Valmont Industries, Inc. (VMI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good morning. We'll go ahead and get started. I'm Brian Drab, the industrial technology analyst at William Blair. Thank you all for coming to the Valmont presentation. I'm required to inform you quickly that you can find a full list of research disclosures on our website, williamblair.com. So today, as you know, we have the team from Valmont here. We have Renee Campbell, who is Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer. We also have Tom Liguori, who has recently joined in the last year as CFO. So thank you both for being here. I'm going to say a couple of nice things about Valmont, and then I'll turn it over to Renee. So Valmont is one of those companies that I realized very quickly when I started to cover the company in 2010 and went to visit them that once you start covering it or you're aware of it, you realize they're all around you every day. They have 40% share, maybe 45% share in North American high-voltage electricity transmission structures. So as you're driving through the countryside, you see those structures. That's probably Valmont. Also irrigation, 40% market share globally, irrigation, it's very likely the food that we have for lunch here today will incorporate crops that were grown with Valmont irrigation systems. They're in the midst of doing some of the largest irrigation systems installations in the world in the Middle East at the moment. Also highway structures, the poles along the highway, the poles that you see at stadiums, the signage along the highways, a lot of that is Valmont as well. So it's one of these companies all around you every day, and we're excited to have them with us. So I'll turn it over to Renee. Thanks for being here.

Thank you. Thanks, Brian. We appreciate the opportunity to be here as well. And at Valmont, we have a long history of innovation and execution. And Tom and I look forward to sharing some of the exciting things and strategies and opportunities with all of you today. So before we start, I just want to quickly say that and remind everyone that our disclosure on forward-looking statements applies to today's presentation and discussions as outlined here on Slide 2. So I will start with just a quick snapshot of Valmont for those of you who are less familiar with us. We are a Fortune 1000 company. We are a global leader in providing products and solutions for infrastructure and agriculture markets with a strong and growing presence worldwide. We were founded nearly 80 years ago, headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. And last year, we generated approximately $4.1 billion in net sales. Our current market cap is around $6.5 billion, and we operate in over 100 countries with 83 manufacturing facilities and a global workforce of about 11,000 people. Looking at our geographic sales mix, just over 70% of our revenue comes from the U.S. and Canada, with the remaining diversified across EMEA, Latin America and Asia Pacific. And this global presence really gives us both resilience and growth opportunities across multiple markets. In terms of our business segments, Infrastructure is our largest with nearly $3 billion in sales last year and delivering a strong operating margin of 16.6%, while Agriculture or Irrigation accounts for just over $1 billion in sales and remains a strategic growth area, particularly as global food security and land productivity become increasingly critical. So all of this really aligns with our company's promise of conserving resources and improving life. So I want to walk you through what we do. As Brian said, a lot of what we do, you really see every day. You may not notice it, but it's very, very visible across the landscape. And although we did start as an irrigation company all those years ago, and we actually founded the mechanized irrigation industry, as mentioned today, our largest segment is our Infrastructure business. So I'd like to walk you through our portfolio of products and solutions. It's very diversified across key end markets, energy, transportation, communications and renewables, all aligned with strong secular trends and national priorities. So I'll start with utility. It's just under half -- nearly half of our segment sales. It's our largest product line. We're seeing very strong demand driven by rising electricity consumption, the need to replace aging grid infrastructure and the continued build-out of renewable energy. Our business supports transmission, distribution and substation infrastructure. We manufacture steel, we do some concrete structures, and we also have a couple of composites facilities. And we're making very focused capacity investments to meet this long-term growth. Lighting & Transportation, this business is about 30% of the segment sales. And this supports public safety and infrastructure with lighting, traffic structures, highway safety structures. This business is very aligned to state and federal funding, including DOT investments and both road and residential housing construction, also aligned to single-family housing starts for our lighting business. Our coatings business is primarily hot-dip zinc galvanizing, and it's a very consistent business. It aligns with regional GDP and industrial production trends. Anywhere between 30% to 40%, 50% of the sales in that business at any given time are for our own internal products. We galvanize almost everything that we manufacture out of steel. And it really adds resiliency and scalability and operational leverage across the portfolio. Our telecom business continues to benefit from carrier spending and 5G build-out programs. We provide telecom components. So think about anything that a contractor or a carrier would need at a job site to build out that site. We also do macro towers. We do concealment solutions, and we do some small cell infrastructure as well. And it's our distribution model, especially in that components business and our customer service levels that really continue to differentiate us in that space. And finally, Solar, it's a smaller part, but important part of the portfolio. And we're seeing really promising momentum in Europe. This was a business that we acquired back in 2018 called Convert Italia. It started and still remains the market leader in Italy. And we're seeing some really promising momentum, especially in agrivoltaic applications. We have, this last year, exited some lower margin or lower return projects, and now we're really focused on targeted value-creating growth opportunities. So altogether, I would say our infrastructure portfolio is very diversified, but also well positioned to grow, anchored by very strong secular demand drivers and supported by targeted investments in capacity, which Tom will touch on a bit later. All right. Let's take a closer look at our Agriculture segment, and how our portfolio aligns with global trends and grower needs. So our core business, the majority is really irrigation, equipment and parts. And it's center pivot irrigation systems like you can see on the slide. It's linear systems, it's corner machines as well as aftermarket parts. And all of that is really built around our industry-leading Valley brand. And what sets us apart -- one of the areas that sets us apart is our very strong dealer network. It's the strongest. It's the most trusted in the industry. And Valley dealers are really embedded in local communities, providing farmers with support and installation and service. And that's something that's really extremely difficult for others to replicate at scale. They are a very much a core part of how we deliver value and maintain grower loyalty. And they're also a major driver of our aftermarket parts sales, which are a growing and margin-accretive portion of the business. Overall, demand for this business is influenced, I would say, by 3 key market drivers. So in U.S. markets and even in some international markets, net farm income or its equivalent remains the biggest influence. And that's really closely linked to grain commodity prices, so corn and soybeans, for example, as well as input costs and interest rates. Demand is also being driven by ongoing conversion from less efficient or maybe even nonexistent irrigation to more advanced automated solutions that we can provide. And we're also seeing farm consolidation, which is increasing the number of large strategic customers that really need scalable irrigation solutions and ongoing support. I mentioned aftermarket parts. This really is a key growth initiative that we are focused on in our Ag business and a strategic priority for us. And we're making some really, really strong progress there. We recently introduced a new e-commerce platform, which is improving, I'll say, the customer experience or the grower experience by making it very easy and fast to order parts while the grower or dealer is in the field and improving service delivery. And that's really critical, especially if you think about through the middle of the growing season, it's hot, a machine goes down for some reason. The grower really needs to get that back up and running as soon as possible. And it's important to have that visibility and availability of parts when they need it the most. Moving to technology, products and services. It's just under 10% of sales last year. So while it's still a smaller part of our business, it does represent a high potential growth area. So this is advanced monitoring and automation tools. It's everything from the ability to control your pivot from your cell phone or your iPad, but also to be -- to enable the grower to make smarter, more precise decisions about when, where and how much to irrigate. And it's not just about improving yields, while that is very important, it's also about using less water, less energy and doing more with fewer resources, which has become increasingly important around the world, and we're proud to lead the industry in this area. And then finally, just as a subset of all of that, I wanted to highlight our international sales. Today, it's approximately half of our total sales and growing. And it's a testament, I would say, to global -- the increasing global demand for scalable solutions. And we're seeing really strong momentum from countries like Brazil, where they're really focused on developing land and putting land into agriculture use, but also government-backed food security programs, particularly in emerging markets like the Middle East, where populations are growing and diets are improving. And we're supporting new land developments in those regions that previously were not even farming before. And these are all long-term opportunities that continue to build out our global footprint. And then I want to -- before I turn it over to Tom, I want to just touch on what we consider to be global megatrends that Valmont is very closely aligned to. And these are powerful structural trends that play directly to our strengths and we believe are shaping our growth for years to come. So I'll start with infrastructure and the energy transition. We're experiencing what I would say is kind of a once-in-a-generation transformation in energy generation, and it's accelerating demand for grid connectivity and electrification. Everything from electric vehicles to smart homes and the expansion of data centers. And these trends are really driving sustained infrastructure investment, creating strong demand for the engineered structures that Valmont is uniquely positioned to deliver. Next would be aging infrastructure and resilience. So across the U.S. and really, really globally, infrastructure is just getting older. Think about roads and bridges and utility structures. All of those are at some point in need of either replacement or reinforcement. And it doesn't take much to look around and realize as storms and severe weather have become more frequent, hardening the grid and building more resilient systems really is no longer optional. And this is an area where Valmont is especially well positioned. And then finally, technology and data consumption. So as I mentioned, the rapid growth of data usage and technologies like AI are placing new demands on both power and connectivity. And we're supporting this with our telecom products and utility solutions that help to power and connect the world's digital future and enable the infrastructure behind it. Then turning to agriculture, I'll start with food security. As I mentioned, governments around the world really are working to improve food security locally and reduce their reliance on imports. And in many regions, especially Middle East and Africa, our Valley Irrigation Systems are enabling farmers to grow more food where it wasn't even previously viable. Next, sustainability and productivity. There really is limited land and water around the world, so doing more with less has never been more critical. And our center pivot, linear and corner machines are essential in helping farmers maximize yields while conserving resources and making land more productive. And our Valley brand is the global leader in the industry for this. And then finally, population growth. The world's population is expected to grow by nearly 700 million people over the next decade and more people means a greater demand for food with fewer available resources, which will require smarter and more productive farming. So just to summarize, whether it's building critical infrastructure, which -- or delivering sustainable irrigation solutions, we're very well positioned at the center of these global megatrends and well positioned to grow as these global needs continue to evolve. So with that, I'll turn it over to Tom.

Thank you, Renee. Great job and overview of our business. First of all, thank you, everybody, for joining. We know you're -- you have choices. You're very busy, and we appreciate your time today. And Brian, thank you for having us here. It's a great conference and really happy to be here. So let me start off with, these are the 2025 critical objectives. This is what the Valmont leadership team is working on and really the whole team globally. The first is we call it catch the infrastructure wave. Renee explained to you all of the megatrends in our infrastructure, the biggest growth areas is our utility business. Today, we're capacity constrained. So when we talk about catching the wave, it's about adding capacity, having the people and processes to be able to meet the demand that's coming from our customers. The second one is for our Agriculture segment. And yes, North America Ag is down. Our international business is growing, but we want to take this time and really focus on positioning the ag business for growth and for margin expansion. Renee talked to you about our technology products. Today, you can control your pivot from a phone app, and we're spending -- we have software engineers in Valley, Nebraska, which is next to our headquarters in Omaha. And we're spending time to improve our technology application. We used to have 5 different apps for a farmer to use. Last year, our software team put it on one app. We added the e-commerce. And this is all about making farmers want the value pivot. And today, we are the premium price premium product. So it was focusing on ag, positioning it for growth. Third is disciplined resource allocation, which is both optimizing our cost structure, making sure we have people at the right place and [indiscernible], but it's also about our capital allocation. I'll talk about that in a minute. None of this happens without our team. And our team is forefront. If you go into one of our factories, we're making large steel structures, brake presses, welders. We have 24 plants in the U.S., plants in Poland, throughout Europe, throughout APAC. So safety, we start every management meeting talking about safety to keep our team safe. And with that is talent development, right? We're a growing business. We're expanding capacity. We need processes. We need people that are well trained and furthering their careers. So financially, let's take a look at our revenue, our operating margin and our earnings per share over the last 5 years. So we had good revenue growth up through 2022, then it kind of plateaued. We had North American Ag pull back. You're very familiar with what's going on in the solar industry. Solar has pulled back a bit. And what is important to know is in the utility business, we pass on the steel cost, meaning we're allowed to -- if steel goes up, we pass it on to the customers. And if steel prices come down, we pull down our prices. So part of that is just lower steel costs over the last few years. Whether steel prices go up and down, has no effect on profitability, which gets to the next slide. Over the last 5 years, even with the plateauing revenue, we more than doubled our operating income and more than doubled our earnings per share as well. So at the bottom of the chart, these are the initiatives we have within the company to grow our revenues, our margins and our earnings per share over the next 3 to 4 years. In infrastructure, it is all about catching that wave and expanding capacity. So what we have told our investors is we are spending $100 million a year in CapEx for growth, primarily for utility. When we spend $100 million of CapEx in utility, we get over $100 million of revenue at about a 20% GAAP operating margin and $1 EPS. So catching the wave, putting the capacity in place is very important. And we expect to do this over the next 2 to 3 years, $100 million per year. When we put this new capacity in place, this is all within existing plants. It's not new plants. It means that we're going to get more throughput in each of our plants. And if you get more throughput with just incremental capital, we're going to lower the cost of our utility structure. And this is really important. This is part of the margin expansion that's going on in infrastructure. In our Ag business, we're focused on growing the higher-margin, higher-growth areas of the business, which would be the international for revenue and our technology products and focusing on the aftermarket, which is spare parts, which is what Renee was talking about with our e-commerce system. We're also looking at how do we reduce the cost of a pivot. The last 3 to 4 months, we've been focused on a pivot tear down. The whole intent is same functionality, same reliability, but at a lower cost to the farmers. In corporate, our corporate costs over the last few years have increased to hovering near 3% of revenues. We think it should be below 2% of revenues. Renee and I are on a team that's with a glamorous name of corporate cost team, but this is all about looking at our outside service providers, our spending on insurance, our legal team, our credit rating agencies and finding ways to have a leaner, more efficient corporate cost. So in the near term, some of the things that we're working on, this is all about getting us positioned for the next 3 years. The first is aligning our organization. So Avner, our CEO, has a big focus on reducing the number of layers in our organization. And this is all about making us faster, be able to catch that wave, get a better flow of information. As part of that, we will have costs coming down. We're also looking at, as I said, the corporate cost and there's an activity on our total portfolio, but this is mostly based -- mostly looking at our solar business. We all know what's going on with solar in North America. Our EMEA business is doing very well. Solar last year was about $150 million of revenue. So a small piece of business, but it's about a breakeven, slight loss. And we think the prospects, at least in the near term, are not very favorable in the U.S. So we're taking a good hard look at that. And that means looking at cost reduction activities. We're going to really reconsider what markets we're serving. We have about $60 million to $70 million of goodwill intangibles and software development costs on our balance sheet. We'll do an impairment test. But this is all about making our solar business back to a growth stage, more profitable. Everything on that right, this is all about aligning the company behind the infrastructure wave, positioning ag for growth so that over the next 3 to 4 years, you'll see revenue growth, continuation of operating income and margin expansion and further growth in our earnings per share. Capital allocation. We came out in January with our updated capital allocation priorities. It's about 50% reinvesting in our business and 50% to shareholder returns. The 50% reinvesting in our business is what we just talked about, investing in capacity growth for primarily utility. There's also a place for M&A. But what you should know about M&A, this would be smaller tuck-in acquisitions where we feel we can bring a new geography, a new product that's close to our current core business. As far as shareholder returns, we just announced a $700 million increase in our share repurchase authorization. That's about 10% of our market cap. We expect to do that on a programmatic basis over the next 3 to 4 years. And lastly, the dividend. Dividend is important to many of our shareholders. Over the last 4 or 5 years, there's been a CAGR of 10% of our dividend, but it's been a little bit inconsistent as far as like timing in every year. We want to get on to a cycle of every first quarter we increase our dividend. We just increased it in January, up 13%, I believe, year-over-year. So lastly, why invest in Valmont? Well, we feel very good about the next 3 to 4 years. This is all about serving high-growth markets, catching the infrastructure wave, positioning ag for growth over the coming years, expanding our margins, which we just went through all of the steps, expanding our EPS and really helping with shareholder returns with both growing EPS as well as our dividend and our share repurchase program. So with that, thanks for the time, and we have some time left for Q&A.

Okay. Thanks very much, Tom and Renee. Yes, we do have 5 minutes and 53 seconds for some Q&A here. So I was wondering if we could talk about the Irrigation segment, just to kick off the Q&A and what's happening in the Middle East. And kind of frame out the potential for some of these huge projects that are happening. In my view -- this bug if flying.

No, don't worry about it.

In my view, we might just be getting started in terms of what we're seeing in Egypt. We're doing a lot of work on these Egypt [indiscernible] and it's incredible, by the way. If anyone -- if you take a look at an aerial view, the amount of pivot systems that you can see going in place there. But I think it's only maybe 25% of the way of what they want to really do there.

It's a great question. And our ag business is about $1 billion business annually, 50% of it's in North America, 50% is international. The international piece is both South America. We have a large presence in Brazil, a factory in Brazil, but the Middle East is very important. It's a high-growth area. We have a factory in Dubai. We expanded capacity in that factory in the last year or so. It's doing very well. Today, the pipeline in our Middle East business is the largest it's been in the last 3 to 4 years. Now traditionally, the international EMEA business has been lower margin. And the reason is because of very large projects. You might make tens of millions of dollars on a project. Whereas in North America, we're selling a $100,000 pivot, a pivot at a time often. But what we take -- the way we look at this is, if our Middle East business is going to be the growth driver or a large part of the growth driver, we really need to improve margins on that business. And as we've taken a look, we find a number of opportunities. It's mostly in our supply chain. In our factory, there's opportunities to improve productivity, throughput, level load the plant and also on our sourcing of steel. We are a very large procurer of steel globally. And if you're in North America, where 75% of our revenues are, our team is focused on supplier relationships, very focused, aggressive procurement and negotiation as well as partnership with steel vendors. We need to take that type of activity, and we're moving it over to the Middle East because as this business grows, it just warrants a very tight supply chain. So the Middle East is really a bright spot. Thank you for asking that question. And we feel we have a number of good opportunities and levers to help improve the margins as we go forward.

You're welcome for the question [indiscernible] so just bear with me. We've got one from the audience. [indiscernible].

Yes. The tariffs -- the question was about the impact of tariffs and specifically the steel tariffs. So when we first looked at tariffs in January, February with the new administration, we had some significant exposure, $80 million. But at the heart, what was very positive was we serve most of our U.S. customers in both segments from 23, 24 -- 24 manufacturing plants in the U.S. We have one [indiscernible] lowest cost facility. So that was the concern. The team did an exceptional job within Valmont to mitigate that. So part of it is passing it on to our customers, especially on the infrastructure side. We have a large backlog of work. Our products are -- we have the largest market share on the utility infrastructure. These are big, major projects by utility companies. That poll has got to be there at the right time, go up at the right -- high quality otherwise, the construction project slows down. So we have a very good position with the utility customers. And when we went to them and explained the tariffs, we were able to pass on about half of that total tariff cost. But then on the supply chain side, our concern was that we were using Mexico tariffs. So we were able to change our sourcing. We now buy U.S. steel, send it down to our Monterrey facility, make the poles. Our facility is USMCA compliant, United States-Canada-Mexico Agreement. So we've really -- we've mitigated just about all of the tariffs, and we came out and said both on our call and in the press release that would be profit neutral. We called it cost neutral. We were corrected. It's really profit neutral. So now that there's an additional 25%, the work we've done has basically mitigated it. Really, there might be an indirect impact from higher steel cost. Steel futures went up on Monday, but they've since come back down. The team is very agile. They're very focused on this. What I'd like to say is every day we come in and we manage our tariffs and our costs. But every day we come in and we focus on things that are going to make us better 3 years out.

We have time for one more question.

Talk a little bit about improving [indiscernible].

Yes. So I'll give you [indiscernible].

The question was improving throughput and productivity in the factories.

So when we go -- we go visit plants all the time. It's part of building our team. When you go to plants, you'll see productivity charts. And they'll have high productivity then a week dip, high productivity, a week dip. And when the dips in productivity are happening, it is because we didn't have material at the right place at the right time. People came in to run the production flow for the whole day or a piece of machinery down. So what we're doing as part of the capacity expansion is, we've assigned a team to look at our material scheduling as well as our preventive maintenance program to keep our machinery up higher. So by getting more throughput because we've now added more capacity, get improved material scheduling, improved preventive maintenance program, we'll get more throughput with the same cost, and that will be -- that's a higher productivity and lower cost per structure.

All right. We're out of time. We're going to have a breakout session. If you would like to join the conversation there. Thank you very much.

Thanks for joining. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Brian.

Thank you, Brian.