by $0.10 to a midpoint of $3.98, representing a year-on-year increase of 28% and putting us in a strong position to achieve our SPX 2025 targets, including $5 per share of adjusted EPS. ASPEQ is now a part of our HVAC Heating platform within our electrical heating business in combination with Marley Engineered Products, or MEP. Together, they create a clear leader in electrical heating, more than doubling our position in this attractive growth market. While MEP is primarily focused on commercial applications and comfort heating, ASPEQ's end market mix is more evenly weighted between commercial and industrial applications. ASPEQ is known for using flexible manufacturing techniques to meet engineered-to-order customer requirements in a timely manner, giving it a significant competitive advantage. Together, ASPEQ and MEP form a strong foundation from which to continue expanding our position in electrical heating. They also position us to benefit from powerful secular demand drivers such as reshoring and decarbonization, the latter of which is driving significant investment in electrification. MEP and ASPEQ are highly complementary and their lack of significant overlap provides several paths to value creation. ASPEQ strengthens our already favorable position in the commercial portion of electric heating, while establishing a strong foundation in industrial end markets where we anticipate significant growth. As we begin the integration process, we see several opportunities to cross-sell and leverage our existing channels. This includes opportunities to accelerate the growth of ASPEQ's well known INDEECO Duct Heaters brand across MEP's extensive rep channel. Leveraging our scale and expertise is another important value creation tool. We intend to combine and align our manufacturing, marketing and distribution efforts to maximize efficiency, accelerate growth and increase our margins. The transaction also enhances our new product innovation capabilities, and we look forward to extending our line of climate conscious products to provide customers with greater choice and value with investing in decarbonization. Together, these 2 businesses provide a strong foundation on which to further consolidate attractive niche applications. Given our scale, we see an opportunity to create significant value by consolidating this fragmented market. And now I'll turn the call over to Mark to review our guidance update and financial position.

Thanks, Gene. We are raising our adjusted EPS guidance by $0.10 to a range of $3.90 to $4.05 to reflect a partial year's ownership of ASPEQ. At the midpoint, this implies year-on-year growth of approximately 28%. In our HVAC segment, we're increasing revenue guidance by $75 million -- we now expect HVAC segment margin of 18% to 19% or an increase of 75 basis points from the prior range, reflecting ASPEQ's strong margin profile. Total company adjusted segment income margin increases by 25 basis points to a range of 18.75% to 19.75%, and adjusted operating income margin increases by 50 basis points to 15% to 15.75%. As always, you will find modeling considerations in the appendix of our presentation. You will note that our expected interest cost rises to a range of $25 million to $26 million compared with $10 million to $11 million previously, reflecting increased borrowing costs to close the ASPEQ transaction. Our updated guidance is based on 7 months of ASPEQ. Our prior year guidance already included 9 months of ownership of TAMCO. You can see that we are approaching many of the SPX 2025 targets we laid out initially in 2021. These include segment income margin of 20%, adjusted operating income margin of 16% and adjusted earnings per share of $5. We are confident in our ability to achieve these targets and are pleased with our positioning and momentum. We've also fundamentally increased the revenue and earnings growth profile of our company. Our businesses strive to achieve company-wide organic revenue growth rates in the mid-single digits, which we believe translates into high single or low double-digit adjusted per share earnings growth. We also intend to continue our inorganic growth investments in our strategic platforms. This strategy has produced adjusted earnings per share growth of approximately 20% or better in 5 of the last 7 years, with only the pandemic years experiencing lower growth rates. Turning to our balance sheet and capital availability. As we noted on our May 4 call, we ended Q1 with a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 0.4x or 0.8x on a pro forma basis for the TAMCO acquisition, which we closed after the end of the first quarter. To fund the ASPEQ transaction, we drew down the $300 million of incremental bank term loans that we announced in April and borrowed under our existing revolving credit facilities. At the end of Q2, including the impact of ASPEQ, we anticipate our leverage ratio will be approximately 2x, declining to 1.5x by year-end as we generate additional cash. With the current incremental borrowing rate of approximately 6.5%, each $100 million of debt repayment would equate to about $0.10 per share of adjusted earnings on a full year basis. As a reminder, most of our cash generation occurs in the second half of the year, with the fourth quarter typically being the strongest. We continue to target a net leverage ratio of 1.5x to 2.5x. Within this range, we expect to continue to have significant liquidity available to support strategic growth investments, including further acquisitions. I'll now turn the call back over to Gene for his closing comments.

Thanks, Mark. In summary, I'm very pleased to welcome another attractive acquisition with a strong growth and margin profile to the SPX technology team. With ASPEQ, we have a great future ahead of us and exciting growth opportunities in attractive end markets. Our adjusted EPS guidance for 2023 calls for a year-on-year increase of 28% at the midpoint and we are approaching many of the targets in our SPX 2025 framework. As we progress through the year, we expect strong cash generation to reduce leverage, boost earnings power and support further investments in growth. Through strong operational momentum, and a highly focused and dedicated team, I'm excited about our path forward and our opportunities to continue driving value. And with that, I'll turn the call back to Paul.

Thanks, Gene. Operator, we are now ready to go to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our question comes from Steve Ferazani from Sidoti.

I wonder if you could just describe the competitive landscape, your interim year and then give a little bit more sense of what you think the growth prospects are, particularly given the decarbonization element?

Steve, the -- I guess, when we think about competitive [indiscernible] the way we think about this is levels really a portion of it is commercial. I'd say that's where when people really think of ASPEQ you think of Duct Heaters and [indiscernible] Heaters. And this is where INDEECO is really the trade brand, and I'd say we have a very, very strong position -- if you look on the commercial side, I would say there's less competitors there. If you look on the industrial side, there's a wide variety of different applications. There's things like [indiscernible] hot air blowers, [indiscernible] and [load backs]. There's a little bit-- a little bit different in each of the different market segments there. But in general, in the applications that they serve, they are the leaders, for the most part, very similar to us where the majority of their revenue, they are the leader. And I think that, that would be how I would think about it. There are a number of different players on the electric heat side on the industrial, Some pretty well-known people out there. You can see some people like [indiscernible] like that. But a lot of players are in the more standardized where a lot of what we do is oftentimes come up with a customer solution for an OEM or an end customer and not really step [indiscernbile] have a wide variety of product. But I would say like their market position and [indiscernible] the growth rate, we definitely think this is going to be a [much] higher growth [indiscernible].

And our next question comes from Bryan Blair from Oppenheimer.

I was wondering if you would be willing to directly quantify the top line and cost synergies that are baked into your deal model And on that front, how we should think about near versus medium-term cross-selling upside and then the timing or cadence of cost actions.

So on the first part of it, Bryan, typically, we get 1 to 2 turns of multiple synergy. And for ASPEQ, we expect these to be split probably more towards the cost side than the revenue side, although we do expect to see very nice revenue synergies. Gene, I don't know if you want to talk at all about some of the drivers of those cost synergies in terms of cross sale and on the revenue side. the cost side, we do have some opportunities for in-sourcing some of our comfort products. And we certainly, on the procurement side as well as C&I and digital, implementing some of our CI and digital programs, as you've seen us do with some of the other businesses. So we see a lot of opportunities there.

Yes. I would just add, Bryan, I think we really focus on the cost synergies first and the cost synergies here are the bulk of what we've built into our deal model. So that would be things like procurement, in-sourcing, getting scale on things like risk, insurance, EH&S. We actually see some nice opportunities on continuous improvement in the manufacturing facilities where we can bring some of our business system to bear. But having said that, we also see a very attractive opportunity to cross-sell and where these products are largely complementary. The way that I would think about it is industrial is -- we don't have really any overlap there in terms of the profit side. However, we do have a lot of customers that we sell into there that we could provide some opportunities. And then I would say, specifically on the commercial side, where we both have strong positions in the commercial business in different product categories, I do think as we highlighted in our prepared remarks, we see an attractive opportunity, in particular, for their Duct Heating and some of their air handling heating through our network, which we think we have a great network, we think we can bring some revenue synergies to bear. As you know, those don't happen overnight. But we do think there's some very attractive growth opportunities, and there are some very real synergies here definitely on the cost and also on the revenue side.

All very helpful color. When asked about organizational capacity and the timing of deals and your willingness to move forward with additional deals once you've closed some key assets, over time, you've always been pretty consistent saying that you have the team in place, the flexibility to continue down the flywheel value creation path. But you never deployed this much capital in a relatively short period of time. Should we expect that there will be a pause on the deal-making front as you digest TAMCO and ASPEQ and move forward with the early-stage integration of these deals? Or are you remaining on your front foot and -- it's just more of the same going forward?

Yes. I mean, Bryan, I think it's a great question. I think the way that I think about it is in a couple of ways. One is what's our capacity financially. And as we've highlighted, we have the financial capacity. We'll be at the low end of our range or below that by the end of the year. So that's 1.5x or less. So we certainly have the financial capacity to keep investing for growth. The second question is we now have the organizational capacity? As you know, this is our 13th acquisition that we've done over the past couple of years. We do believe in our model. At the end of the day, we take great care in how we deploy capital, and we really focus on executing our integration plans and extracting all of the value, making sure we're meeting our commitments. And so that's not going to change. What I would say is I do think we have organizational capacity. So for example, these 2 deals were both done in the HVAC segment. As you know, the bulk of the deals that we've done over the past 3 or 4 years have been in Detection & Measurement. So we really have not done any investments there. And we have a great team there and a great set of leaders that I think that we think would have the capacity to integrate. So what I would say is we're not pausing. We're going to be cautious and thoughtful, but we still feel like we're ready to continue moving forward here.

Understood. Last one for me, if I can. And I'll state upfront, that I think it's the appropriate thing to keep your medium-term targets as is for the time being, given we're in the middle of 2023. But did you guys contemplate increasing your 2025 targets, just given the foundation that you have, if we assume you come in your guidance range for '23, It won't take much just organically in terms of execution. and with some debt pay down to get the $5 plus by 2025. So certainly appears to be quite a bit of upside to that base target from here as you continue to deploy capital.

Yes, Bryan, thanks for that question. So definitely, that's one of the spots that we wanted to point out on the call is that as we are starting to -- as we do integrate ASPEQ and TAMCO and as we do pay down some debt and kind of run rate some of those numbers. that we are starting to get closer and closer to those 2025 targets that seemed quite lofty when we put them out in 2021. So I think we're very happy with the performance. We still have a lot of wood to chop this year. We saw a lot of work to do. But we do feel good about our prospects, and we will take your comments under advisement.

[Operator Instructions] I am showing no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to Paul Clegg, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications.

Thank all of you for dialing in. Thank you for your support and the good questions today as well. We look forward to seeing many of you at the William Blair Conference this week and in subsequent meetings thereafter. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.