Mativ Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:MATV) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 9, 2024
Mativ Holdings, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Welcome to the Mativ’s First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today from Mativ are Julie Schertell, Chief Executive Officer; Greg Weitzel, Chief Financial Officer; and Chris Kuepper, Director of Investor Relations. Today’s call is being recorded and will be available for replay later this afternoon. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. And the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Mr. Chris Kuepper. Sir, you may begin.
Chris Kuepper: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Mativ’s first 2024 earnings call. Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that comments included in today’s conference call include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these comments for reasons shown in detail in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Some financial measures discussed during this call are non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures to the closest GAAP measures are included in the appendix of the earnings release. Unless stated otherwise, financial and operational metric comparisons are to the prior year period and relate to continuing operations. The earnings release issued yesterday afternoon is available on our website at ir.mativ.com. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Julie.
Julie Schertell: Thanks, Chris. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining our call. 2024 is off to a good start and I’m happy to report that our demand recovery is playing out as expected. We left you on our last earnings call with evidence of positive signs of demand momentum in many of our end markets and the expectation of a meaningful sequential step up in sales from Q4 to Q1. I’m pleased to confirm that sales in Q1 were $500 million, which was up more than 10% sequentially from Q4, with volume increases across all product categories. While the sequential improvement in Q1 was encouraging, especially after more than a year of customer destocking and economic uncertainty, we are in what we believe to be the early days of demand recovery.
And as you can see, our Q1 sales were down almost 9% year-over-year, comping a strong Q1 in 2023. What is motivating is that we have line of sight to continue demand momentum, which for the remainder of 2024 will drive positive sales. We also mentioned to you during our fourth quarter earnings call that lower fixed cost absorption and inefficiencies in some of our facilities in Q4 resulted in the production of higher cost inventory and that selling through this inventory would have an impact on our bottom line in Q1. That higher cost inventory in combination with a slightly less favorable sales mix were the main drivers of our adjusted EBITDA for Q1 coming in at $46 million. Most of the impact on Q1 EBITDA is not reoccurring, and we expect meaningful adjusted EBITDA year-over-year improvement for the remainder of 2024.
A few comments on why I’m optimistic about sales and EBITDA recovery this year. Throughout 2023, the combination of destocking, an uncertain macroeconomic environment, and geopolitical tensions created an unprecedented and unpredictable demand setting that drove continued negative manufacturing output across most industries and geographies in which we compete. This reduction in demand and the resulting manufacturing slowdown significantly impacted our operating leverage across our sites. We recognized this quickly and focused on those areas that we could control taking action to navigate this unusual environment, including site and warehouse consolidations, operating staff reductions, accelerated synergies, and a restructuring effort that is expected to reduce our non-operating expenses by about $20 million as we exit this year.
Those actions have been executed and will continue to deliver value to the bottom line throughout 2024. Let me touch on the organizational and segment restructuring that we announced during the quarter. Roughly 18 months into our merger, it was the right time to reevaluate our operating model and organizational alignment to reduce complexity, streamline our reporting structure, and further minimize our corporate overhead cost. This reorg also provides greater visibility and accountability for cross category opportunities, enables faster decision making, and leverages our customer facing resources in a more efficient way. Our segments are aligned by product categories and with how we and our customers go to market. Our Filtration and Advanced Materials segment, or FAM, serves customers directly and focuses on filtration, media and components, advanced films, coding and converting solutions, and extruded mesh products such as nettings and spacers.
Primarily driven by filtration and films, FAM supports a variety of end markets such as water, air and industrial process purification, transportation, agriculture, building and construction, and safety and security applications. Our Sustainable and Adhesive Solutions segment, or SAS, supplies customers through distribution as well as directly, and focuses on tapes, labels, liners, specialty paper, packaging, and healthcare solutions. SAS serves end markets such as building and construction, infrastructure, athletics, consumer and medical packaging, commercial papers, personal care, and advanced healthcare applications. The FAM and SAS segment alignment leverages our manufacturing technologies and our customer facing resources across complementary categories, making us easier to do business with and providing increased clarity of our portfolio of products and capabilities.
It’s the logical next step in achieving a one Mativ solution for our customers. These changes have already made us more agile and efficient internally and externally, and the customer response has been very positive. Also, as a reminder, during 2023 we divested our Engineered Papers business and rightsized our dividend to prioritize our use of cash on debt reduction. We consolidated our facility and warehousing footprint, reducing over ten sites. We invested in new state-of-the-art assets in Germany and Mexico to support growing demand in filtration and release liners, and we delivered on our announced merger synergies. The overarching theme is that we have and will continue to make decisions and take actions that unlock both short and long term value, and that the actions we took in 2023 set us up for success in 2024 and beyond.
Turning to 2024, an important component of our EBITDA performance is price versus input cost and our ability to maintain a favorable spread between the two. Throughout 2023, our business was faced with record level inflation and input costs and our commercial teams were successful in driving price to offset the impact. We believe that the value of the solutions we provide to our customers results in price stickiness that has historically allowed us to maintain a significant favorable spread between our pricing and the associated input cost. As a reminder, our team realized over $85 million in price increases last year and even as we are experiencing some decrease in input costs, we are confident in our ability to maintain a meaningful positive spread.
Since volume growth is our top business priority, let me provide a few examples of how we are working to drive demand and some early wins we are seeing as a result. First, we are leveraging our FAM segments breadth of technologies to capture additional value and to simplify our customer supply chains. What I mean by this is that today we have customers that buy a base media, a top coat solution and a pressure sensitive coating solution and in many instances they are buying these various layers from different suppliers. With our breadth of capabilities, we can provide the entire solution, which simplifies our customer supply chain, improves quality consistency and enables us to become a bigger and better partner for our customers. We have two of our largest films customers that are engaged in qualifying and streamlining their supply chain with us, as well as a similar approach in filtration where we can provide the base media, spacers, the separation membrane, tubing and depletable mesh all from one reliable partner and source.
Again, this is our unique opportunity to make our customers life easier and to increase our share of customers’ minds and wallets. Secondly, in FAM, we were also recently awarded new reoccurring business for our proprietary UV reflective film that reduces heat absorption and increases the efficiency of equipment used in the aerospace industry. And finally in FAM, turning to transportation filtration, we have a stronger project and innovation pipeline with our largest customers than we have had in the last five years and are experiencing both market growth and share gain opportunities. Relative to transportation filtration, volume is up over 5% year-over-year and in our highest margin, highest efficacy product, it’s up almost 10%, comping a strong Q1 last year.
Turning to SAS, there are many instances where we are selling tape, medical, packaging and healthcare solutions to customers that have a specified release liner as part of their finished product, and sometimes it’s not our release liner. So we are working with customers to transition the spec to our own as part of creating a more holistic supply chain solution. And while qualification can take 12 to 24 months, we have several projects underway and progressing nicely with large consumer product companies. Furthermore, our pipeline in SAS for new account acquisition, new products and cross category sales has doubled in the last six months and the team recently landed over $10 million of new business within a new customer in the specialty paper space that we’ve been working on for over a year.
Those orders are starting now and ramping up throughout 2024. Lastly, in our consumer business, we’ve been awarded incremental featured placement at several large retail customers for the upcoming back to school season, as well as new permanent placement in the crafting segment at one of our largest retail customers, which is a new expansion space for us. While all these are specific and recent examples, I’m also encouraged by the many innovative products we are currently working on for a number of our customers, including sustainable wall coverings, additional coating solutions for aerospace applications and filtration products that provide the highest mechanical efficacy for our customers using proprietary technologies that are new to market.
With that, I’ll turn it over to Greg for a more detailed discussion of our financial performance and then I’ll provide some closing thoughts on our path forward.
Greg Weitzel: Thanks Julie and good morning everyone. Consolidated net sales for the quarter were $500 million compared to $549 million in the prior year, with volume down 7% and selling prices down 2%, partially offset by favorable currency. As Julie also mentioned, while sales were down on a year-over-year basis, we did see more than a 10% step up on a sequential basis, intangible evidence that the demand pickup is playing out as we expected. Adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations was $45.8 million, down from $48.9 million in the prior year. Volume, mix and manufacturing costs represented a combined $16 million impact, which was partially offset by $7 million of combined net input cost and selling price benefit, inclusive of synergies, $4 million favorable impacts from lower SG&A, and $2 million from lower distribution cost, which is also inclusive of synergies.
Turning to each of our new segments, net sales in filtration and advanced materials of $202 million were down 8% year-over-year, but up 11% sequentially versus Q4 of 2023. The year-over-year decrease reflected lower volumes due to continued customer caution and the uncertain macroeconomic environment and compares to a strong comp in the prior year. FAM adjusted EBITDA of $33 million was down 23% year-over-year, reflecting the effects of lower volumes, associated fixed cost absorption and the sell-through of higher cost inventory produced in the prior quarter, partially offset by positive net input cost and selling price benefit, distribution efficiencies and cost reduction initiatives. In our Sustainable and Adhesive Solutions segment, net sales of $297 million were down 9% from last year, but up 10% sequentially versus Q4 of 2023.
SAS adjusted EBITDA of $32 million was up 19% year-over-year, while adjusted EBITDA margin for SAS improved 260 basis points year-over-year. Lower volume and associated manufacturing cost impacts in the current quarter were more than offset by favorable net input cost and selling price, distribution efficiencies and cost reduction initiatives. Q1 was our first quarter reporting under this new segmentation and we have also published a separate 8-K last night that provides comparable segment breakdowns for all quarters of 2023 to make it easier to compare our results this year on a like for like basis. Turning to a few of the corporate items, unallocated corporate adjusted EBITDA expense of around $20 million improved 8% year-over-year, driven primarily by the recent restructuring initiative.
We expect unallocated corporate to be around $80 million for the full year. Interest expense of $18 million increased 17% from the prior year period, primarily due to higher interest rates on our floating rate debt coupled with the higher revolver balances in 2024. As a reminder, when taking hedges into account, approximately 75% of our debt is at a fixed rate and matures on a staggered basis between 2026 and 2028. Other income of $1.7 million increased $2.4 million compared with the prior year period, primarily due to gains on foreign exchange contracts. Our tax rate was 8% in the quarter. At the end of the quarter, net debt was $1.03 billion and available liquidity was $409 million. Our net leverage ratio as defined in our credit agreement was 4.2 times, mainly due to a higher revolver balance at the end of the quarter, and we expect this to decrease in the second half of 2024 as we prioritize debt pay down with free cash flow and realize improving EBITDA on a year-over-year basis.
We did not repurchase any shares during the quarter. Our intent continues to be to opportunistically repurchase shares to offset dilution from stock compensation, and the priority of cash flow remains on paying down debt. Turning to our outlook for 2024, we expect a continued sequential step up in sales in Q2 and to be in line with last year’s result of $526 million. We also expect a significant sequential step up in EBITDA, approaching a 30% improvement, mainly due to recovering volumes and further realization of our cost reduction initiatives driving additional margin improvement. We expect Q2 to be the beginning of more normalized demand levels that will play out in a more pronounced year-over-year improvement throughout the remainder of 2024.
We continue to maintain our expectation of sequential quarterly improvements subject to our normal year end seasonality, building toward our previously discussed $70 million run rate later in the year. Our previously announced overhead reduction program, yielding a $20 million annualized savings rate by the end of 2024, further solidifies this increased EBITDA level. We remain relentlessly focused on finding solutions for and eliminating operational inefficiencies and supply chain complexities, while also continuing to invest in high demand technical capabilities. For modeling purposes we are planning for 2024 full year capital expenditures of approximately $70 million and expect our 2024 full year interest expense to be around $75 million and our depreciation and amortization expense to be around $100 million.
With that, I’ll hand it back over to you, Julie, for your closing remarks.
Julie Schertell: Thanks, Greg. In closing, I want to reiterate how proud I am of this team and all that they’ve accomplished in less than two years post merger and during a very unusual market environment. We are beginning to see the benefits of the hard decisions and actions taken over the past 21 months, and I’m encouraged by our path forward and the strong team that we have in place. You’ve heard me mention that to really unleash Mativ’s full capabilities and deliver incremental value to our stakeholders, we need demand to return a bit, and I’m pleased to report that we’re seeing further signs of demand improvement. I look forward to what lies ahead for us in the coming quarters of 2024. We will continue to focus on reducing complexity and winning with leading customers in the markets in which we compete by exceeding their expectations, providing unique, innovative supply chain solutions that connect, protect, and purify our world.
Thank you for joining us this morning, and please open the line for questions.
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